Fourth Sunday of Lent (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 26, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, C, Vigil
March 26, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The text that guided the homily was: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, in which he engages us with perhaps the most famous short story of all time. It’s called the Parable of the Prodigal Son after the youngest of two brothers, but it could easily have been called the Parable of the Merciful Father or the Parable of the Merciless Brother. We know the details of the story so well that we can pass immediately to trying to understand better and apply it more fully.
• We begin with the younger son. His essential sin was not all that he did to blow his inheritance on a dissolute life. It was to treat his Father as if he were dead. To ask for the inheritance while the Father was still living was tantamount to saying, “You’re dead to me, Old Man. I don’t want to wait until you croak. Give me now what you’re planning to give me when finally you breathe your last.” And the Father, doubtless more concerned over the direction of his son’s life than nursing his own wounds at the son’s ingratitude and presumption, gave him the inheritance, probably figuring out it would be the only chance that the son might have of learning the lesson he had long missed. The son, as we know, went and squandered everything in an immoral life. Eventually when a famine hit the land where he was, he needed to do work that no Jew would ever have signed up for, to care for pigs (whom the Jews considered unclean animals). He was eventually so hungry that he longed for what the pigs were eating, something that indicated basically that he had become almost subhuman. But that’s when the grace of conversion hit him. “Coming to his senses,” St. Luke writes, he realized that his Father’s hired hands were always well fed and he decided to return to his Father’s house, to apologize for his sins, and asked to be treated like a hired hand. When we hear the word today, “hired hand,” most of us, I think, imagine he was asking to be treated as an “employee,” but it really “less than a slave.” Slaves were considered members of the household to some degree and they were taken care of and fed. The “hired hands” were not members of the family. They were responsible for their own upkeep, if they could get a job day-by-day. But the younger son recognized that the Father was kind and gave “more than enough food to eat” even to those who had no right to food. The son was beginning to reawaken to the Father’s goodness. But he still didn’t understand the Father. He rehearsed his speech as he was returning home, that he had sinned against God and against his father — both of whom he had treated as if they were dead to him — and didn’t deserve to be treated as a son. But the Father, seeing him far off, was filled with merciful love and ran to his son, probably hustling the way a child scampers across the airport to greet his or her father returning from military service overseas. The son began with his well-practiced confession, but the Father interrupted him. He called for the finest garment to be put around him to cover up all of the swine excrement with which doubtless he had been covered. He put a signet ring on his finger, to show that he still had “power of attorney” over the Father’s goods. He had sandals placed on his feet to symbolize that he was free to go about as he pleased — slaves never had sandals. Whereas he was prepared to ask to be treated like a hired hand lower than slaves, the Father restored him to his full dignity!
• This is obviously an allusion to what God seeks to do to all of us through the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. When we come to our senses, when we realize the Father not only is not dead but is good and cares for us and we begin to make the journey home, he runs out to meet us to restore us to who we really are. In the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin elsewhere in the same chapter of Luke 15, Jesus tells us that heaven rejoices most of all for the return of one sinner, because every forgiven sinner is a restored beloved son or daughter of the Father. The Father initiates a massive celebration, having the special fattened calf slaughtered for the son’s return, because, as he says, “My son was dead and has come back to life again. He was lost and has been found.” That’s what happens every good Confession. Every reconciliation is a resurrection, when we’re raised from the dead by the Father’s mercy (which is why, I believe, Jesus founded it on Easter Sunday evening). The Sacraments is God’s great lost-and-found department for his beloved children. The whole point of Lent is to bring us back fully into the house of the Father so that he can restore us to who we really are.
• Let’s turn to the second son. It seems that Jesus told the whole parable in order to focus on the older brother’s reaction to the Father’s mercy of the Father toward his junior sibling. The setting for the parable, St. Luke tells us, was in response to the Pharisees and Scribes’ complaints that Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them.” The two groups were like a society of older brothers who would rather have had the sinners never convert than for Jesus to show them mercy. And we can see in the older brother’s behavior that he, too, never really grasped the Father’s goodness or love. When he got angry and refused to enter the party the Father was throwing for the younger son’s return, he passive-aggressively waited outside until the Father came for him. He couldn’t join in the celebration because, in his heart, his brother was still dead. When the Father pleaded with him to enter the party, he replied with anger that revealed that he had never related to his Father out of love but only out of duty. He was essentially a slave who, even though he never left the Father’s house, really didn’t want to be there either and resentfully envied his Father’s generosity. “Look,” he stammered, “all these years I served you and not once did I ever disobey your orders.” That’s the language of a slave, not a son! You can almost hear him calling his Father “Master” or “Boss-man” rather than “Dad.” And it gets worse. “Yet when this son of yours returns…” He can’t even refer to his own flesh-and-blood as his brother, because he was filled with hatred against his brother and his Father because he had never even been allowed to kill a young goat for a party with his friends and yet the other brother got a fattened calf. We can clearly see that while the younger brother was restored to health the older brother was still sick. The younger brother now at least understood the love of the Father and was rejoicing in it, whereas the older brother was still in a bitter pigsty of his own.
• We don’t know whether the older brother entered the party with the Father or not. The reason is likely because Jesus knew it was still an open question whether the Scribes and the Pharisees would share his joy and come to welcome and eat with the same prodigal sons and daughters with whom Jesus was dining, or whether they would continue to remain defiantly and enviously outside. There’s an obvious application for all of us, too, of this second part of the parable. Do we rejoice when other sinners return to the faith or do we resent that after they “had their fun” they are now restored to the same status as we have? Would we be happy that the person who used to bully us in grammar school, or estranged family members who used to spread lies about us, or local drug pushers, gang members, and the person who destroyed your best friend’s marriage came to church and sat next to you? Do we look at others not with the love of brothers and sisters but resentfully as fallen away sons and daughters of God with whom we don’t want really to associate? Do we look at the practice of the faith in general as a series of duties, of God as a powerful task master, rather than as a drama of love with God as the most loving Father ever? If God’s greatest joy is forgiving and he wants us not only to enter into that joy but join him in going out to invite others to return to his house so that the joy of heaven will be even greater, is that what we want?
• On Sunday God the Father is inviting all of us repentant prodigals to his house, where he seeks to renew us in our baptismal garments, to restore us to our full inheritance and to help us to walk with true freedom. And if we show, he won’t prepare merely a fattened calf for the celebration but something far greater — a Lamb looking as if he has been slain — so that through communion with His own beloved Son on the inside, we may live always in the love of the Father and have his love become fully alive in our lives. This is the path by which our Lent will be translated into an Easter joy that will know no end.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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