Homilies,  Year C

4th Sunday of Lent – 27 March 2022

Jesus was a great story-teller.  He delighted in telling stories.  The stories he told painted wonderful pictures in the minds of his hearers.  And as he painted these extraordinary pictures in the minds of his hearers Jesus taught us about both ourselves and God.  He told stories because he knew people would remember them, and therefore they would remember what he wanted to teach them about God and our relationship with God.  So, he was constantly alert to all the ordinary experiences of people’s lives and he would use these experiences, weave them together in a story.  Thus the parable is the primary means by which Jesus teaches.  He does not use the philosophical discourse but the genre of story. 

Because their content is about the ordinary, the simple things of people’s lives, the parables disarm us because of their sheer simplicity.  However, this is not to say that parables themselves are simple.  In fact, parables are quite sophisticated, and the more skilled the story teller, the more sophisticated the parable becomes.  Jesus, as a great storyteller and aware of the all the techniques of story-telling common in 1st century Palestine, used the structure of story-telling to maximum effect. 

In particular there are three techniques of story-telling about which he was especially fond, and we see them all used to great skill in this particular story he tells us today.  The techniques he uses are repetition, alarm and omission.  When Jesus really wants to make a point he repeats a line or a phrase.  Then, often enough, there is something missing in the story that leaves us thinking, “Hang on, what about such and such?  You didn’t say what happened there in the story!”   But he also tells the story in such a way that we come across a line or a statement that alarms us.  It’s a line or statement that doesn’t make sense at all, and because it doesn’t make senses it pulls us up short, thinking, “Hey wait up! What you just said doesn’t make sense.  That’s not right.  That’s a silly thing to say.”  These techniques of alarm and omission are particularly important in the story he tells us today.

There are, in fact, many curious things in the story. The first is that the younger son would have asked, and been given, half the property. In the time of Jesus, it would have been unheard of for the younger son in a family to do this, let alone for the father to have acquiesced to the demand. What is the audacity of the son trying to tell us? What is the father’s passivity before the request trying to tell us?

But to add further scandal, the line that would have alarmed the first hearers of the story is this:  While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with pity. He ran to the boy, clasped him in his arms and kissed him tenderly.

No father in 1st century Palestine would have done this. The protocols of the culture would never have allowed this.  The father was held in great esteem and with great deference.  This status would never have allowed him to show such enthusiasm towards his sons and in no way to show such affection even privately let alone publicly.   It is an abandonment of status that would have made all the fathers who first listened to the story very uneasy.  In the story, the father abandons all protocol and restraint in such joy to receive back his son.  Jesus is trying to say to us, “My Father is not like the fathers you have known.  My Father does not operate within the cultural expectations of fatherhood.  No, my Father will abandon everything, especially any status or pride that he has, in order to welcome you into his house.  You do not have to come to him, he will come to you!”

Such an insight was at the centre of the spirituality of the 18th century Alphonsus Ligouri.  Alphonsus presented God as the iddio pazza:  the ‘insane God’, driven by the mad passion of love.  Jesus‘ experience and teaching completely overturn those ordinary expectations we have about God.  As Alphonsus put, it, rather than we grovelling before the divine majesty, it is God who grovels at our feet begging for love.  Alphonsus Ligouri taught that God has abandoned all pride and protocol and has run towards us looking for our love in four main ways.

1.  God empties the divine self into creation, hoping to attract human love by the beauty of the created universe

2.  God empties himself in the incarnation.  Jesus is the passionate love of the Father, the wild risk of the Father, the abandonment of the Father’s status so that we might be brought into the house of the Father.  And because God has become one of us, one with us, God is now as close as your latest bambino, shivering from the cold and crying for milk.  We are to find God in the realities of human history, the hungry child, the daily struggle for life

3.  God empties himself in the Passion of Jesus, the outcome of his sacrificial love. In which God assumes human life at its weakest and most vulnerable

4.  And God empties himself in the simplicity of bread, the Eucharist so that he might make his home in us.  And so for Alphonsus the object is not so much about us going to heaven, but the story of a God who finds heaven in the human heart.  My paradise is the human heart.

So here we have a God who abandons all protocol and runs towards us.  How embarrassed does this make us?  And it does embarrass us to think that God would come grovelling at our feet begging for love.  In a single phrase, “He ran to the boy” all our ordinary ways of thinking about God are turned upside down.  And the story challenges us to wonder what do we do in our embarrassment?  Can we open our arms, without our own pride, and accept the rush of love that leaps towards us?  The single phrase, “He ran to the boy” deeply confuses us. This is the very point of the story to confuse us, for it is in our confusion that we become more open to thinking about things differently.

But there is something in the story that still seeks its resolution.  It is around the issue of what is missing in the story.  There is something that is left out, and that something, just like the line of alarm, is designed to teach us something also.

The son speaks to the father, the older son speaks to the father; he speaks to the servants and they speak to him; the father speaks to the older son, the father speaks to the servants.  But why does the Father not speak to the son who has come home again?

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