Today's readings: Joshua 5, 9-12; 2 Corinthians 5, 17-21; Luke 15, 1-3.11-32.
Today's parable of the prodigal son is one of the Gospel's most imaginative and known stories. For this very reason it risks losing its evocative power. This story has never been so true to life as it is today when there are those who stay and those who leave. But as the parable seeks to tell us, the mere fact of staying or leaving is not what really matters.
The framework of this parable is Luke's gospel, which focussed on evangelisation and illustrating God's infinite mercy for sinners. It is significant also that what in this gospel provokes Jesus to tell this story is the wrong judgmental attitude of those whom we can define as 'churchgoers'. It is the same attitude that characterises the elder son in the parable who stays at home but is homeless. He stays, but with bitter alienation.
Where compassion is concerned, Jesus breaks with the past and proposes, through this parable, a radical criticism towards the system. At the time of Jesus, compassion was not the order of the day both in politics and in religious circles. Jesus particularly criticises the religious system which knew no compassion.
We need this new perspective of how people's lives should be handled in our churches. We also need the strength and clarity with which Jesus proclaimed what he really stood for.
Jesus was always moved to compassion whenever he faced marginalised people. Compassion is a radical form of criticism when it focuses on the person rather than on the law. The perspective of the law never allows compassion, which, from a legalistic perspective, may merely weaken the system. But Jesus broke with that past.
In the midst of the Lenten season, what really characterises the three readings and effectively binds them together is the proclamation of fulfilment. "The old creation has gone, and now the new one is here," St Paul writes to the Corinthians.
This same feeling is communicated when the Lord says to Joshua in the first reading: "Today I have taken the shame of Egypt away from you. The manna stopped falling, and having manna no longer, the Israelites fed from that year onwards on what the land of Canaan yielded."
Fulfilment means there being something new. But what's new in our proclamation? What's new in the way we present Jesus Christ to the world as the Lord of life? Year in, year out, Lent comes to give us a push, to bring change in our way of seeing and doing things.
To this day, in our Church set-up, the law never accomodates the person. The internal structure of power is always above the person. Jesus' compassion, as it is presented in the Gospel story, is not a mere emotional reaction on the personal level, but a public outcry, even a critical outlook on reality.
The readiness of the Father to embrace the unacceptable son, in itself can be considered a radical criticism of the old order, and even its very dismantling. This parable is further proof of how the primitive Church community sought to present Jesus as an alternative voice of conscience. The dominant culture of his time, particularly within religious circles, could not tolerate compassion or any form of solidarity with victims of the system.
Probably even today the Church seriously needs to come to terms with the message this parable seeks to drive home. We have serious difficulties with the demarcation of borderlines between belief and unbelief, between insiders and outsiders, between those who are near and those who are distant. Jesus gave origin to a new community which embraces the sinner and those who, from our standpoint, are distant and lapsed.
Perhaps we should reflect on whether we have transformed his community to such an extent that rather than embracing the marginalised, it creates them. The standpoint of Jesus surely gives a better viewpoint of things as they should be.