Joshua 5, 9-12; 2 Cor. 5, 17-21; Luke 15, 1-3.11-32.
The parable of the Prodigal Son, one of the best-known Gospel parables, which is read this Sunday, is without doubt a key that helps us interpret the state of the Church now. Jesus dares to proclaim a gospel which, then and now, is not in line with the rulings of official religion.
The religious powers-that-be in Jesus’s time claimed a monopoly over what is right and wrong, over even who are the good and the bad. Jesus was shaking the foundations. His message was dangerous and ambiguous, leaving too much space to misinterpretation.
Rereading this parable in the present context reveals the same dynamics that provoked Jesus to tell it in the first place. There is division in the Church now. There are those who are up in arms against Pope Francis, accusing him of being “a lost shepherd”. They keep harping on a rigid interpretation of the father’s mercy, claiming that, in their view, he should not have welcomed with open arms someone so wretched who left home and “squandered his money on a life of debauchery”.
What is at issue is not doctrine but the way forward for the Church. Actually the divide is between the language of the law and the language of love. The Church today is called to be welcoming to all those, whoever and wherever they may be, who are authentically in search of the truth and who have a deep desire for God.
There is nothing, from the standpoint of the Father, that can keep someone away from re-connecting with the source of true life. Hence there is nothing that can in any way justify rigidity and put doctrine as the ultimate criterion for one to belong or not to belong.
The challenge facing the Church today is how to remain open and connect with those who still look for God but do not come to church. Being pilgrims might be the best metaphor in this day and age to express what mostly characterises the present generations.
Christianity is no longer seen as the sole source of moral teaching about goodness, especially at this point in time when our credibility is at a unique low. Apart from the issue of credibility, people today are more reluctant to be told what they must or must not do. Personal autonomy is held to be a major achievement in our culture, and rightly so even from the standpoint of Christian life.
Perhaps we need to recover the ancient vision of morality when being good was primarily about journeying towards God and happiness. Christian living gives ample space even to digressions in one’s journey, the type the younger son in the parable went through. The father refrained from interfering with what his son had decided to do. Yet it was this digression that eventually brought him to experience a true homecoming. The elder son proved to have only a loveless fidelity, a blind obedience that kept him from truly relating with the father.
As pilgrims, it is the authentic search that can bring us to a true homecoming. Homecoming is needed in life. It comes through stages, but it has to come. It is that phase in life when we reach a level of serenity, depth and wisdom that make us see clearly and understand how God is operating in our stories, be they joyful or painful. Plainly, this is adulthood in the faith.
From the book of Joshua in the first reading we read of the homecoming of the Israelites who, after the long desert journey, gradually were led into the Promised Land. There was a time when they needed manna from heaven to nourish themselves while in the desert. The time now came when “the manna stopped falling”, and from then onwards “they fed on what the land of Canaan yielded”. It is the change of perspective in life that the Lenten journey makes us desire.