Homily for 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time

When we come together for worship, we usually begin with calling to mind our sinfulness. Examination of conscience and acknowledgment of sin is part and parcel of our daily prayer and devotions. Now some Christians of the I’m-okay-you’re-okay school of spirituality raise the issue that constant consciousness of one’s sinfulness could lead to low self-image and self-hate. Some people are so preoccupied with the sins they committed in the past, or the sinful habits they have in the present, that they become spiritually immobilized and morose, no longer able to celebrate life. This is unfortunate. Awareness of our sinfulness, when done in the right spirit, is a most healthy and empowering spiritual exercise. In today’s second reading from his First Letter to Timothy, Paul accuses himself to be the chief of sinners: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15). Awareness of his sinfulness did not lead Paul to low self-esteem or depression. It led him to a vibrant life of gratitude and praise to God, and humility toward God and neighbour in his ministry.

Paul starts off with a joyful hymn of praise and thanksgiving: “I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service” (verse 12). Because he knows he is a sinner, Paul is able to see anything good in his life not as a personal achievement but as the grace of God at work in him. For this he gives God continual thanks and praise. People who are not aware of their sinfulness tend to think that the good things in their lives are a result of their personal goodness and holiness. Before they know it, they slip into a hypocritical better-than-thou attitude which makes them look with disdain on those who are not as good as they are. Jesus condemned this pharisaical hypocrisy more than any other sin because it is the highest form of spiritual self-deception. The more we realize our utter sinfulness as Paul does, the more we appreciate the amazing grace of God in our lives. Our lives then become, like Paul’s, a continual act of praise and thanksgiving to God who judges us faithful in spite of our unfaithfulness.

Awareness of our sins is just one side of the coin. Looking continually only at this one side is enough to depress anybody. But we should look also at the other side of the coin every time we call to mind our sins. This other side is God’s mercy and forgiveness: “But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief” (verse 13). Jesus prayed for his killers saying that they did not know what they were doing (Luke 23:34). If those who killed the Son of God could be forgiven because they acted in ignorance, then every human sin could be forgiven because there is an element of ignorance that clouds our spiritual and moral insight at the moment of sin. Judas betrayed Jesus. When he became aware of his sins, he did not recall God’s mercy. So he gave in to despair and committed suicide. Peter also denied Jesus. When he became aware of his sins he recalled God’s infinite mercy. So he repented and became a saint. Awareness of our sinfulness must always include awareness of God’s mercy.

There is a saying of Jesus which Luke loves so much that he records it twice: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 14:11; 18:14). Humility is indispensable in true Christian spirituality and nothing is more humbling than an awareness of our sins, the various ways in which we have failed God, our neighbour and ourselves. Humility makes us more effective channels of God’s love. Just as a recovered addict can minister more effectively to an active addict, so can a forgiven sinner minister more effectively to active sinners. Reflecting on his sinfulness and on how God continues to forgive and trust him, Paul can now tell his life story as “an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Timothy 1:16). What God has done for me and in me, Paul would say to sinners, He can also do for you and in you. Maybe we can become better witnesses of God’s love in our world today when se see ourselves as forgiven sinners inviting other sinners to come on and received God’s forgiveness as we have done, rather than presenting ourselves as holy people trying to save poor sinners on the way to hell.

After going through the story of the Prodigal Son, a Sunday school teacher asked the kids, “At the end of the story who is it that ended up in the worst situation?” One of the kids shot up her hands and answered, “The fatted cow.” The animal-loving child was certainly correct, but the answer the teacher probably expected was “The elder son.”

There are three main characters in the Parable of the Prodigal Son: the father, the younger son, and the elder son. The younger son is a volatile, impatient, easily bored, ready-to-try-everything teenager. He collects his inheritance, goes abroad to see the world, and squanders his birthright in loose living. He represents every sinner. In sin we squander our human and divine birthright and in the end we are no better than in the beginning. Sin promises us a life of happiness, satisfaction and excitement but in the end all we get out of it is misery, wretchedness, dissatisfaction, depression, and a loss of the sense of personal dignity that belongs to us as God’s children. The good news is that no matter how deeply the sinner sinks into sin, there is always a still, silent inner voice within us inviting us to come back to our Father’s house where true freedom and satisfaction is to be found.

Then there is the father who is so loving that he lets his rascally son have whatever he wanted. In fact we can say he even spoils the boy. We have this image of God as a very stern, demanding father who is always ready to whip us into line. This is very far from the image of God we have in this parable. Here God is presented as a tender loving father who is easy on his children, and who is always ready to forgive, no matter what. If this is how God relates to us, then we can see that God possesses the tender-loving quality of mother as well as the tough-loving quality of father.

And finally there is the elder son who is introduced towards the end of the story. If you want to describe the elder son by one word you would call him a gentleman. He is a man of honour, solid, hard-working, consistent, disciplined, and sober — a perfect gentleman. In the elder son we see the virtues, as well as the vices, of middle class morality. What are the vices of middle class morality? Arrogance, better-than-thou attitude, intolerance toward those who do not meet up to our standards, insensitivity and a spirit of unforgiveness. The elder son exhibits these vices in the way he refuses to welcome his lost and found brother, his father’s explanation and invitation notwithstanding. He must have his pound of flesh. For him it is a matter of justice, but for God that is nothing but self-centeredness and unwillingness to forgive.

The first son syndrome is very much alive among us. Do you remember the execution on February 3, 1998 of Karla Faye Tucker. Karla was, to all appearances, a repentant murderer. At the moment of her execution there were two groups of people outside the Texas state prison in Huntsville: a group protesting her execution, who were there praying for her, and a group demanding her execution, who were there cheering and jeering as she was hanged. The praying group was calling for love and mercy and the cheering group was calling for justice. The parable of the Prodigal Son reminds us today that for God love and compassion takes precedence over blind justice.

We often confuse puritanism for Christianity. To be puritanical is to be scrupulously demanding in religious conduct and morals. For such a person the number one virtue is discipline. To be a Christian, on the other hand, is to profess and live according to the example and teaching of Christ. Here the primary virtue is love and compassion. As Christians we believe in a God of love and compassion. Jesus was a man of love of compassion both in his teachings and in his dealings with others. The challenge for us Christians today is to be people of love and compassion, to be like the prodigal father in the parable and not like the uncompromising elder son in a world full of prodigal sons and daughters.

Jesus is being accused by the Pharisees of eating with ‘sinners’. What is a sinner? Or what was a sinner in Jesus’ Hebrew culture?  It obviously included people who did individual bad things. It included people who regularly did bad things because they didn’t know or believe in God or even in order to defy God. These definitions of sinners would be the same today. But, it also included people who were sick or maimed or possessed by devils, which we would not consider sinful today. Jews believed these people were being punished for some sin committed by themselves or their parents. Lastly, sinners were people who had a profession which by its nature made it easy to sin. Prostitution would be an example for us today, probably, but in Jesus’ time it could have been tax collecting or toll collecting, both of which led to those people being thieves much of the time by the nature of the job.

What upset the Pharisees, however, was not so much that Jesus had meals with these people, even though there were some purity issues involved with that,  but that Jesus had the gall to ‘forgive sinners’ and allow them to accompany him, without the traditional demands called for by the Jewish Law.

In his unique way Jesus answers these accusations by telling a story. This was a long selection today and since we discussed in detail the Prodigal Son just recently, we omitted that section of the reading and will center my remarks today on the second parable.

All three parables are different versions which stress the same central theme: God is willing to do just about anything to bring back someone who is lost!

Also I chose the least familiar of the parables because it is one of the times that Jesus uses a feminine image for God. God is like the woman in this parable. So for just a few minutes will think of God as feminine, something we aren’t used to doing. In its simplest terms this is a story about a woman who lost a coin and because money was so hard to come by, she scours her home in attempt to find it, and when she does find it, she tells all her friends and asks them to party with her.

When we look at this story more closely, it may seem strange to us today.  People don’t even bend down to pick up a penny in a parking lot these days – it isn’t worth their trouble.  But this woman was probably not poor or needy. In that culture she had probably been given the job of keeping the expenses of the house.  She was given a certain amount of money for household expenses and she had to make sure that she lived within that budget. Arranging the household finances was the thing that gave her some status, and doing it well would have given her honor in her family’s eyes. Money would have been hard to come by for everyone at that time.

The coin that was lost was a drachma, and while it is a small amount of money, it might have been the amount needed to feed a household for a day. So, like the shepherd in the first parable that we just read, the woman goes to great lengths to find the lost item.    Mediterranean homes of that period were very dark with very small or no windows. So, the woman had to light her oil lamp in order to see clearly. This in itself would have been very expensive and only used in extreme circumstances during the day time.

Cleaning the house would also have been difficult. Floors were mud packed or made up of stones placed close together which would have made it easy for anything to fall in the cracks and be hidden. In the process of searching she puts aside all her other household duties. God is just like this woman, Jesus says.

What all the stories have in common is the great joy that abounds at the end of each story. Once the lost item has been found, be it sheep, coin or wayward son, the seeker becomes very happy and wants to share that happiness. This is one of my favorite images of God, actually, the image of a God so happy that ‘she’ has found someone or something lost, that she wants to party! ‘She’ wants to share her happiness with others.

What does this mean for us?  There is something very particular I want you to focus on here. In each of these first two stories today, the lost item did nothing. The one who did the searching was God. It wasn’t up to the sheep or the coin to make things right. It was God.

We often forget because of all the rules and regulations that often seem to take center stage in our churches, that Jesus died so that things could be right for us. It was a free gift for everyone.  We don’t merit it or deserve it. God did it because God is God, and wanted to. We call this ‘grace’. No matter what we have done, God wants us back, no strings attached! And when we realize it, when we repent – turn around and look at our lives and our relationship with God, when we see God coming – God rejoices, and invites us to the party in heaven!

How wonderful this is.  This is really the Good News! In fact, this is the Great News! St. Paul explains the same thing today when he says: “Even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence…” (in other words a sinner), “I received mercy… and the grace of God overflowed for me. .. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners…” Even in the first reading today which starts with a powerful and angry male image of God, angry because people have sinned against God by worshipping false idols, God “changes his mind” and promises wonderful things to Abraham. And then, the Psalm summarizes it all when it asks: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.”  This, God has done for us through Christ Jesus!

In the second reading, the letter to Timothy, Paul says that he was once one of those sinners that the Pharisees talked about. He accuses himself of blasphemy, violence and persecution. But, he says, God’s grace came to him: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.” And finally, he says that God has made him an example of someone he had patience with, and waited for, and rejoiced at his conversion, giving him the gift of eternal life – the party in heaven.

The recognition of the fact of God’s grace being freely given to us – despite us, in fact – is what I want you to remind yourselves about and take home today. But there is one other thing I would like you to do as well.  I would like you to be like God this week. Is there someone from this parish who has fallen away, that we might attempt to find again? Or is there someone you have been meaning to invite to church, but just haven’t yet? All it may take is your contacting that person and letting them know they are missed and loved or that you want to share your happiness with them.  Perhaps someone will join us for the first time or again. Then we can all rejoice in the banquet that is the Eucharist, in preparation for that great party in the kingdom of heaven.

By Bishop Kasomo Danel

The Bshop of the Socety of St.Peter and Paul (SSPP)