Hungry to Know Our Dignity

The talk will revolve around the parable of the Prodigal Son and St. Pope John Paul II’s 1980 encyclical on the Mercy of God known by its Latin title, “Dives in Misericordia.”

Because one is never sure of the depth of an audience’s familiarity with the Bible, let me give you a very brief synopsis of the parable of the Prodigal Son. A rich man has two sons, and the older son is a dutiful and obedient and quiet man who does what his father expects him to do. The younger son is impatient. At the beginning of the story, he is impatient to receive his inheritance, and so he asks for it from his father so that he will have it before his father dies. His father agrees. So the young man takes his new wealth and goes off to foreign lands and squanders it on wine and women. Out of money and down on his luck, he has to take a job feeding the pigs. In that low position, he admits the reality of what he has done, and decides to go back to his father and seek employment as a servant rather than to be returned to his status as the son. As the younger son is approaching his home, the father sees him and runs out and embraces him and gives him new clothes and a ring and says, “let’s have a big party because my son has returned.” The older brother seems a bit put out by this generosity, and he points out that he has never even asked for one little thing but always done what his father asked of him and yet his father has never given him a party.

While the older brother is very interesting, let’s leave him by the wayside and focus on the Prodigal Son – the younger son – and the loving father. I have heard, you may have heard this too, that this story could also be called the parable of the loving father. And John Paul II suggests that in this story we see the essence of Divine Mercy in the profound drama that plays out between the Father’s Love and the wastefulness and sin of the younger son.

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The Passion is a Great Act of Love

palmsundaymosaic Today is Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion. And it is a special Sunday in the church year because we actually get two readings from the Gospels. At the very beginning, right before we processed in, we read the story from the Gospel of Mark about Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. The crowds were excited to greet him. They put their cloaks down on the ground in front of him. They spread leafy branches, and they cried out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!”

Then we just read the very long passion from the gospel of Mark which picks up the story in the middle of the night from Thursday into Friday. And the tone of the story is completely different from Palm Sunday. Even among his disciples, people are bickering, people are nervous, people are weak; they begin to abandon Jesus in his hour of need. One of them hands him over to the Jewish authorities for a show trial, and the passion is fully under way. It will culminate in his death on a cross and his burial in a tomb.

The juxtaposition of these two gospel stories reminds us how unsteady is the popular sentiment. The crowd loved him on Sunday, and they shouted “crucify him” on Friday.

Today we see in the readings the stark contrast between the fickleness of the crowd’s heart and the firmness of Jesus’s will to do what his father asked him to do. Though the crowd loves him on Sunday and hates him on Friday, Jesus is still Jesus through it all. He has the strength not to be attached to the adulation on Palm Sunday, and he has the strength not to give up through the pain of Good Friday. What is it that he has that gives him such strength?

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Time and Talent

The parable of the prodigal son is one of the best-known stories in all the Bible. I’d like to draw your attention to the first turning point in the story, where the younger son is in the middle of his terrible job feeding the pigs, and he realizes he doesn’t have to live like this. Some voice inside him told him that he was made for better than his current situation. He is not where he should be and he is not where he wants to be.

He hears what we know is the voice of God saying to him “I want you to have something better.” That voice says “I want you to be better.” In order to get the something better, which the son describes as being allowed to eat the slop that he’s feeding the pigs, the young man must go to his father and repair the relationship by admitting the truth of what he has done. That’s the action that the young man must take before he can enjoy the fruits of sonship with his loving father.

We see the same thing in the Old Testament reading. The people of Israel are down at the bottom of the mountain fashioning a molten calf to worship while Moses is at the top of the mountain in a personal relationship with God. And the message that Moses will take down the mountain is that the people of Israel should not give in to false gods, but they should have a real relationship with the true God.

And we see in the life story of St. Paul, which he references in the second reading today, that he was once a blasphemer — he tried to persecute the Christians — but now he glories in God’s love and the work of serving his Lord.

It takes time to make a change like this. It took time for the son to make his change: he needed to be uncomfortable for a while, he needed to honestly assess his situation, he needed to want to be better, he needed to work his way back to the father, and he needed to start fresh with his father with full honesty about what he had done and who he had harmed. Likewise, St. Paul spent about 14 years learning with Barnabas before he went out and preached to the Gentiles. So we cannot expect to have the relationship with our Lord that we were made for, and the relationship with our Lord that we want, if we are not willing to give him time and presence. We cannot just declare ourselves Christians and expect no further requirement on our part.

So it takes not only time, but commitment and effort. A few weeks ago, we as a parish made a commitment to praying. Every Catholic is required to go to Sunday mass, but our prayer lives should be much more than that minimum requirement of the Sunday mass obligation. And many of us signed up in some way to increase our commitment to prayer. And today we need to consider making a commitment of time and talent in two ways

1. We need to work as hard on understanding of our faith as we do in our prayer life,
2. We need to live out our faith in service to each other and in community with each other so that our lives match our prayer life.

Whatever commitment we make to God should not be a one-time thing. Christian conversion is always on-going. Moses and St. Paul didn’t just have one conversion moment, and neither should we. In our prayers, in our intellectual growth, and in our community service, we should renew our commitment to God every day.

The Wedding at Cana

This past Sunday was the second Sunday in Ordinary time, and the Gospel reading in Year C was the story in John 2 of Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana.

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding. When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” (And) Jesus said to her, “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servers, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus told them, “Fill the jars with water.” So they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.” So they

took it. And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine, without knowing where it came from (although the servers who had drawn the water knew), the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him. [John 2:1-11]

Mary figures prominently in this story. I am always struck by Mary’s role as an intercessor and as Mother of the Church, both of which are found in this story. In her role as intercessor, she alerts Jesus when the people are in need. Here they need wine if the_marriage_at_cana_decani the wedding feast is to continue according to custom. Those of us who pray “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death” know from this Bible story our entreaties to her are efficacious and appropriate.

Mary instructs the people at Cana to “do whatever He tells you.” This is also her word to the Church: “Obey the Word.” The Bible can be reduced to two words: Love and Obey. We do not fully understand the first word and we understand all too well the second word, so God gives us the whole Bible to help us comprehend the former and embrace the latter. Mary’s immaculate conception is to me the only sensible explanation for her lack of difficulty in obeying God. Full of grace, she was not structurally inclined to challenge God or disobey Him. As Mother of the Church, she encourages us to overcome our structural inclinations and obey the Word.

The message of hope and promise in the changing of water into wine in the story of the wedding at Cana is that if we choose to do whatever He tells us, He can transform the ordinary into something extraordinary. Just as the servants dared to draw out some of the water they had just put in a stone jar and take that water to the wine steward for tasting, so are we called to obey Him even if what He tells us to do is foolishness to the world. That this is not easy is implied in the story. The servants knew they were taking water to the wine steward for tasting, yet they did it. They knew a miracle had taken place when the wine steward remarked on the wine’s quality. The wine steward made a comment on the normal ordering of wines at a party, but the servants saw something far more interesting and important. Ordinary things are made extraordinary and even Holy when lives are led in obedience to God. By doing whatever He tells you, you will see Him more clearly, just as the servants saw more clearly than did the wine steward. Nothing could be more ordinary than pouring water into a jar, yet this is the story we tell when we move into the season of Epiphany when the Son of Man is made manifest. We tell this story because this pouring of ordinary water was done by people open to the power of God, and that openness played a significant part in the power of the first miracle of Jesus.

Mary’s encouragement must be powerful, for the servants knew they were taking water to a wine steward but did it anyway. When we react with dismissal or condescension upon hearing that someone else payed for Mary to wrap her mantle of protection around him, let us be reminded of how her mantle protected and strengthened the faith of the servants at the wedding in Cana.