Just 3 months ago, I became a father for the first time. December 15
2009 little Jackson Alexander was born and it changed my life. I share
this because the experience of becoming a father has helped me
understand the readings today in a way I never could have before.
Today we heard probably the most famous and beloved of all Jesus'
parables: The Story of the Prodigal Son. Its beauty and its power is
that as we mature, the parable reveals new insights to us. The way I
hear the story today is not how I heard it as a teenager, nor is it the
way I will hear it in my twilight years.
On the surface, it is a simple story. A young man asks his father for
his inheritance before his father even dies-a huge insult: it's like
saying "you are dead to me"-only to squander it on wine, women and song.
He then returns years later, broke and broken, but contrite. He begs for
mercy, and for his father to take him back: not even as a son, but as a
lowly servant. But instead, his father is overjoyed by his return and
throws a huge celebration. This provokes the anger of the older brother,
who complains to his father about the injustice of it all, refusing to
celebrate. His father tells him to rejoice and be happy, for what was
lost is now found, what was dead has now returned to life.
When I read this as a teenager who was not very interested in going to
church, I began to identify with the son who had gone astray. For me at
the time, the heart of this story was about returning to God.
But over the years, the focus of the story began to shift. As we grow in
our faith we begin to wrestle with more complex questions. The big one
for me was forgiveness. I always wrestled with the dilemma between
forgiveness and justice, thinking: "Well if I just forgive the person
and let them off the hook, they will never learn or change..." So I
started to be stingy with it. I began to withhold it, attaching many
conditions. The fear was that if I forgave, somehow justice would not be
served.
It wasn't until later on in my faith journey that I discovered the
spiritual flaw in this. The problem was that I was being the Judge, when
I am simply called to be the Forgiver. Because really, who are we to be
the bouncer at the gates of the Kingdom of God? That's not our job. The
Kingdom belongs to God, He makes the rules. We are only bearers of God's
forgiveness; as Paul writes in his Letter to the Corinthians:
"God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ,
not counting their trespasses against them
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
So we are ambassadors for Christ,
as if God were appealing through us." (2 Cor 5.18-19)
By playing Judge, I was actually impeding God's forgiveness. Then it
occurred to me that this was why Jesus tells us to "forgive 70 times 7",
because we need to enlarge our hearts if we're going to be channels of
God's love in the world.
I soon began to realize that I was acting like the Older Brother in The
Prodigal Son. Instead of loving and forgiving freely like the Father, I
was the one saying; "If you forgive him, he wont learn from his mistakes
and may even do it all over again!"
This helped me understand why it is we come before God on our knees;
because we must be humbled by our poverty. Our poverty to love, to
understand; and even the poverty of our forgiveness.
And we approach God on our knees because that is the posture of the
beggar. We must beg for the strength to rely so much on His power, and
to allow ourselves to be directed by His hidden and mysterious grace
when sometimes every impulse and every voice around us is telling us
something different.
Fr Henri Nouwen wrote an entire book on The Prodigal Son. In it he
writes that the spiritual journey calls us to stop acting like the sour
brother, and to start acting like the loving father.
Now I'm at a point in my life, having just become a father, where I can
appreciate this parable in a whole new light. When I look down upon
little Jack my eyes will sometimes fill with tears, overcome with love.
I cannot imagine a greater or more precious gift. And I think that
there's nothing he could ever do to make me close my heart to him. That
no matter what happens in his life, no matter what mistakes he may make,
that I'll always be able to rejoice in his presence.
And feeling this, I get a small taste of what God feels for each one of
us. How God rejoices in our presence; how God delights in our very
being.
The parable of the Prodigal Son is calling us to trust in God to move
past our wounds, our pettiness, and our resentments, to see the dignity
and glory in each other. To see and to love each other just as God loves
us.
No comments:
Post a Comment