Sermons
The 4th Sunday of Lent, March 6, 2016
The parable of the Prodigal Son is only found in Luke 15. It belongs to the three parables that Jesus used to answer the grumblings of Pharisees and the religious leaders that he was associating with sinners and collectors.(Lk.15:12) The first of this triad of parables is the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7) and the second is parable of the lost coin (Luke 15:8-10). These two parables are quite short and similar to one another. They could be seen as an introduction to the third parable-“the parable of the prodigal son”. The structure of these parables revolves around three common elements: something is lost, it is sought and found. The end of it is that the seeker and his friends rejoice and celebrate. This act of rejoicing and celebrating is compared to the joy in heaven over one repentant sinner (Luke 15:7, 10). The central message here is that: a lost sinner who lives a very sinful life can and will be accepted by God through repentance. There is no limit to God’s mercy. His mercy endures forever and triumphs over sin at the end. In the structure of this story of the prodigal son we could see how depraved the prodigal son is. He asked his father for his inheritance early, essentially implying that he wishes his father was dead (Lk. 15:12). Such a request would dishonor the father, and would sever the son from the family, as well as from the community at large. Sin is simply a separation. This is why he took his share and left to a far country. He separated himself from his father, his family and community. One commentator describing this in modern terms says “one might say that he was essentially kicking his father out of the driver’s seat and taking control of the wheel.” He was acting on his own will, in rebellion against the moral and spiritual leadership of his father. At the end he realizes the foolishness of his decisions and the gravity of the sin against his father and Heaven (v. 17). He decided to returns to his father to confess his sin and repent. He humbled himself enough to be his father’s servant (v. 19). The level of transformation that he had undergone is shown in his change of words. At the beginning he said to his father “Father…give me” (v.12). When he came back he said to his father “Father… make me”. (v. 17). This is a sign of total submission to the will of his father, who has the best plan for his children. His father was filled with joy at the return of his son and started to celebrate. This joy and celebration were resented by the older son who refused to rejoice and celebrate with his father at the return of his brother. This could be compared to the resentment of the Pharisees, who resent Jesus’ rejoicing over the lost/sinners who come to Him. Reexamining the attitude of the Self-Righteous Brother In examining the attitude of the self-righteous brother it is important to closely look at the relationship between the two brothers. Notice the words, “this son of yours” (v. 30). The older brother did not see himself in relationship with the younger, but saw them both in the terms of his perception of their relationship to the father in these words “this son of yours” This makes one ponder the question, “Which brother is really lost?” This is typical of the Pharisees who explicitly claim that they are “not like” sinners. (cf. Luke 18:9-14) This alienation from “sinners” was frequently a point of contention between Jesus and the Pharisees. This older brother in the parable may be compared to those who imagine themselves to be close to God because of their external conformity to the law yet neither loves his follow man nor values the love of the father for his fellow man. Such people are not only far from God, but are also far from others. The prodigal son represents, alternatively, a person lost in sin, and a person receiving grace through repentance. The father represents God, giving his son the freedom to choose to sin, but seeking his return and welcoming him as a son when repentance is demonstrated. Let us at this period of lent continue to seek a living and dynamic relationship with God through repentance and to our fellow man through concrete works of mercy and reconciliation.
Fr. Sylvester Ajunwa, Ph.D.
Third Sunday of Lent, February 28, 2016, Year C
I would like to reread the bible passages we just heard. When you look at the first reading (Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15), you are confronted with one of the most important texts of the Bible: God is THE ONE WHO IS, YAHWE…, who is present for his people, who cares for his people. One aspect of this text is important for me: I do not believe that the bush was set on fire just the moment when Moses got close. I believe that the bush had been set on fire a long time before – the bush was always burning. My point is: no one, except Moses, had ever looked carefully enough at the bush to actually see its fire. I do not want to discuss if it was a kind of illusion: when you look to the bush, the sun might have produced this illusion. This is not important. Important for me is that Moses sees something others did not see. To say the least, Moses was different from others around him, he looked at the world differently In the gospel (Luke 13:1-9), the historical Jesus also expected his followers to be different. That is why he constantly calls upon them to "repent." That is what he does in today’s gospel: “Repent!” The Greek word metanoia (μετάνοια) repent - means more than just "I'm sorry I did it; I'll never do it again." In the Bible, in the New Testament, it refers to a 180-degree change in one's value system: What I once thought im-portant, I now see as insignificant. What I once judged unimportant, I've now put at the center of my life. Jesus, the carpenter for Galilee, demanded that the first step in imitating him was to adopt his value system: to see people and things as he saw them. Among all the evangelists, Luke seems to have regarded repentance as a gradual process. That seems to be why he made a huge part of his gospel a journey narrative. Just as his Jesus constantly is on the road to Jerusalem, where he dies and rises, so the followers, the friends of Jesus, are on their own roads to Jerusalem. Jerusalem as that place and time in their lives where they likewise die and rise with Jesus, where they like-wise become new men and women with new perceptions of the world around them. No doubt Luke enjoyed telling the story of the patient gardener. Like that unbearing fig tree, a lot of the original readers of Luke also needed to be cultivated and fertilized so they would experience a metanoia in the future. Luke is the one evangelist who constantly stresses and underlines God's mercy. “God’s mercy”: is it an accident that his gospel is one proclaimed during this "Year of Mercy?” Unlike most religious teachers, Jesus wasn't overly concerned with just providing people with new information to store in their brains. His goal was to change the way his disciples, his friends saw the world. His goal was to change the brains of his disciples so that they were able to interpret the information already before their eyes – like Moses: he saw something that was always there. But he was the first to see the bush burning. And Jesus wanted to prepare his friends for what things would come: they should be able to anal-yses their world, to see the world as Jesus would have seen it. I still like the sentence Ignatius of Loyola once coined, he invites us to “see the world through the eyes of God.” And you need a certain training to see the world around you, to distinguish between what is important and what is not so important. Paul treats that problem in our I Corinthians (I Cor 10:1-6, 10-12) passage: Nothing was more significant in the history of Judaism than the Exodus from Egypt. Yet as Paul notes, the majority of those who experienced that unique act of salvation never seemed to have appreciated its significance. The people of Israel had not appreciated, had not seen the importance of the Exodus, they had not seen that their God had intervened in their favor. Just as some of Paul’s readers don't seem to be appreciating the significant things and people in their lives. "Whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall" – this is what Paul writes. Acquiring the value system of Jesus is a lifelong process. We never reach a point and time when our repentance no longer needs to evolve. Moses only encountered Yahweh because only Moses had the proper frame of mind which enabled him to come face to face with the God of his ancestors. Of course, this particular frame of mind of Moses had consequences: Moses, having seen the burning bush, having been so near to his God, received some heavy responsibilities. I would say that the value system of Moses was changed by this encounter. And when one's value system changes, one's responsibilities also change: looking on the world around us with this new value system, we begin to see needs and opportunities most people around us ignore. We simply look at people and situations with new eyes. Maybe, more and more, with “the eyes of God”. Perhaps that “responsibility thing”, that challenge to change our way of living, is the reason some of us walk by a lot of bushes in the course of our lives. Because we know that we would have to change our lives, we prefer to never notice the fire burning in the middle of the bushes along our ways. One last thought: Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, has a famous sentence: “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays” or “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” Couldn’t we say the same about our way of seeing the world: “To look at the world does not change the world, but it changes the one who looks at the world”. So I invite you to open your eyes, your ears to see the world, to listen to the world, to see the burning bushes along your way, and to let yourself be changed by what you see. Cf. Roger Vermalen Karban on http://www.fosilonline.com
Fr. Wolfgang Felber SJ
Second Sunday of Lent, February 21, 2016, Year C
Life is not a straight line. We all experience ups and downs, times of tranquillity and moments of doubt and darkness, peaks of light and valleys of doubt and darkness. This is true also for the life of Jesus, as he was fully human “in all things but sin”, as the letter to the Hebrews says. The Gospels mention three spiritual “peak” moments when Jesus experienced very strongly the presence and intimate closeness of His Father, His “Abba”. The first occurred at the age of twelve, for a Jewish kid the turning point from childhood and being counted as an adult. During his first pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, he was so deeply touched by God that he wanted to stay in the house of his Father and forgot all about his parents. Even today the time of transition from childhood to adulthood is often marked not only by deep questioning and crisis but also by profound insights and experiences of the divine. The second moment was Jesus’ baptism. He “saw the heaven opened” i.e. he communicated directly with God and “the Spirit came to rest on him” to empower him for his mission. The transfiguration on mount Tabor is the third time Jesus is drawn so closely to God that even his body is transformed and he experiences a foretaste of the resurrection. What is common to all three moments of enlightenment is that they do not last. Jesus comes down from the mountain and enters a time of testing, a spiritual crisis. After the baptism he is “lead by the Spirit” into the desert, the place of hardship and the territory of evil spirits. At a moment of hunger, weakness and exhaustion the devil tries to pull Jesus away from his true mission. He lures him with the same kind of temptations that are also at work in our own times and often make us silence the voice of our conscience and abandon our values: the possibility of a life of leisure and pleasure, the insidious desire to seek popularity and fame and give in to peer pressure, and the abuse of power which makes instrumentalise other people for our own interests instead of serving them. Jesus resists and Satan “left him to return at the appointed time” which is the time of his suffering and death. But before he enters his last temptation the Father gives Jesus on mount Tabor this extraordinary moment of tasting something of the glory that awaits him. In the strength of this experience Jesus hangs on to trust God’s word even when all abandon him and even his “Abba” seems absent. During Lent we could take some time to recall the peak moments of our life when we had an experience of God’s presence, of his peace, of his light. This gives the strength to stand firm when doubt and darkness seem to overwhelm us. What happens in the life of Jesus and in our personal lives is also a pattern of the history of humankind. There are times of peace, prosperity and progress and there are times when the order of the world is shaken. After two world wars with some 100 million dead we had the extraordinary privilege to live through 70 years of relative peace, at least in the Western world. Now our world seems to slide into a period of uncertainty and conflict. Jesus’ experience and maybe also our own assure us that God is always at work and eventually turns evil into good.
Fr. Wolfgang Schonecke MAfr