11 March 2023

Return to the Father

2nd Week of Lent (S)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP
St. Albert the Great, Irving


Did the Prodigal Son entertain any doubts about going back to Dear Ole Dad? If he did, he didn't allow them get in the way of his redemption. Suffering the consequences of his sin in a foreign land, he comes to the only rational conclusion available: it's time to go home and ask for forgiveness. We can imagine him walking home dejected, remorseful, and wanting nothing more than to go back in time and make better choices. What does he expect to find once he arrives? A told-you-so lecture on the dangers of wine, women, and song? Verbal and even physical abuse from his family, esp. his older brother? He most certainly expects to be rejected as a wastrel and given little or nothing as a homecoming gift. He's prepared to be ridiculed and placed among the servants in humiliation. But. . .he isn't returning home to extort his family into accepting his sins as right and true, nor to explain his bad behavior away with a claim of mental or emotional breakdown. No, he's returning contrite and resolved to amend his life. He's returning knowing that his choices placed him in both physical and spiritual danger. Rather than seeing him as he sees himself – humiliated, embarrassed – imagine instead that as he approaches his father's farm, he becomes more beautiful, truer, better. With each step, he grows heavier in holiness, more densely set apart. . .until his life of dissipation is itself dissipated by a humble desire for forgiveness. Imagine that by the time he reaches the front door, all he needs is a word from his father. . .and he is a New Creation, a creature once again made whole and set on the right path. We don't have to imagine it, that's what happened. And it's what happens every time one of us – sinners in need of mercy – returns to the Father contrite and resolved to amend our lives. We may – in our disgust with our sins – be tempted by the Enemy to think that our disobedience is especially evil or somehow uniquely awful. That God is so offended, so repulsed by our rejection of Him that He can't bring himself to forgive us. This is a lie. One of the Enemy's favorites. God is by nature Love. Love is who He is and what He does. Not to forgive us would violate His nature, an impossibility. Knowing this to be true, the Enemy strokes our pride, telling us that we are a special sort of sinner, one who has achieved the greatest feat of all sinners everywhere: to sin so evilly that Love Himself refuses to love us. So, we remain in that foreign land, wallow in our dissipation, and come to hate the Father for His refusal to forgive – the forgiveness we ourselves have refused to ask for or receive. If Lent is about anything at all, it's about acknowledging the reality of our sins and their consequences, and returning to the Father with contrite hearts and minds ready to begin again. As many times as it takes, to begin again. One step at a time toward home, toward our Father. 



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