24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The most difficult reality we Catholics have to grapple with is God's unconditional forgiveness. Everything we do, most of our mundane relationships, are hedged round with conditions. Even in our closes relationships, this principle seems to be in operation: 'I love you because you love me'. The idea of a God who loves us without strings attached is difficult to come to term with.
Today's gospel extract from Luke contains three parables containing this message: two short parables about a lost sheep and a lost coin, then longer parable of the Prodigal Son.
In each case, there's exuberance, joy, amazement, and great celebrating after the lost object or person has been found. Jesus has been criticised because he mingles and eats with sinners. This is his response to his critics. He consorts with sinners precisely because God is a loving father who welcomes the repentant sinner. He claims that in him God's love for the sinner is made actual. Everything hinges on the initiative of the father. The 'elder son' of the parable embodies in his person the teachings and attitude of the Pharisees. And it is left to this individual to summarise the dilemma of 'the virtuous one': "All these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even as much as a kid to celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours returns, he who swallowed up your property with his women, for him you slaughter the fattened calf." As the American writer Fr. Robert Karban put it: The crucial question is: 'How does one show mercy without alienating those who don't need mercy?'
Our Old Testament extract from the Book of Exodus recounts events that took place on the eve of another famous homecoming: the return of the Israelites to the Promised Land. The story of the 'Golden Calf' is such a powerful story that, like the parable of the prodigal son, once heard, it is never forgotten. We heard it first in National School, Moses has gone up to Mount Sinai to converse with God. But his people grow impatient with waiting on him. So they fashion a Golden Calf and offered it sacrifice. They draw down on themselves the wrath of God and of his servant Moses.
We should look at the 'Golden Calf' story a little more closely. It claims to tell of events that happened a thousand years before Christ. But this actual account that we have is written less than a hundred years before Christ. And, it was written to address an immediate problem. At that time, almost every Jewish shrine had a statue of a cherub in it: a mythological figure with a human head, a huge bird's wings and a bull's body. Middle-eastern religions thought the gods visited their people while sitting astride these creatures. That's why two cherubim were placed on top of the Ark of the Covenant. They were a sign of God's special presence.
However, as so often happens, the original function of the cherubs was forgotten. And the Israelites began to worship these cherubs instead of the God they originally symbolised. (It would be parallel to worshiping the sanctuary lamp in Catholic churches instead of the Eucharistic Jesus, whose presence it signals.) This is the 'idolatrous practice' that the author of the 'Golden Calf' story aimed to root out.
Perhaps we have something parallel in today's Church: a sacrament originally intended to celebrate and channel God's forgiveness is often equated with that forgiveness. What was once a sign of the grace God freely and generously bestows on us has become, for some, the only way God can forgive. The Prodigal Son story tells us that God the minute we 'come to our senses'. In fact he has already forgiven us before we arrive home to the Father's House. Yet we as a Church create so many hoops through which our people must jump before their sorrow is 'authenticated'! Our sins are forgiven even before we confess, receive absolution or perform our penance. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is an outward sign of what has already taken place.