Farewell

Friends, I’m especially grateful to our pastor Fr. Joseph, for the chance to preach today, on my last weekend here at St. Anne-St. Augustin. The friars have assigned me to our parish in Yonkers, New York, where your own pastor’s predecessor, Fr. John, is pastor. I will be moving there in the coming days. Thanks to your prayers, I will eventually serve there as priest.

Preaching today gives me the chance, even though I have been with you only a short time, to tell you how and why I am grateful for the opportunity to have prayed and walked and broken open the Word of God with you over these past nine months.

As I thought about how I could express my thanks to you, the people of this parish, I thought—just trust me on this one—I might start with original sin.

I say this because I think one of the most debilitating consequences of original sin is our frequent inability to notice what is good in us. Instead of rejoicing and being grateful for our good points and the things we have accomplished through cooperation with the grace of God, we often tend to focus instead on our faults, on our failures, on the things about us that aren’t quite as they should be. And this goes both for us as individuals and as communities.

Therefore it is a great grace to have in our lives people who will remind us of how good we are. We all need folks around us to remind us the action of grace in our lives. That’s part of what friends are for. I know personally that it’s one of the great things about having my religious brothers. Though I don’t have the experience myself, I imagine that this is one of the graces of marriage as well, to have someone who will quietly insist to us that we are irresistibly loveable, even though, sometimes, we can hardly believe it ourselves.

So, as I finish up my time here, I want to try to do exactly this for you. In case you don’t see it, and in case it would be good to be reminded, I want to tell you, from the point of view of one visitor to your parish, what it is that makes this place so loveable and so graced by the Holy Spirit of God.

Now I’ve spent just about my whole life in the Order in multicultural and multi-lingual parishes. Even when I was a novice among the cornfields of Wisconsin, there were old folks in church on Sunday speaking to each other in German. In both New York and Boston I have served in parishes with a Spanish-speaking majority. So I’ve been around the multicultural block, as it were.

Now nobody knows how to do this multicultural thing real well. It’s awkward, almost by definition. And yet, here, in this place, I have seen, more than anywhere else I have ever been, the willingness to risk, to try, and experiment, and to learn.

In most places, different language and cultural communities are happy to co-exist. But you are doing more—reaching out to each other, hearing each other’s stories, praying with each other to the one God. And I want to tell you today that this is a tremendous grace that you have going for you here. It’s a hopeful stab at the unity that is God’s own desire and dream, not only for little parish of St. Anne-St. Augustin, but for the whole world. This is the very prayer of the Lord himself in today’s gospel, that all might be one as he and the Father are one. Rejoice and be grateful for your hope-filled response to God’s own dream of unity!

Recall the visions of the prophet Isaiah that we hear so much during Advent. Isaiah prophesied that all nations would come streaming to God’s blessings. And as we know, this hope is fulfilled for us in Christ. In Christ, the promises made to the little nation of the Israelites become the hope of all peoples of all times. And the final fulfillment of these prophecies comes in our second reading today, as people from all nations, having washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, enter through the Tree of Life—the Cross—into the New Jerusalem.

What I want to tell you today is that when you gather here for the Eucharist, and especially when people of different cultures and languages—all the nations of the world, as it were—process up to receive the Body and Blood of Christ, to affirm and receive communion with the Lord and with one another, these words of the prophets and these visions of Revelation are being fulfilled here and now. Rejoice and be glad, for this is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is here.

If the prophet Isaiah were here today, I have no doubt he would praise God to see the fulfillment of his vision of different cultures streaming to the Lord’s blessings. And if John, the author of Revelation, were to see the communion procession of the people of God here at St. Anne-St. Augustin, I have no doubt that he would rejoice, and see in you his vision of the saints processing into the New Jerusalem.

So, be grateful to God for the work of the Spirit in this place. Your faith and willingness are answering the Lord’s own prayer for the unity of those who believe. And for my part, I want to thank you for the chance to meet you and to be edified by your faith. I go forth better for having known you, and encouraged in the Lord. Thank you.

(7th Sunday of Easter, C, Last Sunday at St. Anne-St. Augustin)

My Peace I Give You

It’s hard to believe that we are already coming near to the end of the Easter season. Easter is the longest of the privileged liturgical seasons, but it seems to go by the fastest.

And as we come to these last Sundays of Easter, we’re aware of a real shift that has occurred in our celebration of the Easter mystery. At the beginning of Easter we recalled with joy the Resurrection appearances. We celebrated the fact that the Lord is risen from the tomb.

But in these later Sundays, we celebrate the mysteries of how the presence of the Risen Lord is with us now. This started in earnest two weeks ago on Good Shepherd Sunday, when we heard about how the presence of Jesus continues to guide and lead us in our lives. Last Sunday we celebrated the new commandment to “love one another” as Jesus Christ has loved us.

Today we hear of another great gift and presence of the Risen Lord among us: Peace. Jesus, as he is preparing his disciples for the coming of the Holy Spirit, tells them not be troubled or afraid—he is giving them the gift of peace. And we have that beautiful expression that we use in every Eucharist as we prepare ourselves for Holy Communion: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”

The active, positive presence of peace wherever it is found, whether it be among friends, within families, or among nations, it is a “real presence” of Jesus Christ, Resurrected and risen anew for the new life of the world.

But notice! The Lord makes a critical distinction when he makes this gift of his peace. He says that he gives us his peace, but “not as the world gives do I give it to you.” So what’s the difference between the peace the world gives and the peace that is the presence of Jesus among us?

Here’s an example of the so-called peace that the world gives. When I was in college I had a girlfriend, and, as sometimes happens, her mother did not approve of me. And one day, she took me aside, and here’s what she said: “Charles, my daughter will love you no matter what you do. But I won’t. Therefore, you might as well do what I say because then you will be pleasing to us both.”

She was offering me a peace treaty, and you can’t argue with the logic. But it’s the peace the world gives, the cheap peace that says, “You and I can be at peace, as soon as you come around to thinking and acting the way I think you should.” And we do this kind of thing to each other all the time, and we mistakenly call it peace. When politicians announce peace at the end of a war, it’s not the real peace that is God’s gift, but simply the fact that one group of people has succeeded in forcing another around to their way of doing things, their way of using resources, or their form of government.

This happens in religion too, as is painfully evident in the first reading today. In the apostolic Church there were struggles between the older, Jewish Christians, and the newer converts, who had not been Jews. And as we heard, the original, Jewish Christians were trying to say that theirs was the only way of being a Christian. They said: it’s great that you gentiles want to be disciples of Jesus Christ, but you have to do it our way.

So thank God for Paul and Barnabas, who had the courage of the Spirit to say that were not going to hold back the grace of God by saying that there was only one way of being a Christian. Without denying the beauty and validity of Jewish Christianity, they found compromises that allowed others to come to the Lord as well. They found a way to make peace.

Too often we let ourselves be tricked into thinking that peace is a kind of absence. We think of peace as the absence of conflict, or as the absence of any difficulties or problems that interfere with our own plans and needs.

Real peace, the peace that is Jesus’ gift to us and is his risen presence among us, is so much more than that. It is a powerful and active force, bubbling up like a leaven for the renewal of all creation. It is the power that can make us brave enough to forgive each other. And it will encourage us to risk the vulnerability that lets us ask for and accept forgiveness for the many ways we have hurt those around us.

“My peace I leave you, my peace I give to you.” Let us rejoice in the Risen Lord’s gift of peace, the peace that, should we accept it, will break our cycles of violence and revenge, and will re-create the world according to the “original blessing” that is the very happiness of God.

(6th Sunday of Easter, C)

The Life of the World to Come

Today we have one of the most beautiful images from John’s gospel: Jesus the Good Shepherd. Jesus assures us that through him, we can never be taken out of God the Father’s loving and caring hand, and that in Jesus we are given the great gift of eternal life.

It is Jesus himself who leads us to our destiny. As our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles puts it today, “All who were destined for eternal life came to believe.” Think about what that means—it’s not that we believe and then come to have eternal life, but that it is because God has destined us for salvation that we come to receive the gift of faith.

And God will lead us there. By the example of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit present in our hearts and minds, we are led along and through the paths and troubles of this life. But the work of the Good Shepherd also goes beyond this life. Not only are we led by Jesus here and now, but we are being led somewhere. There is a final destination in this journey, in the pilgrimage of this life. Our destiny, our destination, is heaven—eternal life with God. Heaven is the end, or purpose, of our lives and indeed of the whole of creation.

Now we Catholics, sometimes we don’t talk much about the end of the world. But we should! For one thing, we proclaim our belief in the final goal of the world each time we come together for the Sunday Eucharist. At the end of the creed we proclaim that we look forward to the vitam venturi saeculi, the “life of the world to come.” It’s not just that we are looking forward to a mysterious new heaven and earth, but to the new life that the Good Shepherd promises us today in the gospel.

For another thing, there are a lot of people out there preaching the end of the world, from the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the street, to the Left Behind books that have become so popular. Trouble is, at least as I hear them, a lot of times people who preach the end of the world are preaching revenge. It’s about how God will finally punish all of the sinners and vindicate all of us poor folks who trying so hard to do the right thing.

The heaven of our final destiny is not about revenge or taking rotten glee in how God will punish sinners, but about God’s overwhelming desire to save the world, about God’s overflowing desire to share the perfect joy of his own life with every single part of his creation.

In the second reading today, from the book of Revelation, we have a beautiful picture of what our eternal life in God will be like. There is no hunger of thirst, no tears, no anxiety. There is only the joy and love that is the perfect worship of God and of his Lamb, Jesus Christ. And, as one of the heavenly elders describes to John, the author of the book of Revelation, heaven is populated with those who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

That’s us, friends. It’s us in the very celebration of this Eucharist. In this life we wear the robe of the flesh; our bodies are the robes that express our hearts and souls in this world. And here at Mass we receive the blood of Christ into our bodies, the Precious Blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins.

The blood of Christ will wash our hearts and minds. We may have made our feelings dingy and our devotion shabby through our sins, but the blood of Christ will wash us clean that we may begin again in the newness of the Risen Life of Christ.

In this Eucharist the Lord washes and renews us, and we are made new and clean in the blood of the Lamb. And this is just a little taste of what it will be like for us in heaven, forever enjoying the “life of the world to come.” May we let this little foretaste of the perfect joy of heaven make us desire our final destiny all the more.

(4th Sunday of Easter, C)

A Matter of Life and Death

Well, friends, we are hardly a third of the way into our joyful celebration of this Easter season, and a tragedy has struck this week, reminding us that, despite the Resurrection of the Lord, we still live in a violent world. We still live in what John Paul II called the “culture of death.”

So we pray especially in these days for eternal rest for the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre and for the consolation of their families and friends in their overwhelming loss. And we pray too for the perpetrator, that somehow, in the eternity of God’s irresistible gentleness, he might be freed from the horrible inner torment that drove him to these crimes.

And thus we are reminded in our Easter joy that the Resurrection does not magically remove suffering and violence from our lives. We are reminded that in Jesus Christ we are freed from death, but not from dying.

In fact, the kind of violence and brutality we witnessed this past week are part of the very mystery we worship! As the book of Revelation says today, “Worthy is the Lamb…worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and riches, wisdom and strength, honor and glory and blessing.” And as the apostle Peter proclaims in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, “the God of our ancestors raised Jesus,” the very Jesus we killed by “hanging him on a tree.”

Jesus Christ enters into all of the violence and isolation and brutality that we have brought upon the world with our sins, not to take violence away, but to open for us a path for its transformation.

And so, as Peter says later on, the Holy Spirit is given to us who obey God. This is the same Holy Spirit which conceived Jesus in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and which raised Jesus Christ from the dead. And it is by this Holy Spirit present in our hearts and minds, that we will be able to see the Risen Lord. The Spirit will help us to notice ways that we can begin to transform the meaninglessness of suffering and death into the joy and peace of gentleness and new life.

This movement and possibility are clear from our gospel today. The disciples had been fishing all night and had caught nothing. But once they are able to perceive Jesus Christ risen from the dead and present with them, eating with them, fishing with them, their efforts are transformed and they catch an overwhelming number of fish.

And the same thing is possible for us. As the disciples found courage in the Lord to keep fishing after a discouraging night, we must not let something like the Virginia Tech massacre or the horrifying situation in Iraq make us discouraged in our faith. We must ask for the Holy Spirit, who will give us the eyes to see through the culture of death to the possibility of proclaiming a culture of life.

God is always inviting, always calling us back to the path to new life he has established for us in the Passion and Resurrection of his Son. Today at the end of our gospel we have the beautiful story of the rehabilitation of St. Peter. Having denied Jesus three times on Good Friday, today the Lord asks him three times, “do you love me?” And each time Peter responds that he does, the same imperative comes from the Lord: “feed my sheep.”

Let us pray for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who will teach us the path to the transformation of our violent culture of death into a gentle culture of life. The strength of the anger and bitterness that breaks out into wars and school shootings can be transformed and re-directed to gentleness and the conviction of faith in goodness. We call this transformation the Resurrection.

Feed my sheep, don’t shoot them, says the Lord. And the pattern and path to do this have been provided for us by Jesus, the first-born of the dead and the beginning of the new creation. Let us believe in him, and in whatever small way we can, begin to gather up the whole world into the new life of his Resurrection. The world is desperate for it, though they don’t know it. Let’s make the new life available to us in Jesus Christ risen from the dead the worst kept secret in the world. They need to hear it.

(3rd Sunday of Easter, C)

Divine Mercy Sunday

On the first Easter Sunday evening, Jesus came and stood in the midst of the disciples and said, “Peace be with you.” This is the great good news of the richness of God’s mercy—that, in return for all of our sins and violence and unbelief, God in the Risen Lord gives us just one thing: peace.

Therefore it’s wholly appropriate that on this second Sunday of Easter we celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday, the great feast of Mercy instituted by our Holy Father John Paul II. So let us rejoice in God’s mercy! As John the Evangelist says of the disciples, “they rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” So let us rejoice as we encounter Jesus Christ risen into the new life of this assembly, and risen into the bread and wine we receive as the Body of the Lord broken for our salvation and as his Precious Blood, poured out over the world for the forgiveness of sins.

Consider how this is displayed in the famous image of Jesus the Divine Mercy. It shows the Risen Lord touching his heart—and from his heart come forth two rays of light, one white and one red. These are the water and the blood that came forth from the side of Christ on the Cross when he was pierced in death by the soldier’s lance.

On the Cross these were just water and blood. But in the Resurrection, in Jesus Christ risen from the dead, the water becomes the waters of our baptism. And the blood from Jesus’ side becomes the blood of the Eucharist, through which we are made sharers in his new and eternal covenant.

This is the key to this famous image of the Risen Lord we call the Divine Mercy. From the heart of Jesus, in the utter generosity of God, the waters of baptism and the blood of the new and eternal covenant flow out over the world.

But as we gratefully recall the great mercy of God in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, we must always remember that the only appropriate response is to become merciful ourselves. The personal religious experiences of St. Faustina Kowalska form the basis of Divine Mercy Sunday, as well as of the Divine Mercy devotion. And the Lord said to St. Faustina, in no uncertain terms, “You must show mercy to your neighbor out of love for me, and you must not try to excuse yourself from it.”

Having gentleness and mercy for the people around us is the only adequate response to the great mercy that God has given to us in Jesus Christ. If we want people to see the good news of Jesus Christ, risen again from the sufferings of his Passion and death, we must allow him to be raised into our com-passion for each other!

Note how this is exactly what the apostles were doing in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Having experienced the Resurrection of Christ, and drawing new life from this great revelation of mercy, they turn to those in need. The sick and the disturbed, they were all cured by the power of the Risen Lord present in the faith and zeal of the apostles. And this is our task too, as the apostles that God has sent into this suffering and tired world. As God has had such mercy on us, giving us new life in the waters of baptism and the blood of the Eucharist, may we give our life and blood to the service of others in mercy.

Do you want to see the risen Jesus as the apostles did? Then insist, like our friend doubting Thomas, on putting your finger into the nail marks and your hand into the wound in Jesus’ side. There is so much hurt and sickness and fear in the world, we are bound to encounter someone who is suffering. They are the suffering Christ for us. Be with them. Take care of them, and comfort them. In this way you put your own hand into the wound of Christ and allow Jesus to be raised into your own compassion.

And, hopefully, when we see the Lord in the compassion that God puts between us and the other, we will step back in awe like Thomas and say, “My Lord and my God!”

Once we have had mercy on and compassion for our neighbor, once we have put our hands into the wounded side of Christ, we will be able to say in the words of that old prayer, the Anima Christi, “wounds of Christ, hide me!”

By encountering the suffering around us with openness and a desire to help, we allow, in our own selves, mercy and compassion to be resurrected in the world. And we will see the suffering of the world transformed into the wounds of Christ, from which the new creation is born in the waters of baptism and the blood of the Eucharist.

May we be merciful, as God has shown us his Divine Mercy. By the courage that the Spirit of God gives, we can show the new hope of the Resurrection to a tired and despairing world.

(2nd Sunday of Easter, C)

Believing is Seeing

Happy Easter, friends. May the new life of the Resurrection bubble up in its freshness in all our tasks and relationships this day and forever.

In our first reading today we have St. Peter’s speech in the house of Cornelius. Peter boldly proclaims how God had anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how Jesus went about doing good and healing all.

But wait a second. Peter? Is this the same Peter whom we heard about two days ago on Good Friday, about how we denied that he even knew Jesus, not once, but three times? Standing there in the cold and darkness of night outside of Jesus’ trial, he didn’t even have enough commitment to the Lord to even admit that he had heard of Jesus.

And yet here he is, in the house of an officer of the Roman army no less, proclaiming that this same Jesus is the judge appointed by God, through whom we receive forgiveness of sins in his name. This is quite a transformation! The same man who denied that he even knew Jesus, not once, but three times, is now proclaiming belief in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins.

This transformation, this change from being someone dominated by fear to someone who preaches the name of Jesus with courage and faith and conviction, this, friends, is the transformation we call the Resurrection.

Recall our second reading today, from the letter to the Colossians, in which we heard that “we are raised with Christ” and that we may now “seek what is above.”

We are the body of Christ, the Church. And the body of Christ is raised from the dead in the Resurrection—it’s us who form his body in the world and in history. Our common baptism into the death of Christ was celebrated by the Churches of God most clearly last night at the Great Vigil of Easter. And by allowing ourselves to be baptized into the Passion and death of Christ, we allow him to take all of our fear, all of our hurt, and all of our sins to die with him on the Cross.

But even though in the humanity he borrows from us, Jesus is able to suffer the abandonment and death we have brought upon ourselves with our sins, these cannot hold onto the almighty power of his divinity. And so the Incarnate Son of God bursts forth from death, destroying death from the inside, and creating a path for all humanity to join him in the new and Risen life of a newly re-created world.

And through the utter generosity of God in Jesus Christ, the fruits of the Resurrection are available to us: freedom from anxiety, freedom from guilt, freedom from slavery to sin—and in the end, freedom from death itself. But you have to believe it.

People like to say, “Seeing in believing.” But, friends, in the case of the Resurrection, it’s the opposite—“Believing is seeing.” You have to believe if want to see Jesus Christ raised from the dead, the Risen Lord who is with us always.

Consider the beautiful Gospel we heard this Easter morning. After Mary Magdalene discovers Jesus’ tomb to be empty, Peter and the Beloved Disciple come to see what has happened. The Beloved Disciple enters the tomb, and the evangelist tells us that, “he saw and believed.”

He saw and believed. But think about it—he didn’t see anything. What he saw was an absence. He saw an empty tomb. What he believed was what the Lord had spoken during his earthly life, and this allowed the Beloved Disciple to see through the empty tomb to the Resurrection—and the Resurrection is the truth that suffering and death could not hold onto the Son of God.

Believe and you will see. Believe that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and you will see his Resurrected Life in the joyful eyes of those you love and in the trees and flowers that come back to life each year at this time. Believe and you will begin to see the re-creation, the renovation of the world in Christ wherever you look.

Believing is seeing, friends. Peter himself says this in his speech in the first reading: Jesus “was raised on the third day” and God “granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance.”

Today, this Easter Sunday, we are those witnesses chosen by God. We are chosen by God to have the power to see through all the difficulties and troubles of this world to the new life and hope that is the Resurrection of the Lord.

So let us rejoice today in our divine vocation! Let us believe in Jesus Christ risen from the dead. And let us see in every scrap of hope—the newness of Spring, the wonder in the eyes of children, the fact that no matter how troubled and violent this poor world becomes, people still insist of falling in love with each other—let us see in all these things the re-creating and renovating power of the Resurrection.

(Easter Sunday)

The Prodigal Son

Well, friends, we are drawing ever closer to the great mysteries we will celebrate during Holy Week and Easter Week—of the death and Resurrection of the Lord. And to prepare us on this Sunday, the Church gives us one of Jesus’ greatest parables. The parable of the Prodigal Son, which appears only in Luke’s gospel, offers us a very rich meditation on what God is like, and how God saves us despite the many ways that we fail him.

Ever since the first time I read this story, I’ve always felt bad for the older son. There he is, having worked diligently and quietly all those years, honoring the father and doing everything he was supposed to do. He was the good kid. Why didn’t he get the party? Instead, just because the bad kid got himself into enough trouble to come home again, he’s the one who gets the big party. It just doesn’t seem fair—and the older brother feels it. That’s why he complains to the father, “Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf.”

Don’t you feel for this guy? Like I said, he was the good kid. And yet this older brother points out to us one of the real spiritual dangers of being a righteous person. And that’s us, more or less righteous people; people who go to Church, who try to know and follow the will of God, who seek to live a life of responsibility. But one thing that can easily happen to righteous people is that we can become bitter. Bitter against the world, or worse, bitter against God.

We who make such an effort to be good people, who come to Church each week to hear the Word of God—shouldn’t God love us more than he loves the sinner, the criminal, or the terrorist? It only seems fair. But it’s not true. God loves the terrorist, the criminal, and the sinner just as much as he loves you and me. And if the worst sinner in the world were to repent and turn back to God this Lent, there would be more rejoicing in heaven than there is for us who have been trying to serve God the whole time.

Does it seem unfair? Well, we think we’ve been serving God all along, but maybe we’re not so righteous after all. Whether we have the bitterness of the older brother or not, we surely sometimes act like the younger brother, who dishonored his father and squandered his money. All of us have wasted and taken the gifts of God lightly at one point or another. I know I have. In fact, our sins count against us more, because we know and believe in God and we should know better!

Perhaps one of the only good things about sin is that sin makes us anxious and miserable. And eventually, like the younger son, we decide to turn back to our heavenly father. And this brings us to richest and most beautiful part of today’s parable: the father. The father in Luke’s parable of the Prodigal Son is an image of our father in heaven.

Does the father protect the security of his money when his younger son insults him by wasting it? No. Does he protect his honor when his older son insults his generosity? No. This father does nothing in defense of his own rights or of his own honor. He is only forgiveness and generosity, and wants nothing more than for both of his sons to celebrate the whole family being back together.

Friends, this is what our God is like. God lets go of all the honor, all the power, and all the rights that go with being the almighty God. God refuses to control the world and insists on giving us the free will to shape the world as we see fit. And when we make the world violent and miserable with our bad choices and our sins, God doesn’t punish us or fix the world with a heavy hand.

We human beings constantly the squander the great gifts of God. We destroy the earth. We treat each other like furniture. And in all this we make ourselves and our world miserable. And God’s only response is to let go of everything it means to be God, to become the least among us, and, on the Cross, to absorb all of our sins and bitterness and violence in his own body.

As Paul says today, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them.” Just like the father in the parable, God is only concerned with reconciliation, with having the whole family back together again, and not with punishment or honor.

Paul goes on to say that through Christ we can become the “righteousness of God.” This is the real good news today. The righteousness of God is what we seek, not to be righteous ourselves.

The older brother, who had served the father quietly all those years, thought he was righteous. But taking that righteousness to himself made him self-righteous and bitter. The younger son, who knew very well that he wasn’t righteous at all, well, the father puts the good robe over him and the ring on his finger and makes him the guest of honor.

This is our good news. Not that we are good, or that we are better than other people who don’t try to serve God, but that God is good. And God is not interested in defending his honor or in punishing sin, but only cares about loving and reconciling the world. Contemplate the Cross then, as we get closer to Holy Week, and see the God who is literally, just dying to bring the whole human family back together again.

(4th Sunday of Lent, C)