The Return of the Prodigal Son

My homily for tomorrow, 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C:

The readings this Sunday touch on one of the most important aspects of Christ's teaching as 'good news': the truth that God is ever ready to forgive our offences and shows infinite patience in waiting for us to realise our need for forgiveness, to reach that decisive moment of spiritual awakening which Jesus illustrates with his parable of the prodigal son.

We're often told - with some exaggeration - that in the past Catholics were over-burdened by a sense of sinfulness. They were tormented by feelings of guilt, moral unworthiness and anxiety about the prospect of being saved. 

I don't think myself that religious-minded people monopolise the tendency towards neurotic self-deprecation, or that agnostics and atheists are universally happy, balanced and "whole". But today, it certainly seems that "Catholic guilt" is a thing of the past and that the dominant trend even among church people is towards a sort of nonchalance about sin, both in the sense of underestimating the self-serving and malicious inclinations we all have because of our wounded human nature, and in the sense of airily excusing the self-serving and malicious actions we carry out in practice. As the American Catholic writer Peter Kreeft has written: "ancient pagans took sin for granted and doubted salvation. Modern pagans take salvation for granted and doubt sin"!

There's a big difference between the idea of an all-holy, all-loving God who rejoices each time "one repentant sinner" turns to him, and the idea of a God who is indulgent, "non-judgemental" and ultimately indifferent about whether his creatures repent or not.

It's a great mistake, then - in liturgy, in hymns, in preaching and in catechetical instruction - to present God, not as the loving but authoritative parent revealed to us in Scripture, but as a sort of eager-to-please manager, someone more concerned to make us all feel comfortable than to summon us to sanctity. Apart from anything else, there are many men and women who won't automatically find this picture of God attractive. Experience, especially with young people, shows that they're more likely to find it feeble and pathetic and a good reason for dismissing the Christian faith altogether. 

In the second reading this Sunday St Paul describes himself as a type of returning prodigal, a "blasphemer" who at one time did all he could to "injure and discredit" the Christian faith, but who has now been rescued by God's mercy and grace. I am the greatest of sinners, Paul says, saved only by Christ's "inexhaustible patience". That sense of gratitude towards God for enlightening him and liberating him from his previous faults and follies is quite different from the modern tendency to regard God as a soft touch who accepts and affirms us despite our lack of convertedness.          

So the purpose of today's readings is to encourage us to cast ourselves in the role of the prodigal son. Are we in the process of returning to our Father? Can we look at ourselves and see someone who was once lost but now, by gratefully embracing God's mercy and forgiveness, is found again? Was once blind, but now can see? Was dead, but has now come back to life? These are stark, arresting alternatives, as in so much of Jesus' preaching. But that only serves to underline the urgency of his appeal.