Lent Sun 3, C March 20, 2022
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
“How many of my Father’s hired workers have more than enough food to eat?” So the lost son wonders to himself just before he returns. It is this insight that finally draws him back home… that shows us how, without even leaving his home, the Father rescued his son from sin.
We know the demographics. We all have or at least know someone who has children who have left the Church and even who have left the family altogether. So often I hear about the pain and sorrow… the anger and frustration that parents feel concerning their wayward children or siblings towards other siblings or spouses towards each other. What are we to do with this? Take heart and learn from the merciful father.
This comes right after the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. These are about seeking out those lost to ignorance, personal weakness, or to scandal and mess in the Church. In this case, however, the Father does not chase down what was lost, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t evangelizing the son. So the question is, what does he do? And how do we imitate it? There are three principles we should focus on.
First, be generous. Notice that the father is not insulted or begrudging when the son asks for his inheritance. He is also quite fair and generous in how he pays his hired workers – that’s quite literally the reason the son gives for coming home. But this is deeper than bribing your children. The kind of generosity we see is a total disinterest in money. The father is obviously wealthy, but he is radically detached from it. He uses it for its purpose, the good of others: A generous wage to his workers, a loving gift for his children. Even though the older son doesn’t realize it – he thinks he has to earn it – the Father was ready to ungrudgingly give whatever was needed and good to his children.
You may be surprised at just how significantly the way you treat money affects the spiritual well-being of your loved ones. Money is one of, if not the biggest rival to God in our world. If you love it too much, if you’re too focused on it, too stingy… your loved ones will intuitively feel your love of God is not genuine. Why would they want to follow your religion if you yourself don’t love it more than money? Even if you are poor and don’t have it – love of money is a strong counter witness to the truth of Catholicism. No one is drawn to the Church or back to the Church by greedy people. Be generous and detached.
Secondly – and this should be obvious – never stop wanting them to return. I don’t mean in a passive sense. I mean to exercise that desire… to increase that desire deliberately. How? By prayer and by paying attention. When the son returns, the father sees him from “a long way off.” He was scanning the horizon every day in hopes of the son’s return. In practice, this means praying for them deliberately every day. It means heartfelt rosaries and novenas. It means going to the chapel and expressing your anguish to the Lord in the blessed sacrament. It means letting yourself feel the pain and sorrow their absence brings you, but doing so without despair. Feeling it with the Lord and deliberately entrusting that anguish to Jesus Christ on the Cross. It means not giving up hope, choosing to hold on the possibility of their return no matter the evidence against it. We walk by faith, not by sight.
Third and finally, be merciful. Beyond the physical desire for food, the lost son knew on some level that his father would forgive him. He grossly underestimated just how thorough that forgiveness would be, but he nonetheless had good reason to believe his father would at least be willing to let him come back to the property and work. Why did he expect some mercy? Because he knew his father was merciful.
If we want wayward loved ones to return, we must be very good at forgiving. To forgive is not a single choice, it is a process and a way of life. It doesn’t mean forgetting. It doesn’t mean letting yourself be taken advantage of again. It doesn’t mean saying what someone did was not wrong. You can forgive without forgetting. You can forgive without immediately trusting again. Memory is complicated and trust has to be earned back. What authentic forgiveness looks like is getting to the point where you want what is best for the person who hurt you. It means loving them and praying for them. It means that, if God gave you the choice to send them to hell, you wouldn’t. It means being able to think of the person without anger or grudge. This means, every time that grudge wells up, you say “Lord, I forgive them, help me to forgive.”
To draw back wayward loved ones, we must not just forgive them, but everyone. We must live lives of forgiveness. This is not the same thing as pretending nothing is ever wrong. It is not the same thing as refusing to acknowledge that sin is real and bad. It is not tolerance. It is staring evil in the face, calling it evil, and choosing to love and forgive the person who caused it. And all of that is impossible if yourself have not practiced receiving forgiveness. If you don’t go to confession regularly, then you don’t understand forgiveness. It’s also possible to go to confession often, but without real contrition and so without real benefit. What’s needed is both the internal attitude and the external practice.
This in turn requires great humility – the realization that there is a right reason and wrong reason to want your family to convert. In our pride, we can fall into the trap of wanting our family to be Catholic because we are Catholic. It can become more about validating my own belief than about a genuine desire for what is objectively best for them. People sense that. If your child thinks the Catholic faith is just another tool to control their behavior, just another way of proving to them that you know better, they will be repulsed.
But with humility, with acknowledging that you need salvation as much as they do, with genuinely seeking forgiveness and offering forgiveness, you begin to reveal the truth that they have rejected: that Catholicism is the best possible way to have a relationship with the God who gave his only son to save us. Take this to heart! Be generous, pray always, live a life of mercy and humility. Do this, and you will have a home worth returning to, where the lost can be found and the dead returned to life.