Homily for 4th Sunday of Lent

Homily for the 4th Sunday of LentMarch 14, 2010
2 Cor 5: 17-21
Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32
Salesian HS Band

“We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5: 20).

If you were paying attention, you heard a reference to reconciliation at the beginning of Mass: “Jesus Christ brought mankind the gift of reconciliation.” The reading from St. Paul was an exhortation for us to be reconciled with God. The gospel reading was a parable of reconciliation that we’re all very familiar with.

We can see everywhere around us how people need reconciliation. There are wars and violence all over the world—not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in Pakistan, the Holy Land, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Nigeria, Cechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines, Colombia, Mexico—to give a partial list. In our own country the newspapers and radio waves are loaded every day with stories of street crime and domestic violence. In our families, how many arguments take place, how many people aren’t talking to each other!

St. Paul appeals to us to be reconciled to God—to admit our sins against one another and against God, and to come to God for pardon. But reconciliation with God has to mean also forgiving one another and accepting the forgiveness that others offer to us. For us who aren’t statesmen, diplomats, important politicians, who can’t stop al Quaeda from blowing people up or renegade soldiers in Congo from raping and murdering or abortionists from slicing up 4,000 American babies in their mothers’ wombs every day—for us, reconciliation starts in our families and neighborhoods. Whom do we have to forgive and try to get along with better? Whom are we angry at, like the older brother in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15:25-30)—who’s really angry at his father at least as much as at his brother?

When we turn to God for reconciliation, we can be sure that he accepts us, like the father in the parable (15:20-24). But we need to ask him also to help us be reconciled with the real people in our lives: our parents, our siblings, our cousins, the guys we go to school with, the peers we hang out with and the ones we have trouble getting along with, maybe the girl who used to be special to us. While we all want peace and brotherhood in Afghanistan, we also need peace and brotherhood in Westchester and the Bronx—and that’s something that more immediately affects us than does Afghanistan, something we can affect by our own words and actions.

God has already taken the 1st step toward reconciliation with us. He didn’t have to do that; he could have just left us to rot in our own hatred, alienation, sin. But, says St. Paul, God has initiated “a new creation,” brought in “new things” (1 Cor 5:17), thru Jesus Christ. God has re-created the world, opened up the possibility that creation can be the way he made it to be in the beginning before human beings thought they were smarter than God and sinned. God has “reconciled the world to himself in Christ,” who suffered the hatred, the alienation, the punishment that our sins deserve—“for our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin” (1 Cor 5:21)—while Christ embraced our human nature, our human condition; while he embraced us and made us his own brothers and sisters—“so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (5:21). On the cross he cried out to his Father, “Forgive them!” (Luke 23:34). Whom was he forgiving? His executioners--and you and me. And he practiced that forgiveness also with the criminal we commonly call the Good Thief by promising him reconciliation with God, a place in paradise, in the new creation (23:40-43).

Like the forgiving father in Jesus’ parable, Jesus opens his arm to receive us sinners. May we accept his pardon like the younger son (and the sacrament of Reconciliation gives us a wonderful opportunity to do that). May we extend God’s reconciliation to other people, especially those in our daily lives.