TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
11 SEPTEMBER 2022
As
Moses communes with God on Mount Sinai for forty days and nights, the Israelites
have become anxious and worried. Has God
forgotten us? Has Moses abandoned
us? Are we stuck in this Sinai
wilderness to never reach the Promised Land?
In response, the people give their jewelry to Aaron, who fashions a
golden calf in the divine image. In the
apparent absence of God, they can see and touch and worship. God sees this as infidelity and becomes
angry.
The Book of
Exodus gives us an insight into the remarkable relationship between God and
Moses. God offers to allow his wrath to
blaze up and consume them. Then, God
will make of Moses a great nation. However,
Moses has the courage to remind God of his promise to their ancestors. “Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and
Israel, and how you swore to them by your own self….” Moses becomes a mediator for his people. He tells the Lord, “You would look pretty
silly going back on your promises.” In using the word “remember,” he is
appealing to God’s very nature. God has
not forgotten them. On their part, the
Israelites need to remember who God is and who they are. They need God, even when God seems distant to
them.
In our
journey to the new and eternal Jerusalem, we can find ourselves in a
wilderness. When life gets difficult, we
do not pitch in all our jewelry to fashion a calf. Like the ancient Israelites, we want real
assurances that God has not forgotten us.
We want something tangible, something we can see or touch, when we are
weary or disillusioned. We want our
leaders to be nearby to lead us, and not up on some mountain communing with
God. There are times when we want God to
intervene directly to get us through whatever wilderness in which we find
ourselves.
That is why
Jesus tells these three parables. The
Lord wants us to remember that he seeks us out when we are lost, like the
shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, or like the woman who searches
diligently for the lost coin, or like the father who never gives up on a son
who had considered him dead. While we
may sometimes feel that we are alone in a particular wilderness, the parables
of the lost sheep and the lost coin remind us that the Lord is always near and
always remembers us, even when we feel abandoned. Like the son in the third parable, we
sometimes make some very bad choices and wander away from our Father who loves
us and from others who care about us. We
often call this the “parable of the prodigal son.” The son is prodigal, in the sense that he
makes outrageous demands of his father, considering him dead. But it is the father who is also prodigal,
because he makes the outrageous choice to give his son what is not his. He is outrageous in his desire to watch for
his son’s return. He is outrageous when
his son comes to his senses and then receives him back fully as his son.
Jesus
addresses these parables to the Pharisees and scribes, who have been critical
of his practice of welcoming sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes and
eating with them. He addresses these
parables to us, especially when we think that the Lord has not remembered
us. He wants to share his joy when we
who are lost have been found. As a
confessor, I am humbled when I become an instrument of the Father’s prodigal
mercy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and when I give the Apostolic Pardon
to a dying person who has been away from the Church for a long time. Jesus continues to eat with us sinners at
this Eucharist. No matter how lost we
may be, or how much we might have thought that he has not remembered us, he
seeks us out to share his great joy when he finds us.
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