Most Reverend Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv DD STL, Bishop of Parramatta
Homily for the 4th Sunday of Lent, Year C
Readings: Joshua 5:9-12; 2Cor 5:17-21; Luke 15:1-32
Enacting God’s mercy as the framework of our relationships
Dear brothers and sisters,
Pope Francis has named this year 2025 as a Jubilee Year. He has invited us to a time to embrace hope, deepen our faith and draw closer to God. We are to become ‘Pilgrims of Hope”, he said, and Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love.
Jubilee is not primarily about rituals, or even distant pilgrimages and indulgences. These are means to inner conversion. Jubilee is really a prophetic summons and a call of conversion to how God wishes us to live as his children and as a collective witness to his love. At its heart, Jubilee is a radical reset: a return to the covenant community where all -with no exception- are accorded the dignity of God’s children. Rooted in the Jewish Sabbath tradition and echoed in the Christian Eucharist, it invites us to see the world through divine perspective. We are to restore relationships, repair injustices, give equity to the underclass, relieve the indebted and reimagine community in alignment with God’s vision of solidarity and harmony.
The Word of God on this “Laetare” Sunday of Lent guides us in this endeavour. It speaks of a God who is interested in more in our future than our past. This God shows extravagant and unbridled welcome to sinners. He challenges us to enact mercy, compassion and love as a framework for our relationships with all people, particularly with those society regards as undeserving and expendable.
The first reading from Book of Joshua speaks of the impending occupation of the land of promise and the new era of permanent settlement. It was a transition time that required the people’s attentive hearing and sensibility. “Today, I have taken the shame of Egypt away from you”. God has kept his promise. The exodus was a journey of transformation. It was meant to move the people from slavery to freedom. However, this freedom was to be internalised and appropriated by the way they were to love, respect and treat each other and the strangers among them.
In other words, the Israelites have the moral obligation to build a community that is the antithesis of Egypt from which they were delivered. Being shown mercy and love, they must become the vehicles of mercy and love. They are required to form a new society that embodies God’s vision for them -one that cares for the poor, the indebted and the oppressed.
In the Gospel, Jesus tells us what God is like through the parable commonly known as the Prodigal Son. The truth is that it is not only the younger son who has lost his way. The older son too shows himself to be a stifled, stagnated and self-centred person. He refuses to share the joy of his brother’s homecoming and his father’s lavish reception. The two brothers are present in each one of us: both of them have something to be reproached, so both need conversion. The younger needs to recognise his heartlessness in abandoning his parents while the older needs to grow in compassion like his father.
For Jesus, the ideal to which we must turn is the merciful Father: He welcomes all without making exceptions, pardons everyone freely, wants all to live in his house. The parable reveals the extent to which God is prepared to suffer for love of us. Like the father who becomes vulnerable on account of his son’s behaviour, God becomes vulnerable on account of our free choice. In the end, the parable challenges us to become like the father. Jesus presents a model of love that he himself embodies. He invites us to be moved with compassion and enact the unimaginable mercy of God.
Dear brothers and sisters,
Wherever we are in our journey of faith and life, whether we are like the first or the second son, God joins us and accompanies us to greater transformation. The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve wholeness. As a counterpoint to the two wayward sons of the parable, we catch a glimpse of another son, the Son of God who reveals the heart of the father through his life of self-giving love. He is a Son who will also spend the entire inheritance he has received from his Father, down to the last penny – or rather the last drop of blood – to pour it out and give it back to us.
St. Paul in the second reading remarks that every good experience is to be shared with others. The one who has experienced the merciful goodness of God and has begun to live a new relationship with Him as a child and a friend feels the need to involve others in the same experience of life and reconciliation. This is what constitutes our mission: to share the experience and to bring others in accepting into their lives the merciful and regenerating love of the Father! As we recognise our own need of repentance and conversion, let us be the Church that reaches out to embrace, accompany, encourage, and engage with people’s struggles, wounds and failings. Let us model a different way of being together, grounded in justice, animated by mercy, and sustained by hope. Drawing all people to the heart of God’s mercy is our task. As Paul reminds us, may we be ambassadors for the ministry of peace and reconciliation.
