Fourth Sunday of Lent
In today’s first reading we have a description of the first Passover which the Israelites celebrated in the Promised Land at the end of their 40 years of wandering in the desert wilderness. Before celebrating this Passover, they had to repent and turn back to the Lord, which was signified in their having to be circumcised. The fact that they had to be circumcised shows that this generation, the which grew up during the 40 year period in the wilderness, had not followed the Laws of God. It is in the Promised Land, after the exodus, after the wilderness period of trial and testing, at the first Passover in Canaan, that the Manna ceased to fall and the Israelites ate from the fruit of the Promised Land. This of course points forward to the Mass, the fulfilled Passover in which we as Catholics participate. In Heaven, our Promised Land, we will no longer need the signs of the Sacraments, because the supernatural realities signified with the signs here on earth, will be present to us in a new and special way.
In our responsorial Psalm for today, we hear the acclaim, “taste and see the goodness of the Lord” (Psalm 34:9). In the Eucharist we really do taste and see the goodness of the Lord. We taste and eat the Lord’s very Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, under the appearance (taste, touch, smell, feel) of bread and wine. The Sacraments enable us to “see” the goodness of the Lord which was foreshadowed with the Manna in the wilderness and by the Passover celebration under the old covenant.
Today’s Gospel Reading from St. Luke’s Gospel, the parable of the prodigal son, is one of the most moving stories in all of Scripture. It shows in the form of a story the very reconciliation that St. Paul speaks of in our second reading (2 Corinthians 5:18-20). We are to be reconciled, and such reconciliation happens especially through the great Sacrament of Reconciliation, Confession. The story of the prodigal son is about a wayward son who leaves his father’s home through sin and goes off and loses everything through a life of sin, and then repents and returns to his father.
But the story is also about the love, generosity, and mercy of the father, who willingly gives the inheritance his son would ordinarily have to wait for until his father’s death, and takes his son back, running out to meet him. This is what happens to us in confession. In Confession we return to our Father, and we receive the love, mercy, and forgiveness of God. But the story of the prodigal son is also about the older brother who begrudges the mercy their father has lavished on his younger brother. The parable ends with the father inviting the older son to the feast. This is because Jesus is wooing His audience, the Pharisees and scribes who are begrudging the sinners Jesus is welcoming home.
Jesus is wooing His audience, and He is wooing us, welcoming us to the feast of heaven and earth, the Mass, where we taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
What better way to prepare for the wedding banquet of the lamb, the Mass in heaven, and the Mass on earth, than to make a good confession? Let us take up the practice of confession during this Lenten season, to better taste and see the goodness of the Lord in the grace of penance and in the Eucharist.
- Jeff Morrow