Fr. Alan's homily for The Fourth Sunday of Lent March 18th 2007
We call today's gospel "The Prodigal Son." It should be the prodigal Father. Having lost half his estate through indulging his younger Son's reckless behaviour, he now spends more of his reserves on a feast to welcome him home. Yet it is right. Life is restored. The lost is found.
If it is sometimes hard to forgive, then it is often even harder to receive and accept someone's forgiveness. It can be a painful process to have your offence exposed and also forgiven. Perhaps it is harder for the one who is forgiven than for the one who does the forgiving.
Nowadays we can account for the dynamics of dysfunctional family relationships: the cycles of domestic violence, abuse or manipulation that spiral on from one generation to the next. It's like the plays by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. In order to secure a fair wind for the voyage to attack Troy, the gods tell the Greek leader Agammemnon that he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Taking revenge, his wife Clytemnestra murders him. She in her turn is killed in revenge by their son Orestes. And so it goes on. All are guilty, caught in a spiral of dysfunction.
Such a spiral provokes violence, the physical violence in Aeschylus and the verbal violence of the elder son in Jesus' story. But it can be ended. The violence of the crucifixion is directed against one who is innocent, whose human nature is free from guilt, who enters the spiral from outside it and by suffering its violence, ends it once and for all and opens up for us a place beyond guilt, a sacred space where forgiveness and reconciliation are the sacrifice pleasing to God.
Jesus the innocent victim, the man without sin, first unmasks the violence endemic in our human community, even though we are in denial of it. He says "Forgive them for they do not know what they do." We cannot escape from that which we will not acknowledge. You can't help someone in denial. You have to expose the offence in order to forgive it.
Jesus the innocent victim offers the possibility of breaking that cycle, of acknowledging our denial, and of ending the violence that is part of the inheritance from Adam's fall. His sacrifice is what we offer in the Eucharist: "the pure victim, the holy victim, the flawless victim." Day by day that offering is leading us, if we will be led, into the mystery of forgiveness, reconciliation and new life which we call the resurrection.
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