OMELIE / Omelie EN

30 mar 2025

30/03/2025 - 4th Sunday of T.Q. - year C

30/03/2025 - 4th Sunday of T.Q. - year C

1st reading Jas 5, 9. 10-12 from Psalm 33 2nd reading 2 Cor 5, 17-21 Gospel Lk 15, 1-3. 11-32

‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; old things have passed away, behold new things have come into being. We, who live in Christ, bring newness into the world. We are new creatures.

Where is the newness? We feel like everyone else, but we have a hope, founded in our faith, that changes our way of seeing, of listening, of relating to others and to the things of the world. This way of being is expressed in charity, which is a love that is neither spontaneous nor willed by man, but comes from above, so much so that it is gratuitous and envelops even those who manifest enmity towards us. We are a new creature, not living the inheritance of Adam, but born of God and manifesting his identity as Father. Our hope keeps our gaze always turned upwards and to a heavenly future!

Hope makes us new in relation to the world, and our newness is realised through a conversion, a return from the jealousy and seduction of possessing a ‘divine’ power, to the humility and simplicity of allowing ourselves to be loved, to imitate the love of a God who is Father. This conversion begins with reconciliation, with acknowledging, by asking forgiveness, that we have given space and freedom in us to sin, that is, to turning away from God.

The Church is authorised to accept our request for forgiveness and to give us the answer: its ministers are in charge of this and have the power to restore us to communion with God. In this time of Lent of the Jubilee Year, we will enjoy this in a special way.

The parable, recounted by Jesus and conveyed to us by St Luke, describes our story very well. We have become an ‘old creature’ by turning away from God, the true Father, but we have the possibility of becoming a ‘new creature’ by returning to him. This return is necessary not only for those who have turned away from God, but also for those who have not made his thoughts and mercy for all men their own. No one can and no one should feel exempt from being reconciled in order to continue conversion.

Both sons described in the parable, and who represent us all, are far from the Father. The one who has openly rebelled against him, and demanded his share of the inheritance in advance, is a son who manifests dislike for his father and disinterest in his brother. He will come to find himself in an unbearable loneliness, which will lead him to recall with nostalgia the moments of communion experienced in harmony with his own father. Suffering will make him humble, and humility will make him appreciate being a docile son.

Man alone will never be able to build happiness. Man with his own selfishness and his own pretensions only succeeds in increasing the burden of suffering in his own heart: this is what we are experiencing every day also in our society, which wants to make sacred for everyone, even as a boy, the right to do what he likes, that is, the right to be selfish.

The other brother in the parable narrates the other position, that of the one who thinks he is all right because he is faithful to the past, to traditions, attached to the family, obedient and dutiful. These are not true sons either. Honesty and obedience are for him a motive of pretense, and an incentive to judge and condemn his brother, of whom he has no compassion.

Men have nothing new to teach us. No man, as Jeremiah, the persecuted prophet, said, is able to hold our lives in his hands: ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in man’, he told us a few Sundays ago, and therefore not even in the man who considers himself an impeccable son, who remains loyal to traditions. These are not the source of salvation, but only the love of our Father, that Father who enjoys showing his mercy to all his children.

Sound and new teaching only comes to us from the father of the parable, who makes the attitudes of the true God his own. God, Jesus already confirmed to us in the Sermon on the Mount, is a Father who ‘makes his sun rise on the bad and the good’. Did Jesus purposely say first ‘on the bad’ and then ‘on the good’? For it is the wicked who need to see the Father's love, to know his heart. The pretentious son, proud and a slave to vices, did not know his father. He knew him through his own sin of rebellion.

The other son considered himself obedient, but made his obedience a right, to the detriment of his brother, and a right to judge and condemn his father. Not living as a brother, he could not even live as a son: and here he was incapable of feasting, incapable of communion with all.

We must, helped by Jesus, fix our gaze on the Father who wants the salvation of all: all need to be changed from old men into new creatures, living the same life of God, of God who is love. His is a love that excludes no one, not even sinners.