Fourth Sunday of Lent
Lord Jesus Christ,
You see how bent over we are
Under the weight of the world’s habits.
Unburden us
Clear the path within our soul
Lift up our heads to see you
Our hearts to love you
To follow you
To stay with you.
Fourth Sunday in Lent
This week the lectionary reading invites us to join Jesus as he continues the slow walk to Jerusalem. (Luke 15:1-2,11-32) His followers walk with him, and a large crowd also gathers around him on the road south. Among the crowd were tax collectors – Jews who made a living collecting taxes from their fellow people, taxes which were exacted by occupying force of the Roman Empire, and which thus supported the Roman domination of the Israelite people and their land. Other “sinners” also gathered close, persons who were judged unclean and untouchable by the religious leaders, especially the Pharisees for whom the law of Moses and their many traditions were translated into a rule of life which required strict separation from anything and any one who would render one unclean, and therefore unrighteous and unacceptable before God.
Jesus is aware of this legalistic and separatist culture: the desire behind it—to be acceptable to God and so to come home to God,– and the way in which it caused such a deep rift within the life of the people. He addresses both fronts. Jesus is hospitable and welcoming to all who come, including the “untouchable” tax collectors and sinners, and by accepting their hospitality and eating in their homes. It is this welcome and this being with at table which arouses the judgment of the Pharisees and Scribes, the guardians of the written Law of Moses and Hebrew scripture. They grumble among themselves: “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
In response Jesus begins to tell some parable stories – in the hearing of both the religious leaders and the crowd of “sinners” gathered around him. The lectionary reading invites us to listen in as Jesus tells a story about a father who is a landowner and farmer, and his two sons.
Read the narrative in Luke 15:11-32 slowly, reflectively, prayerfully.
Jesus weaves into this story both the plight of the religious leaders and of the crowd. They both desire to come home to God. The religious leaders are seeking to be acceptable to God by strict obedience to the Law and the traditions. The younger son who wastes his inheritance and finds himself in a place of starvation and need, also decides that he is not worthy and can only return to his father under certain conditions. He will become a servant and earn his keep: at least he will have food. The “sinners” in the crowd also desire to come home to God. We who live on this side of Eden have this deeply imbedded homing instinct within our soul and being, and all religions contain some form of offering a way back to God, to peace. We who live on this side of Eden also seek to fill our lives with other things in an attempt to somehow satisfy this soul hunger which we do not always recognize because it lays so deep within us. Jesus comes among us as the Way, the Truth, the Life. And he directs our attention to God as the father who waits on the porch, scanning the horizon for when we “come to our senses” and wake up to the realization that we do need to come home to God. Nothing and no-one else will satisfy.
But rather than being welcomed as a servant who must now earn his or her keep, we find ourselves greeted by God who runs towards us, ecstatic that we have turned and are making our way back home. We are embraced, celebrated, loved, clothed, named, and fed.
We are at home as a beloved child of God – who once was lost and alienated, and who now has come home.
Lent is a season of turning – of many turnings. There are still places in our lives which “live in a distant country” and have not been brought fully home – to ourselves, or to God.
Attend to those places which you sense God’s kind invitation to notice, to name, and from which to turn, and then to make your way home into God’s welcome and embrace.
Dear Lord,
Help me to listen
Free me from being blind to who you are
Release me from captivity to the world’s ways
Help me to listen
Amen
Fourth Sunday in Lent
- 3/8 Monday: Luke 15:1-2
- 3/9 Tuesday: Luke 15:3,11-32
- 3/10 Wednesday: Psalm 32
- 3/11 Thursday: Joshua 5:9-12
- 3/12 Friday: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
- 3/13 Saturday: Luke 15:1-2
- 3/14 Sunday Luke 15:11-32