From first to last this has been the work of God. God
has reconciled us to himself through Christ, and he has enlisted
us in this service of reconciliation. What I mean is, that God
was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, no longer
holding our misdeeds against us, and that God has entrusted us
with the message of reconciliation.
~ 2 Corinthians 5: 18-19
The liturgy of the Fourth Sunday of Lent draws us into
what St. Paul clearly understands to be the core of his
preaching: “the service of reconciliation.” This message, as
presented in 2 Corinthians, has two aspects. The first is that
reconciliation with God is “the work of God” through the life
and ministry of Jesus Christ, and the second is that this
reconciliation calls those who receive it into the “service of
reconciliation” to all others.
“From first to last this has been
the work of God.” We live, however, as if the work of
reconciliation is our own work. If we are at all reflective we
recognize ourselves to be at a great distance from the person
God calls us to be, and we swing between the extremes of
willfully striving to create ourselves anew and willessly living
out unreflective lives of habit and reaction. Our attention is
fixed on who we must become if we are to be living our life in
accord with God’s will for us. We do not see ourselves as being
reconciled to God through Jesus, but we have rather as having to
reconcile ourselves to God.
The Gospel for this Fourth Sunday
of Lent is the parable of the Prodigal Son. There is perhaps no
story of Jesus that is better recognized and loved. And yet, its
central meaning continues to elude us. “So he set out for his
father’s house. But while he was still a long way off his father
saw him, and his heart went out to him. He ran to meet him,
flung his arms round him, and kissed him.” (Luke 15: 20) It is
the father who runs to meet the Son, “while he was still a long
way off.” All the son did was to return to his father who had
never ceased to wait for him with longing. As the father makes
clear to his other son, it is the father’s unceasing love and
not the righteousness of his son that necessitates the
celebration. The joy in heaven is joy over the return of the
sinner. And the joy is unending precisely because we are always
sinners in need of returning, of fulfilling the reconciliation
which Christ has accomplished.
Our very sense of who we ought to
be, of what we must do, of how good we must become before we
become reconciled to God is a great part of the delusion in
which we live. It is what Adrian van Kaam terms the “pride
form” in us that keeps us from receiving in gratitude the
reality of our reconciliation through Christ. God no longer
holds our misdeeds against us, but runs to meet us and embraces
us in the condition of our life as it is. If we only knew the
gift of God that is ours, we would live moment to moment in
gratitude and openness, knowing peace in our actual, broken, and
sinful lives. We would live in the truth of our own littleness
and the mystery of grace, realizing that every moment of life,
every aspect of creation is gift, that “the Kingdom and the
power and the glory” are God’s and not ours. As we arrive at
these closing weeks of Lent, have we awakened to the “sweet
repentance” that recognizes the fulfillment of the deepest
longing of our heart: that we are loved and desired by God in
all of who we are? Are we becoming small and humble enough to
trust that because God does not hold our misdeeds against us, we
must do likewise?
This extraordinary realization of
the gift we have received impels us to become servants and
ministers of reconciliation to all whom we encounter in our
lives. The call is not merely to speak of reconciliation but to
live it, to be its servant. Thus, Jesus admonishes us not to see
the speck in the other’s eye while neglecting the beam in our
own. (Mt. 7:3) To truly know the gift of reconciliation in our
own lives renders us unable to judge the other; to experience in
our hearts that God does not hold our misdeeds against us is to
make it impossible to hold the misdeeds of others against them.
The Christian scriptures make
clear to us that the greatest of virtues is love. But the truth
of the matter is that attempts to live the call to love can
become very discouraging. As the years pass, our difficulties
and failures in love become more and more present to us. We know
the truth of human sinfulness in our own difficulties in
attempting to care for others, in our frequent and powerful
feelings of envy, mistrust, and resentment. It is not unusual as
we age to seriously question our ability to love others, to
break through the self-centeredness and criticalness of others
that is so much a part of our fallen human nature. It is here
that the teaching of St. Paul points the way. We are reconciled
to God through the love, mercy, and obedience of Jesus Christ.
The ground of our love is not self-realization or
self-perfection, it is humility. As we begin to understand
deeply and to appropriate more fully the compassion of God
toward ourselves, prodigal daughters and sons that we are, we
very slowly begin to grow in compassion for others. This
compassion is borne not of self-realization or personal moral or
spiritual achievement but from our grateful acceptance of the
gift of reconciliation we have received. From knowing who we are
and God’s love for us as we are, we experience the humility, the
living in the truth, which enables us to be compassionate toward
our poor and broken sisters and brothers even as they frustrate
and irritate us.
“The natural heart will do any
amount of serving, but it takes the heart broken by conviction
of sin, and baptized by the Holy Ghost, and crumpled into the
purpose of God before the life becomes the sacrament of its
message.” In these words Oswald Chambers suggests that there is
a difference between the serving of our “natural heart” and the
serving that is inspired by the mission of the Spirit of Jesus
Christ within us. There is a “service” of others that arises
from our fears of our own humanity. The ever lurking sense of
our own inability to live up our own demands for
self-righteousness always threatens to evoke in us a “service”
of others marked by judgment, manipulation, and exclusion. In
short, our service is not that of reconciliation but of
judgment, a judgment of the other person based on our deepest
fears about ourselves. Every believing person and every church
must always be vigilant against a self-righteous and fearful
presence to the world that designates itself as pure and knowing
and others as impure and ignorant.
To allow ourselves, on the other
hand, to be “broken by conviction of [our own] sin, and baptized
by the Holy Ghost, and crumpled into the purpose of God” is to
become a humble servant of the reconciliation of God in Jesus
Christ. We no longer fear and exclude the other but become the
sacrament of Jesus who “welcomes sinners and eats with them”.
(Luke 15:2) Our personal lives and the lives of our believing
communities then become places of welcome to all and thus become
servants and sacraments of reconciliation at every moment and in
every encounter. As Lent draws to a close, may we deepen in
gratitude for God’s mercy and love, for the reconciliation we
have received, in our sin and our delusion, through Jesus
Christ, and may our gratitude for that mercy and reconciliation
help us to embody ever-increasingly in our lives with others
“this service of reconciliation.”
