Laetare

(first published Sunday, 14 March 2010 in the Faith section of Cebu Daily News)

Today is one of only two Sundays on the Catholic liturgical calendar in which priests wear pink or rose-colored vestments or stoles at Holy Mass. The first of the two is Advent's third, called Gaudete Sunday. The second is Lent's fourth, called Laetare Sunday. Providentially, the Latingaudete and laetare command the faithful to rejoice and be joyful in the middle of penitential seasons.

Roseate liturgical clothing reminds us that penitential seasons like Lent are not occasions to be gloomy. If Lent occasions a Christian's realization of his littleness and imperfection, indeed his sinfulness, that Christian is not expected to wallow in self-reproach but is encouraged to look with hope to God, who brings him mercy, reconciliation, and the grace to rise from failure.

Laetare Sunday readings remind us of the centrality of reconciliation, the restoration of the broken relationship between man and himself, man and his neighbor, and man and his Creator in the mission of our Lord Jesus Christ the first time he walked this earth.

The first reading, taken from the book of Joshua, features the image of the land yielding food for Israelites at the end of days when they had to be chastened by heaven to learn total dependence on God (symbolized by the miraculous manna). The image is a foreshadowing of the Christ's new covenant, which essentially includes man's discovery of his absolute dependence on God's mercy, that he may know how to till the land of his being for it to yield the feast of Christ-like mercy for his brethren.

The first and gospel readings use the image of eating, nay, feasting, as the sign of reconciliation. In the first reading, God removes the stigma of his people's rebellion (after being liberated from Egypt) from them, making the Gilgal tilled by human hands produce the food they need. In today's Lukan gospel, Jesus comes eating with sinners. When the self-righteous grumble about this, the Lord uses a parable that had a lot to with food and feasting to illustrate mercy – the heavenly quality of God's justice.

The prodigal son misused his dignity in a life of debauchery, indulging his appetite left and right. We can easily include gluttony in this younger son's lifestyle. In the worst episode of his irresponsibility, he sinks to the point of desiring to eat food meant for swine. I leave others to imagine whether such food was “Polard” tolerable to the sense of smell or stinking “lamaw.”

The point is that people can be classified into two categories of sinners, the first being those who, like the prodigal son, fail to appreciate the greatness of God's gifts for the nourishment of spirit, soul, and body – those who rebel against God's laws and try to feed themselves in their own human way, without our heavenly Father's guidance.

The second category of sinners include all those who, like the elder brother in today's gospel parable, presume that they are living so well that the Father is feeding them in reward. They think God operates like a bank: you put in much cash in exchange for a little interest rate. They are self-satisfied and proud of their hard work and achievement, but deep in their hearts they resent the Father, feeling that they deserve a bigger serving of whatever food is on the table.

The younger son is prodigal with his rewards. The elder son is prodigal with his efforts. To bring them home from their waywardness the father in the parable, like our heavenly Father, shows himself lovingly prodigal beyond all telling. The father who runs, embraces and organizes a feast for the young son, and who pleads with the resentful elder son is an image of the Father.

God the Father is prodigal in sending his only-begotten Son to do all the effort to bring us back to our heavenly home, so that we will understand that all the work that remains for us to do is not servile but is a gift, and all the reward that we are encouraged to partake of came at the costliest of prices: the Body and Blood of Jesus himself.

The bulk of the work that remains for us to do is this: to learn to be as merciful to the God who sent his Son to reconcile the world to himself and the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of our sins.

In a sense, we are called to have mercy on God. He has given us everything, what else can we demand from him? In another sense we are called to be merciful to ourselves. Everything is impossible without God, so why set ourselves or our lifestyles against him?

In yet another sense, we are called to have mercy on one another. In a certain way, the joy of our reconciliations with God, our grace-filled efforts to live life with newness, cannot be complete if there are those among us who put us in the box of our histories of failure. 

We cannot truly have a feast if we are surrounded by fault-finders. Knowing the intensity of the struggle required to come home to God, let us rejoice too, like the angels do, when we see our brothers and sisters coming back home and being celebrated by the Father of mercies.