Today is about new beginnings. Reminded last Sunday of the importance of repentance and changing our ways – “But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!” – today we rejoice with Jerusalem with the joy of the prodigal son come home.

          Today, Holy Mother Church bids us rejoice. This rejoicing is not about giving us a “break” in the middle of Lent. Please put that idea out of your mind. How many of us are really living Lent so intensely that we need a “break”? Maybe there’s a few who are fasting on bread and water, but it’s probably not most of us.

          The “lightened” Lenten Sunday – called Laetare  Sunday from its beautiful entrance antiphon –is like a moment in a movie when the plot slows a little to allow the audience to catch its breath, before things really get intense. Or like the musician who pulls back before belting into the finale. Next Sunday, the church will look different. It will be Passiontide. The Crosses and other sacred images will be covered with the purple cloths of mourning. The liturgy will echo with reminders of the Lord’s coming Passion. Rather than rejoicing with Jerusalem today or singing the tender mercies of the Lord, we will plead with Him to defend our cause against an impious nation.

          But that’s next week – what about today? Today the Church holds out the reason for our hope and rejoicing, the reason for our perseverance through Lent – the hope of Christ’s Resurrection to follow. We saw the prodigal son demand his inheritance as if his father were already dead. A couple years ago, my parents summoned my siblings and me for a rather awkward conversation about their will. It was weird talking about what will happen when they’re gone. But imagine their reaction if we had summoned them to talk about our inheritance, or worse yet to demand it now.

          Even in those days, for the younger son to demand his inheritance, while possible, was rather gauche. He is telling his father – “You’re dead to me.” I always thought that the Father complied with this untoward request because the Jewish legal system so obligated him. I mean – why else would he? But he complies with his son’s request, even though he isn’t obligated to do so at all.

          There’s a powerful lesson here about a father who allows his son to stray, just as our Heavenly Father has so often allowed each one of us to stray from Him. But unlike the earthly father who doesn’t know how it will all turn out, God the Father knows the end of the story before it begins. He has disposed all things wisely in His providence.

          Suffering in the far-off country, tending the pigs, the younger son is at the lowest of the low. When he first set out upon his life of dissipation, he probably thought he was “living his best life.” But at that lowest moment he realizes, “but here am I, dying from hunger.” His father was dead to him – now he is the one who is dying. But he will not remain in this miserable state: “I shall get up and go to my father.” I shall get up. It’s an odd way of putting it. He is tending pigs. This is hard, manual labor. He is on his feet all day – not sitting around relaxing. The only time he was off his feet was the few hours he was able to sleep each night. So why does he get up?

          The answer is in the explanation of his father to the servants: “This son of mine was dead, and has come to life again.” This is not just a metaphor. The Greek word under the rather un-poetic English translation get up is one that St. Paul uses to describe the Resurrection of Christ. He gets up from the tomb. In a strange twist of fate, the prodigal son becomes the Christ figure in the story.

          “Whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.” The behavior of the Father is indeed something new, something wholly unexpected.

          The most touching scene in The Passion of the Christ is for many the encounter between Christ and His Mother. As He falls under the weight of the Cross, She recalls Him falling as a little child and runs to Him. It happens so quickly, though, that people miss what Christ says to Her as She touches His bloody face. In what must be at the same time the most creative and the most theologically profound original move ever made in a movie about Christ, the film borrows a line from the Book of Revelation: “See, Mother, I make all things new.” This is what the Father does when the son, the ironic Christ figure – who in St. Paul’s almost seemingly blasphemous words was “made sin” for us – gets up and comes back to His Father.

          I was reminded of the power and beauty of that pivotal scene from The Passion by a young father of eleven, four of whose children suffer from an extremely rare and incurable disease that regularly has him sitting by their bedsides in the ICU. He found himself doing just that in Paris two years ago. They made it out of the hospital just in time to do the very thing for which they had come, because on the first Friday of the month, in Paris, the Crown of Thorns, brought to France by St. Louis IX, is still exposed for the veneration of the faithful. After yet another scrape with death, after watching one of their children suffer once again, they brought their family to kiss the instrument of torture that pierced our Lord’s sacred flesh and became for Him truly a crown. My friend could say, “Behold, my children, He makes all things new.”

          “The old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.” Through the Lenten disciplines we have explored the past three weeks – the weapons of Lent – the old has been passing away. While we have been at work, so has God: “Namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them.”

          At the end of their 40 years’ wandering in the desert, in which an entire generation and even their leader, Moses, had to die, the manna, the miraculous bread from heaven, ceased. Each morning for nearly 40 years they had gathered it with the dew, sustaining their fragile existence. And now it was no more, because that year, they “ate of the yield of the land of Canaan,” the promised land.

          Even though there were clearly good things to come, it was surely scary. The daily bread they had relied on was gone. It would now be up to them to plow their fields and sow their crops. There would be good years and bad years – times of plenty, and times of hunger.

          “New things have come.” Christ’s promise is thrilling. We do not have to live in the filth of pigsties anymore. We can get up and go to the Father. But it means setting out into the unknown. Even sin has its kind of security. What will happen when the pattern of my life changes when I leave sin behind? Will I be happy? Will I be fulfilled? Will I lose my friends?

“For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin.” We can say that the prodigal son in some sense represents Christ, not because Christ ever turned His back on God the Father, but because in the abasement of the prodigal son we see an image of the abasement of Christ. Christ’s taking on our sins is not a mere juridical imputation. It’s not just that God puts our punishments on Christ instead of on us. “He made him to be sin.” That is, Christ so deeply identifies with the human condition in His completely true human nature, that on the Cross He not only bears the intense horrors of execution by crucifixion, but also the full psychological weight of who we have become through sin. We are in a foreign country, and we are dying.

          But we cannot stop there! The paradox of the Crucifixion, the paradox of the identification of the Son of God with the suffering of the younger son, is to reveal the greatness of what we are to become, of being made new. He has risen up, and not only is He alive again, He comes back to life precisely so that we might as well.

          “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” Christ so deeply identifies with the brokenness of the human condition as He hangs on the Cross, revealing God’s judgment on sin, not only so that our sins might be forgiven, not only so that we might become holy, not only so that we might become saints, but that we might become the righteousness of God. The calling of the Christian to holiness is not just to refrain from sin. It is about being transformed from within not just by a multiplication of our efforts, but by what Christ has already accomplished within us.

          This is what the Father’s forgiveness does when He welcomes us home in the confessional and – restored to grace – in the Eucharist. “You have died, and your life is [now] hid with Christ in God.” “The old things have passed away” – let them go! – “behold, new things have come.”

          Behold, my son, my beloved friend, “new things have come” – I make all things new. I take your doubts, fears, hesitancies, and sins, and I make them new. When the manna is gone, when we are in a foreign country and dying, He is waiting to show us that the new things have already come, if only you will be reconciled to Him.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope

IV Sunday of Lent in Laetare, A.D. MMXXV