Let God be God

The stories in the Gospel today must have baffled the followers of Jesus and the Pharisees. The stories were told due to the questioning and disdain expressed by the Pharisees. Jesus was spending His time with sinners and tax collectors. How could this be? He was breaking every social norm and religious precept of His position as a Rabbi. And yet the stories ring with hope for the people who heard Him preach and for us. 

They are stories that are reminiscent of fairytales. Perhaps, they should have begun with, “Once upon a time.” They were absurd. Jesus was telling stories about things that just wouldn’t happen. 

Would a shepherd leave his 99 sheep to chase after the one that wandered away? Would he abandon 99 sheep, making them susceptible to being attacked by wolves in his absence? Would a woman busy about many things toil hour after hour to find a lost penny? And then throw a party on which she would spend more than the penny she found. Would a father, who had been disowned and abandoned by his son, throw tradition and societal expectations aside and run out to welcome home his wayward son? The outlandish nature of each of these actions was precisely Jesus’ point. 

Throughout time we have come to call these stories the “lost stories” — the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. The name draws us off the mark when we see these stories from the perspective of being lost. We naturally tend to identify with the one who is lost. We quickly hear the call to allow ourselves to be found in these stories. No doubt, this is valid and meaningful. But it falls far short of the more powerful message embedded in all three of these ‘lost’ stories. 

Jesus told these fanciful stories because they are outrageous. He wanted those who heard His word to stop seeing God only from their limited perspective. He yearned to inspire them to go beyond using human experience as the outside boundary of their expectation of God. Jesus was trying to get the people (and us) out of the mud of human limitations. He wanted us to experience God’s outlandish and overwhelming wonder. The Gospel today is not about a sheep, a coin, a son, or even us when we are lost or stray from God’s message. This Gospel is about God, whose love is outrageous and absolutely preposterous. Jesus is telling us that God’s love is so wondrous that it is the stuff of fairytales.

Prodigal means reckless abandon, wastefully extravagant, imprudent, lavish, unsparing, and bountiful. 

Our God is the One who is Prodigal! Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel that God searches imprudently to the ends of the earth and to the end of time for us. God is not passively waiting for our acceptance of his bountifulness. God is constantly seeking us with overwhelming love. God wants us enough to search for us. God longs to embrace us in a love that knows no bounds. God does not watch us from afar if we are lost or have wandered far from Him. No, He seeks us with unsparing reckless abandon. And if we have stayed close beside him, he lavishes his love on us and whispers, “You are with me always, and all I have is yours.”

The great gift of our Gospel today is Jesus encouraging us to allow God to be outrageously in love with us. The challenge is to believe that no one and nothing is beyond the bounds of God’s love. We are just that lovable. We need only accept the prodigal love of our wondrous God.

In God’s Unending Love,

Gwen