Weekly Reflection

In the days of His public life, Jesus also used stories as His favored method of helping people to see the truth.

Today’s story is an intriguing tale of master and servant, and money and sly dealing, and the lesson is clear. As Jesus tells it, the servant who loses his job knows exactly what he needs to do to get himself into another job and a secure future: use his position to make friends with other people who will then take care of him. Smart move, good thinking! So, says the Lord, use your gifts and talents in a joyful and generous way with others, and so prepare for yourself a highway to heaven. Learnm that life is God’s gift to you, a gift to be rejoiced in and shared for the benefit of all. It is not a private possessions to be hoarded to oneself, to accumulate pleasures and privileges that only you can enjoy.

Today St. Paul reminds us that God wants everybody to be saved, not just some people. And so prayers should be said for all people, and especially for those in power, so that we may all live in peace in this world. See people as God sees them, Paul tells us, not as we see them. They are children of the living God, the same as we are. Our life is based on love of God and love of neighbor, and our lofe fluorishes when these two values are fulfilled in us. Using life merely for my own ends and purposes, with no care for others, is the road to misery.

The father in the story is really God our Father. And the boy who comes home is you or me. It is a tale of forgiveness. God is so anxious to forgive us. We are tempted to think that surely God’s forgiveness cannot work quite like that; we’d expect that a repentant sinner would have to do a lot of penance to earn God’s forgiveness. If we think like that, we are like the elder son in the parable. He is not in forgiving mood. In our own time, virtous people sometimes find it hard to forgive, hard to imagine God really and truly forgiving people who have lived irregular lives. It is easy to look at the damage of the sinner has done, and wait for him or her to do an equivalent amount of good to prove his or her sorrow. If you feel like that, just close your eyes and listen to the running feet. That’s the Father coming, running to welcome us home because we’re sorry.