If we enter a new time in our relationship with God then our state in life overall is renewed! In today’s readings, the Book of Joshua looks back at how the Passover event redefned God’s people who had been captive in Egypt, and how the celebration of Passover in his day continued to give and renew life for him and for his contemporaries.
Jesus’ contemporaries, as recalled in the Gospel of Luke, can’t wrap their heads around the “new” to which Jesus is calling them. Those who are captive in the bondage of sin are not only those who beneft from God’s boundless mercy, but they are in fact signs of and invitations to that same mercy for us all. It is not enough to be the prodigal son of whom Jesus speaks in his parable. It is required also that we should be the hard-working son who rebels against such “crazy” mercy, welcome and forgiveness. We should be the son forgiven and we should be the son who bridles at his sense of being offended, of being treated unfairly. The parable doesn’t clarify whether or not this son agrees, fnally to enter the banquet.
But we can. Christ speaks of a boundless mercy precisely because that is the mercy he has come to accomplish and to reveal. The words of the father of these two sons, “now we must celebrate and rejoice” are the words Jesus speaks to us. It will not be enough to celebrate what I feel is rightly mine. It can only become enough when there is room in my heart to celebrate what God’s bounty becomes in others, in the other. And we will truly rejoice if we see how “unfair” it is that God should be so generous but will not be tripped up by that awareness. Each time we remember, each time we celebrate and live anew in the present moment our passing over in Christ from sin to holiness, from death to life, we choose to enter the banquet!