The parable we hear this weekend from Jesus is familiar. Set in the context of the first and second readings from Scripture, as well as the Responsorial Psalm, the embers of truth within the parable of the father and two sons is stoked to life once again.
It isn’t simply a matter of pleasing the father in the parable, or the spouse who sits across the table from us, or the parent whose concerns and values seem to punctuate every conversation. It isn’t simply a matter of getting along. It is the truth of our lives!
Obedience isn’t a term heard or used in conversation much these days. The landscape of persons whom we might be convinced to obey seems fairly vacant. The reasons why we might be inclined to esteem or honor another as worth our posture of obedience seems like a text whose pages have been torn out and consigned to the shredder. But this isn’t just about who is right and who is wrong. It is about Who is there. It is about Who and what is just, with power to give life. It is about commitment in relationship, in and through the many relationships with which we are blessed, but all pointing to and bringing us to our relationship with the Author of Life and the Author of our Salvation.
Obedience to God can seem confining, if we see only the limits that obedience entails. But, even if that is so, the Sacred Scriptures make it clear that in Christ there is the possibility to repent. When we have become more confined or controlled by the choices we have made contrary to God’s revelation than by that revelation itself, God has determined to be there with us and for us.
But, if we can discern that obedience to God truly unfolds as a path upon which God meets us constantly with the grace of compassion, then we need not shrivel up because we obey. We do not experience God’s will, grace, and sacrifice for our sake in Christ as walls that confine but as gateways that launch us into and accompany us in life, bearers of God’s compassion, celebrants of grace!
-Fr. Tom