Huge Loving Hug

Perhaps the most famous of Jesus’ parables, this Sunday’s gospel is often titled “The Prodigal Son” but more correctly should be the “Amazingly Loving Father” (Luke 15:1-3, 11-32). Though at our worst we can relate to the dissolute younger son and the resentful older son, the character who blows us away is that forgiving father. What is happening there? Often, parents instinctively get it.

We remember those anxious, exasperating times when a child of any age goes missing (literally or figuratively) and is found. There is a moment when nothing matters except their safe return. We just envelop them in a huge loving hug. For our Creator, that moment is always.

Jesus doesn’t tell this story for amusement. This is his core business. This is why he is incarnate amongst us. To make known to us this unfathomable, loving embrace of the Father. That’s what the Kingdom of God is about.

Pope Francis holds that “you cannot change the way God is in love with you, that his love flows all around you, and through you, and in you, and as you. We do not need to become more loving to make God love us more. It is because God first loves us that we become loving in response”. (Evangelii Gaudium 44) It is not because we pray more, become more religious and celebrate more sacraments that God looks at us with greater love; nor is it because we go to confession that our sins are forgiven.

Every single grace, every blessing of total love and forgiveness bestowed on us, no matter what efforts we make to earn it, deserve it, merit it, always and only spring from the unconditional divine love that created us in the first place. Our Father has loved from the beginning. (Daniel O’Leary, An Astonishing Secret p211) Do we respond lovingly by hugging the Father and all his creation in return?

Deacon Mark Kelly