Did you happen to notice that we just had the gospel reading on the prodigal son last Saturday too? The reason why is because the church wants to make sure that we hear the main stories from the bible at our Sunday masses each week, over a three year period.
If you go to daily mass or read the scriptures every day though, you will read the entire bible after three years. So, there’s no need to make a major commitment to read the entire bible from cover to cover, because you are already doing that if you read the scriptures for mass each day.
It is also interesting that you can read the same verses in scripture one day and come back a few days later and see them from a completely different perspective. That is because the words of the bible are living words. The words in the bible are timeless and we find meaning in them that is fresh and relevant to our lives, at different stages in our lives. They are forever new and never seem to have exactly the same meaning twice.
For an example, in the story of the prodigal son. When we are young, we may identify more with the son who sinned by squandering his inheritance, or the brother who resented the attention his father was giving him. As we grow older and have families of our own, we may identify more with the father who forgave his son and welcomed him home again. However, at all the stages in our life, we feel the love that our Father in heaven has for us, every time we read this story in the bible. God’s love and forgiveness is in the words that come alive and live in our hearts. We can all identify with doing something wrong and the need to ask for forgiveness.
We know what it is like to be young and self centered, pursuing fun and a good time as the main focus of our lives, instead of realizing the value of our faith and family. Our home life and even the mass may have seemed boring when we were young, so we went off into the world in pursuit of more glamorous, exciting things to do. Some of us made some pretty serious errors too, before we finally woke up and realized how stupid we had become. It’s possible that our behavior also hurt some of the members of our own family too. It’s true what people say, that we sometimes have to hit rock bottom before we realize our behavior has become self destructive.
What is really unique about the Father in the story about the prodigal son though, is the fact that he gave his son his inheritance, and allowed him to take it and leave. He respected his son’s decision and allowed him to go, and live the life he had chosen for himself. The father surely knew the son was making a mistake, but he didn’t impose his will on his son and make him stay, even though it probably broke his heart that he left.
Our heavenly Father is like that too. He respects us too much to restrict our free will. He gave us free will and the freedom to pursue our lives however we see fit. God is smarter than we are though, because he knows that all paths eventually lead back to him. But, when we do return to the Lord, it is of our own free will and that is when our love becomes genuine. This is ultimately what God wants, for us to discover for ourselves, how much we need Him and how much we love Him, because He never stopped loving us.
