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Sacred Scriptures/Liturgy- Commentary on Sunday's Readings |
Jesus AND SINNERS
Fourth Sunday of Lent
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCap, Pontifical Household Preacher
www.zenit.org
Joshua 5:9a, 10-12; 2 Corinthians 5:17-21;
Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
The Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Lent is one of the most
celebrated pages of Luke's Gospel and of all four Gospels: the
parable of the prodigal son. Everything in this parable is
surprising; men had never portrayed God in this way. This parable
has touched more hearts than all the sermons that have been preached
put together. It has an incredible power to act on the mind, the
heart, the imagination, and memory. It is able to touch the most
diverse chords: repentance, shame, nostalgia.
The parable is introduced with these words: "All the tax collectors
and sinners were drawing near to him to listen to him. The Pharisees
and scribes murmured, saying, 'This man receives sinners and eats
with them.' So he told them this parable ..." (Luke 15:1-2).
Following this lead, we would like to reflect on Jesus' attitude
toward sinners, going through the whole Gospel, guided also by our
plan for these Lenten commentaries, that is, to know better who
Jesus was, what can be historically known about him.
The welcome that Jesus reserves for sinners in the Gospel is well
known, as is the opposition that this procures him on the part of
the defenders of the law who accuse him of being "a glutton and a
drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners" (Luke 7:34). Jesus
declares in one of his better historically attested to sayings, "I
have not come to call the just but sinners" (Mark 2:17). Feeling
welcomed and not judged by him, sinners listened to him gladly.
But who were the sinners, what category of persons was designated by
this term? Someone, trying to completely justify Jesus' adversaries,
the Pharisees, has argued that by this term is understood "the
deliberate and impenitent transgressors of the law," in other words,
the criminals, those who are outside the law. If this were so, then
Jesus' adversaries would have been entirely right to be scandalized
and see him as an irresponsible and socially dangerous person. It
would be as if a priest today were to regularly frequent members of
the mafia and criminals and accept their invitations to dinner with
the pretext of speaking to them of God.
In reality, this is not how things are. The Pharisees had their
vision of the law and of what conformed to it or was contrary, and
they considered reprobate all those who did not follow their rigid
interpretation of the law. In their view, anyone who did not follow
their traditions or dictates was a sinner. Following the same logic,
the Essenes of Qumran considered the Pharisees themselves to be
unjust and violators of the law! The same thing happens today.
Certain ultraorthodox groups consider all those who do not think
exactly as they do to be heretics.
An eminent scholar has written: "It is not true that Jesus opened
the gates of the kingdom to hard-boiled and impenitent criminals, or
that he denied the existence of 'sinners.' What Jesus opposed were
the walls that were erected within Israel and those who treated
other Israelites as if they were outside the covenant and excluded
from God's grace" (James Dunn).
Jesus does not deny the existence of sin and sinners. This is
obvious from the fact that he calls them "sick." On this point he is
more rigorous than his adversaries. If they condemn actual adultery,
Jesus condemns adultery already at the stage of desire; if the law
says not to kill, Jesus says that we must not even hate or insult
our brother. To the sinners who draw near to him, he says "Go and
sin no more"; he does not say: "Go and live as you were living
before."
What Jesus condemns is the Pharisees' relegating to themselves the
determination of true justice and their denying to others the
possibility of conversion. The way that Luke introduces the parable
of the Pharisee and the tax collector is significant: "He also told
this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were
righteous and despised others" (Luke 18:9). Jesus was more severe
with those who condemned sinners with disdain than he was with
sinners themselves.
But the novel and unheard of thing in the relationship between Jesus
and sinners is not his goodness and mercy toward them. This can be
explained in a human way. There is, in his attitude, something that
cannot be humanly explained, that is, it cannot be explained so long
as Jesus is taken to be a man like other men. What is novel and
unheard of is Jesus' forgiveness of sins.
Jesus says to the paralytic: "My son, your sins are forgiven you."
"Who can forgive sins but God alone?" Jesus' horrified adversaries
cry out. And Jesus replies: "'So that you might know that the Son of
Man has the authority to forgive sins, Get up!' he said to the
paralytic, 'Pick up your mat and go home.'" No one could verify
whether the sins of that man were forgiven but everyone could see
that he got up and walked. The visible miracle attested to the
invisible one.
Even the investigation of Jesus' relationship with sinners
contributes therefore to an answer to the question: Who was Jesus? A
man like other men, a prophet, or something different still? During
his earthly life Jesus never explicitly affirmed himself to be God
(and we explained why in a previous commentary), but he did
attribute to himself powers that are exclusive to God.
Let us now return to Sunday's Gospel and to the parable of the
prodigal son. There is a common element that unites the parables of
the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son, which are told
in succession in Chapter 15 of Luke's Gospel. What do the shepherd
who finds the lost sheep and the woman who finds her coin say?
"Rejoice with me!" And what does Jesus say at the end of each
parable? "There will be more joy in heaven for a converted sinner
than for ninety-nine just people who do not need to convert."
The leitmotiv of the three parables is therefore the joy of God.
(There is joy "before the angels of God," is an entirely Jewish way
to speak of joy "in God.") In our parable joy overflows and becomes
a feast. That father is overcome with joy and does not know what to
do: He orders the best robe for his son, a ring with the family
seal, the killing of the fatted calf, and says to all: "Let us eat
and make merry, for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was
lost, and is found."
In one of his novels Dostoyevsky describes a scene that has the air
of having been witnessed in reality. A woman holds a baby a few
weeks old in her arms and -- for the first time, according to her --
he smiles at her. All contrite, she makes the sign of the cross on
his forehead and to those who ask her the reason for this she says:
"Just as a mother is happy when she sees the first smile of her
child, God too rejoices every time a sinner gets on his knees and
addresses a heartfelt prayer to him" ("The Idiot").
Who knows whether a person who is listening does not decide finally
to give this joy to God, to smile at him before he dies ...
This page is the work of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and
Mary