A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
Readings: Joshua 5:9a, 10-12 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
What took him so long? The story of the Prodigal Son raises the question. Life does not deliver on the young man’s dreams. He is envious of “the pods on which the swine fed,” and still he refuses to return to his father. What can explain his long reluctance, his resistance, to be reconciled?
Maybe it is an image of what awaits him. Does the second son envision an angry, punitive parent? Maybe it is the same with us when we stay away from wounded relationships. We expect rejection. But do these images, the ones that keep us from seeking reconciliation, correspond to reality?
Images can be so misleading yet still so powerful and constricting. Consider, for example, the humble spider. There are over 50,000 species of them in the world, only a hundred of which are considered venomous to humans. Spiders feed on human parasites—so why do we shun them? Perhaps it is all those legs and the extra, and often oddly placed, eyes. Spiders “creep us out.”
In America’s most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan preacher, famously employed the image of a spider, one precariously suspended over a flame, to imagine our own situation before God.
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight.
Preachers draw their images and their issues from the surrounding culture. The 18th-century God of Puritan New England was an angry deity, quite distant from the one whom St. Paul had preached to his morally challenged congregation in the port city of Corinth. The apostle wrote:
God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ
not counting their trespasses against them
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:19).
The age of Edwards’ preaching is past. Few people today hold such an image of God. If anything, we have gone to the opposite extreme, picturing God as little more than a slightly perturbed lifestyle coach.
The balance is surely somewhere between those two images, neither of which is sufficient unto itself. Moreover, our reconciliation with God does not begin with a notion of a God beyond the stars. It is too easy for any of us to fashion our own image of God and then conclude that, by our lights, we are perhaps the only ones who are truly faithful.
No, reconciliation with God begins here on earth in our relationships, for the Gospels insist that we will be judged by our love of neighbor, not by our fidelity to some preferred image of God.
So, what keeps us from seeking reconciliation, here on earth, with others? Is it not, as it was for the Prodigal Son, our image of the reception we would receive if we tried to make amends, tried to re-establish our relationships with others? This begs the question: What image do we carry of them? Is that what keeps us from them?
There is a less famous image of spiders in American letters. It comes from the poet Walt Whitman. Watching a spider launch its filaments, the poet marveled at an arachnoid’s openness to the world, its desire to explore.
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
Whitman wondered why we are not more like that spider, willing, even eager, to go out of ourselves.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres
connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
Why are we not oriented outward, like the spider? Why does it take so long for us to go home, to seek reconciliation with another? What image of our reception holds us captive?
Yes, there are dangerous, death-dealing webs from which we must surely flee. But is that really the scenario you are avoiding? Are those from whom you are estranged venomous spiders, ready to bite? Or are they much like you are, wondering how it came to this, worried about being bitten in return?
It took the Prodigal Son so long to return! His Father was not waiting to roast him over an open fire. No, he was launching forth loving “filament, filament, filament, out of himself/ Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them forth.”
