A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
Joshua 5:9a, 10-12 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 Luke 15 1-3, 11-32
Call it an irony of history or a lesson to learn, but the greatest monarchs in English history have been women: Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria and now Queen Elizabeth II. The first two presided over periods of tremendous expansion; the third, a great contraction. Yet they have all become the stuff of legend, somewhat eclipsing the men who ruled between their reigns.
Equally strong and astute women have married into the British monarchy. We have all seen photos of the big-boned, high-haired and untiringly erect Mary of Teck. She was queen consort at a time when royals were not expected to wave or even to smile. Yet Queen Mary helped George V rescue the monarchy from the collapse of crowns caused by the First World War.
Queen Mary had no sympathy, only outrage, when her first son, Edward VII, abdicated the throne. “All my life I have put my country before everything else, and I simply cannot change now.” She told her first-born, “The person who needs most sympathy is my second son. He is the one making the sacrifice.” That second son, Bertie, Queen Elizabeth’s father, became George VI on the eve of the Second World War.
In Jesus’ parable, it is hunger that brings home the prodigal son.
How many of my father’s hired workers
have more than enough food to eat,
but here am I, dying from hunger.
I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him,
“Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.
I no longer deserve to be called your son;
treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers” (Lk 15:17-19).
Physical hunger cannot be easily ignored, yet Christ proposes the parable to draw our attention to spiritual hunger, which is easier to dismiss, even deny, until we no longer can.
The abdication crisis produced a fascinating vignette about spiritual hunger. From Jane Ridley’s new biography George V: Never a Dull Moment (2022):
One day at the height of the crisis, the Queen’s Daimler drew up in Warwick Street, Soho outside the Roman Catholic church. A plain brick Georgian box, in the eighteenth century it had been the church of the Portuguese and then the Bavarian legations. Accompanied by a lady-in-waiting the Queen entered the church and sat or knelt in front of the Virgin. Five minutes later, she departed. From that date until her death in 1953 flowers were delivered to the church every week from the Queen.
The issue is not a comparison between the spiritual wealth of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, any more than Christ’s parable intends us to contrast crop production in various regions. The issue is spiritual hunger. Where do we wander when we fail to recognize it, and how might awareness of it bring us home?
Physical hunger cannot be easily ignored, yet Christ proposes the parable to draw our attention to spiritual hunger, which is easier to dismiss, even deny, until we no longer can.
In our Lord’s parable, the prodigal son left, looking for his illusions. Hunger drove him home to a family, and, notably, not a perfect one at that. Not everyone met him with open arms.
Yet from the moment Christ first summoned his disciples and called twelve of them by name to be apostles, he made it clear that we are fed in community, in a life shared with other believers. Christ called the church into existence. She has no reason to exist without him. The church’s infallibility does not mean she is perfect. Far from it. But it does mean Christ will never allow her to cease from being his living presence.
If the church has a mission statement, St. Paul wrote it:
We are ambassadors for Christ,
as if God were appealing through us.
We implore you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God (2 Cor 5:20).
Jane Ridley writes of the queen consort:
That Queen Mary should seek comfort in a Catholic church was extraordinary. Brought up a strict Protestant, she had become more High Church later in life. But she was sternly Anglican—her position as queen consort depended on it. “If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be here,” she once remarked. The episode at the church in Warwick Street is perhaps a measure of how desperate she had become. She confided in her sister-in-law Princess Alice that the Abdication made her “more unhappy than she had ever been in her life. ‘Even worse than when George (her husband the king) died.’”
In all three of the parishes where I pastor, use of votive candles has markedly increased, enough that we have needed to make new provisions. Like Queen Mary, a lot of people are slipping into churches, seeking the solace of prayer.
Hunger drives people home. We must work to see that they have one waiting for them.
Certainly, Christian life is not bound by church doors. Last summer, when a stranded family with four kids needed their car repaired, the mechanic who fixed it was not in church each week. He has never been paid, and he did not expect to be.
How do parishes reach out? Studies show that many, if not most, drop away because they drop below the social-economic make-up of a parish. Many begin to struggle so much with life that there just is not time for spirituality. But that does not remove their hunger. How do we make them feel welcome again?
It is a partial solution, but it would work wonders. Renew your own commitment to the life of your parish. Do not think of it as simply the local franchise. Do not seek sacraments on your own terms. There is no such thing as “my child’s baptism,” “my wedding” or “my ordination.” Sacraments are public acts of parishes. If they did not involve the church and the world, they would have no reason to exist. All are bred in bonds of communion. Even confession retains its orientation to community, with the priest declaring privately what bishops once proclaimed publicly: This soul is again in communion with us.
Find a people, not a pastor, who can be your home. No disregard for pastors, but a single person, beloved or loathed, cannot be a home. An individual disappears with the beat of a heart or the stroke of a bishop’s pen. A people does not.
Hunger drives people home. We must work to see that they have one waiting for them.
