Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today's readings speak of God's mercy.
They do this to encourage sinners to repent and just to welcome them back with open arms.
The first reading is the end of the book of the Prophet Micah.
First, we have a prayer for the restoration of the relationship with God that used to exist, a prayer that a sinner might make.
Then we have a hymn praising God's amazing mercy and faithfulness.
The psalm continues this theme, he pardons all your iniquities.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has he put our transgressions from us.
The psalm response can be translated more precisely as the Lord is merciful and takes pity.
He is compassionate towards sinners because he knows what is in man, he knows how weak we are.
In fact, we are so weak that only by his help can we go a long time without offending him.
Yet we feel constrained by God's rules.
Many want to strike out on their own and be free of them as the younger son did in the parable.
He is depicted as younger because he is less wise.
The older son is wiser in that he realizes it is better to serve his father and receive his inheritance at the proper time.
St. Lawrence of Brindisi says that he represents those who embrace virtue and so always maintain their baptismal innocence.
To them the father who represents God says, my son, you are here with me always, and everything I have is yours.
Though they fall into some venial sins, they never commit a mortal sin because enlightened by God they see the folly of doing so and are strengthened by his grace.
Therefore they are with God always.
Yet the older son also has a problem as we see at the end of the parable.
But the parable focuses first on the younger son.
He asks his father for his share of the estate.
In Middle Eastern culture this was an unreasonable and offensive request.
While fathers sometimes did decide to divide the inheritance while they were still alive, they always did this on their own initiative.
Apart from this parable, there is no other known case in Middle Eastern literature of a son asking the father to do this.
It is as if the son were wishing the father were dead so that he could enjoy the inheritance.
The sinner likewise wishes to be free of God's rules so he can enjoy the good things that God has created without the hindrance of the moral law.
Along the same lines, Nietzsche declared God dead so that he could create new values based solely on the love of this world.
In this way, he made a theory out of what the sinner does by instinct, love the world and forget God.
So the young man goes off to a distant country.
His father is not dead but is now so remote that he will have no influence just as the sinner refuses to let God guide his life.
Sin is by nature self-destructive and so the prodigal son rapidly consumes all he had received from his father except his human nature.
Sin strips us of the gifts of grace we receive from God our Father.
Faith and hope remain to call us back unless we sin specifically against those virtues.
Sins against faith are often motivated by clinging to sin, especially sexual sin as the young man consumed his father's property with prostitutes.
But faith and hope while they remain declare to the sinner that he is destroying himself and that there is a way out, creating an inner tension.
The right way to resolve the tension is to repent, to humble oneself and ask pardon of God and the wrong way is to deny faith.
Another tactic is to keep busy and surrounded with noise that will drown out the voice of conscience.
The younger son may have used this tactic, but then providence intervened.
Even when we flee far from God he is still present and seeks the lost sheep.
And so the psalmist says in another psalm, today's, where shall I flee from your presence if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea?
Even there your hand shall lead me.
So when the prodigal had run out of money to buy distractions, God sent a famine to save his soul by distressing his body.
Alone with the pigs he now had plenty of time to think and could no longer deny he had chosen a self-destructive course.
For a Jew pigs are unclean animals and there he was fallen lower than the pigs because he was their servant and their owner had more concern to feed them than to feed him.
Just so the sinner is lower than irrational creatures because he acts irrationally even though he has a rational nature.
This particular sinner still had faith and hope which reminded him of his father's house and promised a way back which was to humble himself and confess his offenses.
He said I no longer deserve to be called your son which is true of the sinner who has lost the life of grace by mortal sin.
Having wasted his inheritance the prodigal did not expect his father to give him anything more but perhaps he could at least hire him.
It seems to me that he represents a sinner who has attrition rather than perfect contrition.
While perfect contrition is motivated by the love of God for his own sake, attrition or imperfect contrition is motivated by something inferior like the fear of God's just punishments or the recognition of the ugliness of sin.
I think the prodigal represents the latter case because he's recognized that he chose a self-destructive course and his words suggest that he wants to improve his situation in life.
In this sense he was still a long way off from his father.
But his father caught sight of him and ran to meet him.
This is what God does in the sacrament of confession.
Outside of the sacrament only perfect contrition can restore God's grace to the sinner who has lost it and by the way perfect contrition presupposes the desire to fulfill God's law and therefore confess all mortal sins when it becomes possible to do so.
So it's not an alternative way to salvation for those who want to avoid the embarrassment of confessing their sins.
But those who do have genuine perfect contrition are immediately restored to grace.
In confession God accepts not only perfect contrition but also attrition and supplies the rest himself.
In this sense he runs to meet the sinner who begins to make his way back to him.
With sanctifying grace God restores everything proper to his son, faith and hope if they were lost, charity and everything else infused in baptism so you get all the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit.
The clothing of the son represents this.
He does not go barefoot like a slave but he has shoes.
He wears a ring to show his rank and he is clothed in a fine robe as he was before he left.
Then the rejoicing begins, the celebration of this dead man who has come back to life.
For he was dead in sin but now he lives.
But the older son doesn't rejoice.
He has always served his father faithfully and he never had a party.
How is it that his dissolute brother deserves one?
The irony is that he doesn't realize what it means to be a son.
He's been living like a servant or a hired hand all these years, working faithfully but looking to his father to give him something.
But as his father says, everything I have is yours.
If he wants a goat to celebrate with his friends, he can just take it.
It was always his for his father divided the property.
More importantly, he's not living like a son because he isn't behaving like his father.
He isn't trying to become like his father.
He lacks his father's compassion for his brother and is unwilling to forgive.
Indeed, he's unwilling even to call him his brother.
He says, your son.
We must be merciful as our heavenly father is merciful.
And this is how we deserve mercy, especially those who've never sinned gravely or haven't done so for a long time.
They tend to presume that it's no harder for others than it is for them to avoid sin.
But we only avoid sin in the long run by God's grace.
And we have no idea whether or not we receive more grace than another person.
So we can't really ever know if someone else is more wicked than we are.
And then there's this irony.
It's ironic to be envious if you've actually received more, but just this can happen if you fail to recognize what you've received.
It's a greater mercy to be preserved from sinning in the first place than to be forgiven after sinning.
But those who are preserved from sin often fail to recognize the great grace they have received.
So if you would be a true son of your heavenly father, rejoice for the salvation of your brother and do not hold his past sins against him when God does not.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.