Homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Lost And Found And Joy

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

St. Bridget Catholic Church, Minneapolis, MN

Sunday, September 11, 2022

Modern day spirituality emphasizes an individual’s quest for God. Adherents of this kind of spirituality talk about their search for God. They will tell you they are on a quest to find God. As interesting as that sounds, it is not biblical. The Bible is about God’s quest for us. Our supposedly quest for God is a veiled reflection of God’s passionate and unrelenting quest for us. It is God who finds us and not the other way. If the project of finding God is entirely ours, we may never find God. So, as from today, let your prayer life and moral life be about setting yourself up to be found by the one true God, who is good. Our today’s Gospel gives us three classic parables of Jesus that highlights the stubborn fact that God is the one who searches for us. God is the Seeker. In the first story, Jesus says to the crowd, “What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it?” The implied answer is nobody! No one will take such a risk of putting the ninety-nine sheep in danger just to go in search of one. It’s just bad math and bad economics. Ninety-nine is greater than one, isn’t it? Leaving the ninety-nine and going after one sheep is simply bad shepherding. But that’s our God, everybody. His ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8b). But why would God bother about one soul? It is what God is and does! God is nothing but love, and in supra-rational ways, God relentlessly searches for the lost. That’s why St. Catherine of Siena said that God is pazzo d’amore (crazy in love). 

In the second parable, Jesus tells the story of a woman who has ten coins and loses one. Then she turns her entire house upside down in search of the lost coin. The coin we are talking about is of small value. It’s like a nickel or a penny. Could you imagine someone turning her entire house upside down just to look for a nickel? If it is $20 or $50 or $100, I will understand the passion to find it. But to turn an entire house upside down because of a nickel is shocking. I don’t know of anyone who would do that. Yet, that’s what this woman does. More to it, she invites her neighbors for a celebration. If you invite your neighbors to celebrate with you for finding a nickel, they will think you have lost your mind. If they know your children, they are likely going to be telling them: I think you should check your mom. Something is not right with her. Again, the point here is how crazy in love God is. He searches even for the smallest or the least of us. 

The third parable is the famous story of the Prodigal Son. In the story, the younger son severely insults his father by precisely saying to him: I have desperately been waiting for you to die and since that has not happened yet, I can no longer wait for your demise. Just give me my own inheritance now. In Jesus’ time, such a move is the worst insult a son can heap upon his father. To add salt to injury, he squanders his inheritance on a life of dissipation. Every father has the right to right off this kind of son. Yet, the father waits and waits and waits until the boy returns home. Then going against all the social conventions of the time, the father runs to him and receives him with open arms. What the father has done is crazy. That’s bad fatherhood. In that era, no father would behave that way. At least, he should be imposing punishment upon the reckless son or at least receive him back grudgingly. Indeed, God is pazzo d’amore! God is crazy in love with us. He is relentlessly after us. We are hunted by the image of God who is distant and difficult to please, who is waiting for us to perform morally at a very high level before he can give us any time and attention. But that’s not just the Bible. God is the shepherd, the mother, the father who is crazy in love with us. Even the most obnoxious of us, the prodigal son, is crazily loved by God. 

What’s the spiritual lesson of the three parables? The lost coin, the lost sheep and the prodigal son represent three clear ways of being lost. The woman, the shepherd and the father represent three kinds of finding the lost and three manners of divine intervention and activity. First the coin. The coin is an inanimate object. It is not able to know or feel or sense anything. When it is lost, it doesn’t even know it is lost. It can’t do anything to get to where it truly belongs. Some people, including the ones we know, are in this kind of situation. Who are they? They are people who are spiritually dead, who are so far from God, who are so alienated from their real purpose but don’t even know they are lost. An unexamined life does not know when it has gone off kilter. Such people may be successful in the world, but spiritually speaking, they are far from God and don’t even know they are lost. For St. Augustine, such persons drift into the region of the unlikeness. We are made in the likeness of God, but our sin could be so bad that we wander into the colony of the unlikeness. I have heard people say, ‘I am fine; I am doing well; I don’t need God for anything.’ These people are so lost that they don’t even know that they are lost. People in this situation are like the lost coin. Is there any hope for such people? Today’s Gospel says YES! Because God is like the woman looking for the coin. He is diligently searching for those who don’t even know they are lost. Let’s look at the lost sheep. Obviously, a sheep is more than a coin. It has mobility, sense, appetite, and mind at a very low level etc. When I was growing up in Nigeria, my friends and I once traced a bleating and crying sheep into a ditch. It was his persistent cry that led us to where he was. The sheep knew he was in trouble, his loud and persistent bleating is for someone to come and save him. Some people are like the lost sheep. Spiritually, they are compromised and unable to help themselves. However, they are aware of their dysfunction and messiness. They know they are in a totally bad place. They are like people who admit they have hit bottom and then enroll in an AA program. Like the sheep, they bleat and cry for help. Spiritually and religiously they know they are lost. One day I was sitting in the rectory chapel praying. Upon a reflection of my life, I prayed: “I don’t know what I am doing, Lord. I am so lost. Please, locate me, find me, and bring me home to yourself where I truly belong. Amen.” The words of that prayer is like the bleating of the lost sheep. To such sheep, God finds them too and carries them home. 

Now the prodigal son. He is not like the coin, just dumbly lost. Nor is he like the sheep able only to bleat and cry for help. His situation is more complicated. How come! He has gone into a conscious rebellion against his father. He didn’t fall into a pit and didn’t know why. He consciously and rationally strayed and rebelled. Furthermore, his reasoning skills did not abandon him even when he suffered spiritual and moral collapse. He examined his situation, and made the rational and wise decision to return home. Are there people like this? Yes! You may be one of them. In the past, you may have consciously rebelled against God. Maybe something happened to you. You lost a spouse or someone nearest and dearest to you. May be you prayed and your prayer was not answered the way you wanted it. Maybe the good health you once had has gone south. Maybe the condition of your children saddens you. Maybe you didn’t get the dream job. Maybe you didn’t save enough money and in your retirement you are barely getting by. And in that state of anger, you consciously rebelled against God and stopped praying to him. After a few years, you realized how so lost you have been and you sought your way back. Notice how the father respects the son’s freedom. When the son decided to leave, he let him go. In the same manner, when we exercise our freedom, God respects it too. And when the son exercises the common sense to return home, the father runs to meet him. Finally, what does the woman who finds her coin, the shepherd who finds his sheep, and the father who finds his son have in common? Joy! They are all overjoyed when they found what was lost. God operates in several ways depending on the situation of his children. When we are lost, God finds us. When we allow him to find us, he carries us and welcomes us home. That’s the amazingly great news for this weekend, everybody.