Christ, however, also opens God’s heart so that human beings can see into it and know that it is love. There is initiative on both sides. “Be reconciled,” Saint Paul commands. How are you reconciled to God? To your sisters and brothers of the human family?

The father’s compassion offers both children the chance to become unstuck. Younger son needs to come home and wise up. Older son needs to reappraise his superior position in the household and embrace it. The father’s constancy is the key and catalyst for their potential transformation, but they both have to act. If they want things to change, they have to take a few steps in the father’s direction.

Is it possible that the father in today’s parable saw something of himself in his impetuous and unthinking son? When we recognize parts of ourselves in others, especially those we don’t like, compassion follows and forgiveness becomes unnecessary.

God has made all things new. In hope of renewal in this season of Lent, we pray.

Saint Paul reminds the Corinthians that God through Christ has forgiven their trespasses and calls them be ministers of reconciliation. The parable finds the father welcoming home both his elder and his spectacularly errant younger son with a celebration—the latter’s return and reconciliation are more important than his past sins. In all the readings “the old things have passed away,” as Paul writes, and “new things have come.”

The father actually runs out to meet a son twice: once to kiss the errant, broken younger one and then to bring into the warmth that stubborn elder one. Jesus still “consorts with sinners,” no manner which kind we are.

Be at peace with your own soul, then heaven and earth will be at peace with you. —Saint Jerome