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Finding God as a Parent
We lift up our Nation in prayer to God this weekend as we recall with a heavy heart the loss of life, the way of life and the disruption of peace caused by the tragedy of 9/11. Our world needs more than ever, the healing that can come only from God. In chapter 15 of Luke's Gospel, Jesus tells three parables about losing, finding, and rejoicing. The outcasts of society, the taxpayers, and the sinners approach Jesus eager to hear what he has to say. In Luke's Gospel, hearing is a sign of conversion. The Pharisees and scribes, still suspicious of Jesus, complain about him associating with sinners. So, he tells them these three parables.In the first story, the parable of The Lost Sheep, the shepherd leaves behind the 99 sheep to search for the 1 lost sheep. When he finds it, the shepherd rejoices, not alone as in Matthew's version, but with friends and neighbors. In the same way, God rejoices more over 1 sinner who repents—like the outcasts who have come to hear Jesus—than over the 99 righteous like the Pharisees and scribes. The second story, about a poor woman who will not stop searching until she finds her lost coin, makes the same point. According to scholars, the little coin is very precious to her as it is the missing piece of her wedding necklace. Why are the Pharisees complaining? They should rejoice when the lost are found. They are unhappy because they do not view lost and found with a parent's heart.
So, Jesus tells the most memorable parable in the Gospels, the story we know as The Prodigal Son. Just as in The Lost Sheep and The Lost Coin, this story (found only in Luke) is really about the seeker. The loving father is at the center of this parable. Even though his son runs off with his father's inheritance and squanders the money, the father waits for him, hoping for his return. Upon his son's return, the father, “full of compassion,” runs out to embrace and forgive him before the son can utter one word of repentance. At this point, the rejoicing begins. The parable does not end there. Rather, it makes one more point about the older son's reaction. This son who never left, just like the Pharisees and scribes who feel they are righteous, refuses to enter his father's house to join in the rejoicing. He has served his father. He has obeyed him. Perhaps it was not out of love. The father's response teaches us that God's care and compassion extend to the righteous and sinner alike. When we are lost, God doesn't wait for our return. He actively seeks us out. And when the lost are found, how could we not celebrate and rejoice?
The reading from Exodus 32 records the incident of the golden calf. Here God is presented as an angry parent. After witnessing the mighty wonders of God in delivering His people from Egypt, the Israelites began to feel that their leader, Moses, had abandoned them. For 40 days, Moses was on Mt. Sinai receiving the written law from the Almighty God, with smoke and darkness covering the mountain. The same God who brought 10 plagues upon Egypt so that Pharaoh would let the Israelites go, and the same God who parted the Red Sea to let His people walk through it on the dry ground appeared to be “far off” so the Israelites decided to create a god of their own. They asked Aaron the Priest (Moses’ own brother) to make them gods who shall go before them. They gave Aaron all their gold jewelry and Aaron melted it down and made a statue of a golden calf. He then built an altar upon which he erected the calf and proclaimed a feast to the god the next day. The people burnt offerings and then danced and partied before the god they had made in their own image
Scholars believe the golden calf may have been modeled after Apis, the Egyptian fertility bull-god. That would have been a symbol the Israelites were familiar with after their years of slavery in Egypt. According to the commentators of the Life Application Study Bible, “even if we do not make idols today, we are often guilty of trying to make God in our image – molding him to fit our expectations, desires, and circumstances. When we do this, we end up worshipping ourselves rather than the God who created us – and self-worship today as in the Israelites’ time, leads to all kinds of immorality.”
Our golden calf can be a success, productivity, fame, the approval of others, or anything we strive for more than our spiritual growth and our closeness with God. We make idols of our desires when we become conformed to this world. And we can make God into our own image when we are more familiar with the world and its ways than the Word of God and His ways. The best way to renew our minds and be transformed to the will of God, rather than this world, is to be fully saturated in the Word of God. A person transformed by the Word of God is much less likely to erect a golden calf and worship a false god in their life. The God of mercy of the Gospels is also the God of Justice of the Exodus. What He wants is our eternal happiness. This search for happiness must lead us into our heart, where our creator dwells. Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O.