Fourth Sunday of Lent

2 Corinthians 5.16-21; Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32

We've been thinking about repentance in these weeks of Lent as we've thought about Jesus's first words in His ministry "The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel". As we looked at His temptation in the wilderness we thought about our own temptation to doubt and th ways in which the devil tries to draw us away from God. Following that we thought, by way of contrast about what it means truly to believe, to, as it were, bet your whole life on God, as nothing less will do. And then last week we thought about St. Paul's call to Christians to stand firm in their faith, to keep going on that life long journey of repentance, as especially we can be pulled this way and that as we meet with the challenges to faith.

This week has a slightly different hue as the focus is moved from us to God; and as it does so it gives us great encouragement to continue on our journey of turning our heart to God. We meet this week with the parable of the Prodigal Son, one of the most memorable parables of Jesus. Jesus is challenged about talking to and socialising with sinners and so he tells three stories, not just this one. The parable we've read this morning is prefaced by the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. All three make something of the same point, which I think is to do with the all-embracing love of God. The sheep, the coin and the son are all in some way lost to the shepherd, the woman who has lost the coin and the father either by negligence or free will. It doesn't really matter how they are lost, what does matter however, is the concern shown by the shepherd the woman, and the father. All three show by their searching, either physically or emotionally for what they've lost, their love for the lost.

Very often in Bible studies, we look at the characters in the parable of the Prodigal Son and think very closely about each one of them and how we ourselves compare with them. And we think about our experience of the love of God for us as we do that. I think it's useful though to look at a parable as a whole and take the meaning of the whole thing without necessarily thinking about the individual characters. And this parable in particular I think tells us something about the values of the Kingdom of God. God allows us to use our own free will and He risks the loss of everything by doing that. So free will is an important feature of being in the Kingdom. We don't have a God to whom we are enslaved like puppets with Himself the puppeteer. We are allowed to go our own way, with all the risks that involves for God in allowing His creation to be kept intact or destroyed by the very beings He has created. And evidence of all of that is all around us.

The one thing though that holds all together is shown by the father in the parable and that is the love of God which not only creates but redeems as well. The parable shows us that we can never go beyond the love of God. And all it needs for us to be saved, to be redeemed is to come to know that and make a conscious decision to turn to God's love. Just as we have free will to move away from God, so we have the free will to turn towards Him as the lost Son did. And I think we should note that turning towards God's love is our natural state, turning away is an unnatural state. The turning point is where the Son, "came to himself". I think that's a most important phrase, probably the most important in the whole parable, because it implies that when we are turned away from God we are not ourself, we are not our true self. We are made in God's image, to be in His likeness also and when we are turned away from God and towards sin, we lose His likeness and so lose ourself.

Jesus was Himself, someone truly turned to God, He was without sin, truly human and truly divine and His prayer was that we would be also so that we could be described as being in Him as He is in the Father. And in that way we are turned fully to God and fully reconciled. His death on the cross seals that for us. St. Paul takes that up in his letter to the Corinthians when he says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. It was Jesus's specific task to turn the world to God again, to reconcile and redeem the world. And St. Paul emphasises the fact that in being reconciled we are a new creation, the world is a new place, completely new. The life we live as Christians isn't the old life with a new structure or a new regime put in place, our life isn't 'under new management'. No, our life in Christ is a completely new life. Just as the father in the parable says that his son was dead and is now alive so the same is true for us as Christians. We were dead in sin, as St. Paul says but now we are alive in Christ. The two are totally different.

And I think that's what we need to realise that repentance is all about, it's about creating a new person, as we repent we are being made new and being made whole. And that is what the Kingdom of God is like. It's values are unlike merely human values, its justice and mercy are unlike merely human justice and mercy; because we are talking about God's kingdom and not human kingdoms.

So the goal of repentance is twofold if you like. The first is to be made new in Christ, to have this new life fully in the Spirit of God and then secondly to live in the Kingdom, a Kingdom in which God's values and justice give shape to life. And all of this is made so gloriously plain in three weeks time when we celebrate the crowning glory of God's Kingdom in the resurrection of His Son. And knowing that makes the journey of repentance and the trials and tribulations of the journey all worthwhile as we anticipate the feast being laid even for us as it was for the son who was lost, the son who was dead but is now alive.