Father's Gospel Thoughts

Contemplating today's Gospel; Saturday 7 March 2026: Memorial of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, martyrs: 1st Reading (Mic 7:14-15.18-20): Responsorial Psalm: 102: R/. The Lord is kind and merciful. Gospel text (Lk 15:1-3.11-32): In this parable that is at the heart of the Gospel of mercy, Jesus reveals to us that salvation is the fruit of the invigorating love of a Father God, who persists in considering us as his beloved sons, whatever our rebellions (Eph 1, 5). From the first lines, a major problem arises: how is it that this father, whose human and spiritual qualities we admire, "missed" the education of his two sons to such an extent? Of course I am over-objectizing the parabola, but this questioning can lead us to an interesting discovery. How can we not be sensitive to the absence of a mother in this story? Where did she go? First answer: the God that Jesus stages is as much mother as father; he is beyond this anthropological distinction. Certainly, but the fact remains that the sons only seem to perceive a suffocating paternity, which is not tempered by the feminine, maternal aspect. In other words, they do not know their father, or rather they know only one aspect, and it is this deficit in the order of knowledge that explains their very harsh behavior towards this man full of kindness. The question remains to be elucidated: where does their blindness come from about the true identity of this father they rub shoulders with daily? Perhaps it is necessary to go back to a certain chapter three of Genesis to understand. When the Scriptures speak of God, they always designate him with two joint terms: Yahve-Elohim. The first - the sacred tetragram - designates the female "pole", maternal in God: his infinite mercy, always available, his compassionate tenderness; the second designates virile, paternal polarity: the trustworthy God because faithful to his commitments; who can be demanding for his children, because he commits himself to their side. The cunning of the Serpent was precisely to present a God "half amputated": the Liar speaks to Eve only of a God Elohim, insidiously "forgetting" the attributes of tenderness and mercy, essential to the "business card" of the true God: "God tender and merciful, slow to anger, full of love and fidelity" (Ex 34, 6). It is certain that in front of the "divine father" that the Snake suggests to him, man can only be afraid and "hide among the trees of the garden" (Gn 3,8) . Since the sin of the origins, the wound remains open: we all carry deep inside ourselves a secret fear of God, which is undoubtedly the most formidable obstacle on the way to him. As long as we have not integrated the two aspects of God, we remain divided between the desire to throw ourselves into his arms, and the anguish of being crushed, manipulated, killed. Seen from this angle, the two sons of the father of the parable are children of our race: marked by the lying speech of the Serpent, they fail to trust this father, whom they suspect to be a rival, jealous of their happiness, and who wants to prevent them from accessing the control of the family domain. The first rebels and asks for his share to escape once and for all from the logic of the gift that normally presides over family relationships - and in general love relationships - each finding his joy in the dependence of the other, so that in the gift and reciprocal reception unity is built. The other stays at home, but he lives there as a mercenary, a paid servant and not as a son: he no longer knows the gratuitousness of paternal love. Both will have to live a process of profound conversion. The first through a long detour that will lead him to the depths of human decay, before discovering that he has never lost his filial dignity in the maternal heart of this father who rechildren him in his bowels of mercy. The second through the meditation of these words, which Jesus will repeat to his Father during the priestly prayer on Holy Thursday: "Everything that is mine is yours". To tell the truth, Jesus will add: "... as everything that is yours is mine" (Jn 17, 9). The father of the parable expects the reciprocal of his elder: only then will his joy be perfect, when his two children are reunited with him in the same communion of love. Certainly, the parable speaks to us above all of God, of his unconditional mercy, of his joy in offering his forgiveness and of his desire to gather in the same feast all his scattered children. But the story also underlines how everyone's process of conversion is part of a personal history: for each of us, it was only at the end of a long struggle - against false images of fatherhood, against erroneous conceptions of freedom, against the violence of our passions - that we gradually saw the vanity of our claim to autonomy, and that we envisaged a return to the One from whom we thought we were definitively freed ourselves. We too have discovered the paternity of God only in the embrace of the Father, snuggled all against his bowels of mercy. Let us know how to remember, our hearts overflowing with gratitude, these founding moments of our journey of faith.