REFLECTIONS ON THE GOSPEL

FOR THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT…”Overcome evil by good”

Mercy – as Christ has presented it in the parable of the prodigal son – has the interior form of the love, that in the New Testament is called ‘agape’ This love is able to reach down to every prodigal son, to every human misery, to sin. When this happens, the person who is the object of mercy, does not feel humiliated, but rather found again and restored “to value”.

The father, first and foremost, expresses to him his joy that he has been ‘found again’ and that he has been ‘restored to life’. This joy indicates a good that has remained intact; even if he is prodigal, a son does not cease to be truly his father’s son ; it also indicates a good that has been found again, which in the case of the prodigal son was his return to the truth about himself.

What took place in the relationship between the father and the son in Christ’s parable is not to be evaluated “from the outside’. Our prejudices about mercy are mostly the result of appraising them only from the outside. At times it happens that by following this method of evaluation we see in mercy above all a relationship of inequality between the ‘one offering it’ and the ‘one receiving it’. And in consequence, we are quick to deduce that mercy belittles the receiver, that it offends the dignity of the human person.

Conversion is the most concrete expression of the working of love and of the presence of mercy in the human world. Mercy is manifested in its true and proper aspect when it restores to value, promotes, and draws good from all the forms of evil  existing in the world and in humanity.

Understood in this way, mercy constitutes the fundamental content of the messianic message of Christ and the constitutive power of his mission. His disciples and followers understood and practiced mercy in the same way.

Mercy never ceases to reveal itself, in their hearts and in their actions, as an especially creative proof of the love which does not allow itself to be ‘conquered by evil’, but ‘overcomes evil with good.’

Adapted  from the Teachings of Bl. John Paul II