Meeting Jesus during Holy Week Retreat

How do we meet someone? Relationships are what we are about as human beings. I live in community, how do I meet my brothers? How do I relate to them? Our relationships with those we meet can also tell us what it is to meet Jesus during the Easter Triduum. He often brings in human relationships to explain the Father’s love for us. The parable/story about the Prodigal Son is a good example. It can be read on more than one level, just as our human relationships are experienced that way as well. It can be read as a good story with a happy ending. Or it can be read on a deeper level, which might not include a happy ending.

There is the Father, the wayward younger son, who is in fact most likely someone very narcissistic and incapable of relating with anyone on a deep level. Not many young men would go to their rich father and pretty much tell him that he wished he were dead. He wanted his inheritance; it was something more important than the ‘Father/Son” relationship. The father did react in an unexpected manner and in fact, did give his son what was due him at his time of death. For all apparent purposes, the relationship was dead, and for the son, it probably was, yet not for the father. This powerful story tells us something about our human nature as well as shows us the mystery of God’s love for us. The father did not have to ‘meet’ the son, or develop a deep loving relationship with him; it was given, the son just could not see it.

We can meet Jesus on more than one level as well. Yet Jesus is God’s “Yes”, and is always in relationship in a deep and intimate way. We can run from it, disdain it, hate it, yet God’s love is constant, waiting, patient and long-suffering. Just as the Father in the parable was the same. So how did the son meet his father? Well, I doubt it was based on any deeply felt contrition or remorse on his part (My take only), but from the fact that what he loved most was now no longer available to him, having squandered all of his money, He did take responsibility for his state, but his heart was still selfish and seeking only relief for himself and from his suffering. I doubt that it even entered his mind what he had put his father through.

Yet the father accepted him, ran to him, embraced him and put on a ring on his finger and a robe, and killed the fatted calf…..a true honor. So did the young man respond? Did he wake up to the nature of his father’s love? Did the older brother also reconcile with his brother, the story does not have any kind of an ending. Our ideas of love, mercy, and forgiveness differ from what Jesus is trying to show in this powerful parable. It tells us something about the nature of grace.

The son had to rehearse some sort of statement for the father to forestall what the son thought would be his preconceived wrath. He had a game plan, but the father did not. In fact, the son had no time to state his speech. The father’s love showed that he knew his son, and probably understood that the son was too callow to feel any real sadness over what he had done…..yet the father embraced him. He saved his son from the humiliation of shaming himself further.

In our own lives, how do we meet Jesus? When Jesus said that fear is useless what is needed is trust; what in fact did he mean? If Jesus is trying to reveal in some small way the love of the Father for his wayward son, what does that say about the love that Jesus has for us and with that the love of the Father and the Holy Spirit? I think what it points out is the impossibility of hiding anything from the loving gaze of God (the Trinity). Sin is not an obstacle to God’s love for us. It is our seeking to hide, or to make speeches, or excuses, that slow down our desire for union with Infinite Love.

Trust is a choice. During Holy Week we are called to enter deeply into the suffering of Christ Jesus, as well as to experience the deep love and compassion that allowed him to forgive all when he was nailed to the cross. As St. Paul says: “If Christ is for us, who can be against us--BrMD