Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 30, 2025
Click here for an audio of the sermon
It was Erick Erickson, the twentieth-century developmental psychologist, who coined the phrase “identity crisis.” Before Darwin, he notes, an “identity crisis” wasn’t a thing. But in a world where everything is changing, the question of “who are we” begins to make itself known with alarming urgency. For
Erickson, without a strong sense of identity, the self will struggle to develop and mature. And this is the great challenge that faces us today: how do we find a healthy sense of identity when nearly every sector of life is defined more by a question than an answer?
Well, one way that both society and religion has sought to alleviate this disease of uncertainty and ambivalence is to retreat into the past…to that “safe space” where everything is clear, fixed, and steady…where boundaries and allegiances are maintained. But the fatal flaw of this fundamentalist retreat is that it’s based on an illusion…that life is static and fixed…and that the greatest value of life is to protect yourself from what threatens your sense of self, not what causes your self to grow.
For Erickson, the human person and societies develop into maturity through successive stages, the foundational being what he calls “basic trust.” All of the building blocks to healthy living are founded on the ability for one coming into the world to regard one’s caregiver as one who can be trusted. To the extent that we don’t receive this, we struggle through the course of our lives to find it, usually causing much damage to others along the way!
What results from this predicament are two contrasting, often competing, approaches to our life with God: one that believes that God is to be feared and obeyed above all else, the other that believes that God is to be trusted and loved above all else.
And this brings us to what I consider to be the greatest of all Jesus’ stories in the Gospels: the story of a father’s prodigal love for his wayward son. To set the context…Jesus, we should highlight, was born into a Jewish world that was decidedly on the closed, fear-based side of the ideological spectrum. Her identity was entirely wrapped up in her ability to remain obedient to the law. The religious leaders, the scribes and Pharisees, at least as they are portrayed in the New Testament, were the fundamentalists and legalists of their day. God, was, above all else, to be feared.
But, we should ask, why did so many in Judaism come to have an image of God that resembled more a despotic judge than a prodigally loving father? To put one’s finger on it, it was because Israel interpreted her near annihilation by the Babylonians as a direct result of her disobedience to the law. God’s wrath was unleashed upon her because she behaved badly, and, as a result, her leaders would develop a vision for restoration based on a hyper-sensitivity to obedience to the law. And this would lead directly to the fear-based religious sensibilities we see Jesus confront over and over again in the Gospels. It had everything to do with her inadequate image of God.
Notice what spurs the story on: “tax collectors” and “sinners” were coming near to listen to Jesus, which incensed the Pharisees and scribes. These religious leaders believed holiness to mean “to be separate from” all who are deemed sinful and unclean. How could Jesus be a holy man if he was always hanging out with sinners? This would be a direct threat to the Pharisaical system of holiness, which would threaten the identity and integrity of Israel as God’s chosen people. “We can never allow any compromise to the law to ever cause our downfall again,”in essence they say. It is to those of this fear-based, closed, transactional way of seeing God that Jesus tells his story.
On one level, the two sons represent Israel and the nations. Israel, the elder son, who has always been with God resents that the younger son, the gentiles, has not had to be placed under the same yoke of the law yet still reaps all of the benefits of being God’s son. And not just that, but God seems to take greater joy in the “sinful” son than in the “holy” son who remained “faithful” in his father’s house. The genius of the story is that Jesus subverts our expectations, as he so often does, and shocks us into seeing God in a wholly different light. In a way, Jesus is an iconoclast who tears down the idols of our bad theology and directs us
toward something far more life-giving instead. God is not a tyrant ready with whip in hand to strike us in our moment of stupidity. God is, rather, like a father who completely forgets the foolishness of his son altogether because all he can think about is seeing his son once again. “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” No questions. No rebukes. Just running and embracing, and kissing, and, probably, not a few tears as well. All that matters is that the lost son has returned, and all that the father can do is celebrate.
At this, the elder son is enraged: “Listen! For all these years I have been working as a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command….” Notice, he likens himself to a slave and not a son. His relationship to his father was transactional based on duty, not in love based on trust. And this is what Jesus is most concerned about. We cannot truly know God unless we see God as the prodigal, loving father in this story…and place our trust in his merciful love.
Religion, which literally means to bind together, is meant to be covenantal, not transactional. One life results in singing and dancing…the other in bitter resentment.
From the moment of our birth, we begin forming images of God that will determine how we relate to God, to one another, and to the world we inhabit. There the foundation of basic trust is laid, or not. It is inevitable that there will be cracks in the foundation and that we will struggle to attain this basic trust throughout the course of our lives. What is so revolutionary about the teachings of Jesus is that his theology, his understanding of God, becomes the one thing that can heal, restore, and expose the lies that we have believed about God and about
ourselves for what they really are. No matter how warped our images of God may be and how compromised our foundation of basic trust, when we encounter the truth of the prodigal love of God as we do in this story, our lives become firmly planted on the rock of this love and the rest can just be forgotten.
This is the good news we must both live and boldly proclaim: God is to be loved more than to be feared. That the heart of God is the kind of love that knows no conditions…that is boundless, blind, and ecstatic. That our God is a God who is consumed with the thought of the sight of us…who night and day anticipates us…and that when we finally come to our senses and make our way home, loses it and overwhelms us with a nonsensical embrace. Now this is a God we can trust!
And this alone will take us beyond our current “identity crisis” as church and help us find the heart-beat of our faith on which to build our future. Our world, now flailing about in chaos and confusion in its own “identity crisis,” is in desperate need of a church that knows this and that lives this.
The English writer, Hannah More, expressed it this way:
“Love never reasons, but profusely gives,Gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all,And trembles then, lest it has done too little.”
May we this Lent come to know more convincingly than ever before this profuse, this thoughtless, this prodigal love…and may it flow freely and nonsensically out of grateful hearts that just can’t be contained. Amen.
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