30 Apr Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Lent, Year C

The Community here at Mucknell is, as with any group, made up of diverse individuals with varying opinions on just about everything! As such, sermons posted on our website represent the ideas of the preachers who wrote and delivered them, not necessarily those of the entire Community.

Sunday 30th March, 2025

As with all of the parables, in the one we have just heard, Jesus is trying to tell us something about God, something about the nature of God’s fatherhood, the mercy of God’s motherhood, or perhaps better, ‘parenthood’, and the Church is inviting us to consider our response to it.

The Prodigal Son decides to go back home and throw himself on his father’s mercy.

Have you ever wondered about the quality of the mercy the Prodigal Son was looking for?  Was it love?  Was it compassion?  Was it forgiveness? – or was it simply the provision of food, shelter and a job?

When a Benedictine comes to make Profession the Abbot or Abbess asks: “What do you seek?” and the answer is: “The mercy of God.”

 ‘Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.’ We ask God for mercy time and again every day; in the Eucharist, in the Offices and in our own prayers.

So does today’s parable help us to unpack what we are seeking when we ask for God’s mercy? And might there conceivably be anything here which links mercy to Laetare Sunday, or Mothering Sunday as it is popularly known?

The clue might be that the root of the Hebrew word for mercy is the same as the root of the Hebrew word for womb.

David Ranson says that for the Hebrew mind, having mercy is a motherly feeling – not simple soft-heartedness or any feeling of bliss or sentiment, but it is that creative love which is like the pangs of birth. He says, ‘The Hebrews understood the convulsion that occurs in the life of God whenever God encounters suffering in his creation. For them, this convulsion had all the hallmarks of the contractions of birth giving. Having mercy means experiencing the pain of bringing the dead to life, of liberating and loosing those who are bound. The mercy of God is passionate life-giving creativity. This,’ he says, ‘is the Mercy in the heart of Mary – she who brings forth the life of Jesus at his birth, but who now gives birth in a new, even deeper way at his death. The birthing of the new life released by Jesus’ self-surrender at Calvary begins in grief –grief for what has been lost, grief for what could have been…..’

Mary’s grief on Good Friday must have been as raw as any mother’s watching her son die, but having ‘pondered all these things in her heart’, that grief must have been under-girded by a kind of hope which was creative. The fruit of her remembering, of her ‘pondering these things in her heart’, was the capacity to hold not only her own grief but the grief and confusion of the disciples, and to have the interior strength to give fresh hope to the disciples, to prepare them for the coming of the Spirit ~ the birthing of the Church. In a sense, to BE the mercy of God for them, the womb that held the embryonic Church.

We ‘seek the mercy of God’; our life here, as contemplative monastics and as friends who journey with us, is a life of ‘pondering these things’.

My hunch is that God may well be calling us to share, not only his grief as he sees institutional Christianity in such a parlous state, tearing itself apart over  issues in human sexuality, scandals of abuse, status and wealth, issues of liturgical nicety and church politics overshadowing those of gospel integrity and compassion. God is calling us to BE the mercy of God, as Mary was; to be the womb – in part at least – that holds the embryo of the Church as it will be ~ to play a part in the re-birthing of the Church ~ to consent to live something of the labour pains: whatever it is that God asks of us.

To ‘seek the mercy of God’ may need to shift from being a liturgical formula to a gut-wrenching plea. Such capacity as we may have to hold the confusion and grief of others, and such strength as we may be given to hold out hope to others, will be the fruit of our faithful ‘pondering of these things in our hearts’.

We will do well to explore more deeply the fact that our community here at Mucknell is dedicated to Mary who consented to be the womb, the mercy, which made possible the birthing of Christ and the birthing of the Church.

As we look at what’s going on in the world at the moment we see today’s parable being writ large: the Earth’s resources being squandered, warnings about the catastrophic results of global warming being ignored, or worse, denied, the rise of far-right nationalism and irresponsible short-term political policies; we see the elder son trying to be conscientious, to live sustainably with a care for those less fortunate than themselves, angered by the political bullies and the uncaring selfishness of so many…and we can imagine the ache in the Father’s heart as he loves us all and his creation.

We come ~ and each of us is a great mixture of the father in the parable and of both his sons ~ we come seeking mercy, seeking the love and the safety of the womb [“Can one enter a second time into the womb?” Jesus was asked.]

We come to be ‘re-birthed’ so that we in turn can be used by God in the re-birthing of his Son’s mystical body, the Church ~ re-birthing not so much as a formal, institutional religion, but a community of his followers trying to live the way of life Jesus taught and modelled, which, and we need to remember this, was for the healing, even the re-birth of the nations!

It’s a way of life – yes, including corporate prayer and worship, but rooted and grounded in seeking and receiving God’s mercy, and in turn living it out, BEING it, in and for the world.

As Archbishop William Temple said of the Church that exists for the benefit of those who aren’t its members. “Lord have mercy!”

Br. Stuart

Image: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606-1669. Prodigal Son, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54908 [retrieved April 30, 2025]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prodigal_son_by_Rembrandt_(drawing,_1642).jpg.