Is love transactional? Is love conditional? The ideal answer to this question would be no. Love should not be transactional or conditional, especially if that love is of God. God’s love, we say, is unconditional and un-transactional. Now let’s look at ourselves. Is human love conditional and transactional? It is hard to admit but it is. Our love is quite conditional. Our tendency to look for reasons to love someone itself shows that our human love is quite limited and in a way transactional. As a parent, you might say otherwise. But aren’t our children more loveable when they behave better, receive better grades, become more successful, and so on?
As soon as we’re born in this world, we are conditioned to certain social constructs. Our perspectives are shaped and taught in certain ways, mostly depending on the cultures we’re born into. For us rational animals, the carrot-and-stick principle is crucial. This use of a combination of reward and punishment is considered effective but is recently proven to be unhelpful to motivate someone in the business world. In one way or another, we may have used or experienced this carrot-and-stick method. We are quite unconsciously influenced by this use of a reward and punishment system even when we think about God. So here’s how this thinking process that is deeply affected by the carrot-and-stick principle goes: When I do good, I deserve to be blessed by God. When I do bad, I deserve to be punished. Or it can be the other way around: God rewards those who do good and punishes those who do bad. This is exactly the way the two sons in the gospel story think of their father. Both believe their father to be one with the carrot-and-stick. Let’s consider the younger son first. After wasting all his inheritance from the father, the younger son realizes what he has done. When he decides to return home to his father, he no longer sees himself as a son but as one of his father’s employees. In fact, this change of his status is the very first thing that he says to his father upon his return home, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” What about the older son? After his younger brother comes back home, he becomes resentful. In his expression of resentment and rage, he shows how he considers himself and his father. Let’s listen to what he has to say to his father: “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobey your command yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” In this saying of the older son, he kind of contradicts himself that while he sees himself as his father’s slave, not as his son, he expects his father to treat him like a son. Both sons treat themselves as their father’s slaves. From the father’s perspective, this is quite painful. Imagine your loved one who refuses to be loved. The two sons are not able to receive the father’s love as it is. They turn that love into a form of this carrot-and-stick. When they feel their father’s love, they think they must’ve done something worthy to receive that love. When they don’t feel it, they perceive that they must’ve done something wrong. Now, we want to honestly ask ourselves if we see God in the way that these sons do. When bad things happen to us, do we see God punishing us? When good things happen to us, is it God’s reward for all the good deeds we have done? If that’s the case, today’s gospel lesson, which is often titled as “the parable of the prodigal son and his brother,” must shock us if our understanding of God is the same as the two sons. The father of the story that Jesus describes is God. This portrait of the father is how Jesus understands God. Jesus’s God is not the kind of god who uses the carrot-and-stick method. Jesus’s God is the One who is so in love with his children whether they deserve his love or not. Does this sound unfair to you? Of course, it is unfair. Why? Because it is unconditional. It is un-transactional. This is the main reason why the older son is so furious. The father behaves not in the way he think he should. The father shouldn’t love his younger son unconditionally according to both sons. The younger son doesn’t even expect to be loved either. This distorted image of God, which we all share with the two sons, is our projected image of God based on our perception of how a god ought to be. A god should reward the good and punish the bad. And my friends, this is not the god we Christians worship. This is not the god Jesus himself worships and loves. The very fact that we have this image of the carrot-and-stick god is the very evidence of sin. What sin does to us is that it turns God into a punitive deity. Sin makes us think God is eager to judge if we don’t behave well. The one common thing that the two sons share is how their sin turns the real loving and compassionate God into a scary and judgmental accuser. (You would get my point here if you remember Satan simply means an “accuser.”) Let’s look at the father now. Some theologians like to rename today’s parable as the prodigal father, which I believe to be correct. He is prodigal literally in the sense that he spends not only all his resources but also all his love and compassion freely, recklessly, even wastefully, and extravagantly. This extravagant, abundant love is God’s love that Jesus preaches and lives out. What kind of God do we believe in? Is your god of the carrot-and-stick type? Or is your God the prodigal father? Let’s not forget this one important part of the parable. The prodigal father never says stuff like “I forgive you, my son.” He just celebrates! He sees his younger son coming back far away, which tells us he has been waiting since the day his son left home. The father is filled with compassion once he sees his son. Then he runs, hugs him, and kisses him. Don’t let sin trick you to think God is some type of IRS agency who is calculating all your deeds. Don’t let sin turn the loving and compassionate God into Satan the accuser. Don’t let guilt and shame get in your way to God who runs to you, hugs you, and kisses you. Guilt and shame do not change us. They don’t help us stop sinning. They indeed make us repeat our sins over and over again and trick us to believe our identity as slaves, not as God’s beloved children. But God’s unconditional love, on the other hand, transforms us. If you somehow are repeating what you’ve been doing over and over again, that means you might suffer from guilt and shame without changing the way you think of God. That god who you believe requires your guilt and shame is not the prodigal father. When you think of God after you sin (just in case, I know you wouldn’t!), think of the prodigal father. Prepare yourself to be greeted, hugged, and kissed. You are what God celebrates! This is exactly why Saint Paul talks about regarding no one from a human point of view. Do not regard God from a human point of view that is based on the carrot-and-stick principle. Wonder why God would celebrate you and the younger son who return? The answer is simple. God is in love with you helplessly. God just loves you so much to the point he looks rather silly and prodigal. Every Sunday Eucharist is our return to the prodigal father. It is not you who runs to God. It is God who runs to you, being filled with compassion. God hugs you and kisses you. God celebrates your return. Hugging and kissing are not good enough for God to express that unconditional love. God gives God’s very own self in Jesus Christ. God gives his body and blood to feed us, nourish us, to celebrate our reconciliation. My friends, this is the love we want to bring out to the world. This is the ministry and message of reconciliation through Jesus Christ. Show yourself, your loved ones, and the world the prodigal father who is love. And we see this prodigal father incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. It is my prayer and hope that all of us can see this prodigal father running to us every time we celebrate our Sunday Eucharist. May the Holy Spirit open our hearts to see the compassionate God who celebrates our return! In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. * This homily is inspired by Herbert McCabe's piece on Forgiveness in his book, Faith Within Reason (Continuum International Publishing, 2007). |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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