Fourth Sunday of Lent

Today is Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, when we are called to give ourselves to rejoicing.  Why rejoice?  Aren’t we supposed to be repenting?  The introit for Mass today gives us a hint:
“Rejoice, Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her: rejoice with joy, you that have been in sadness: that you may exult and be filled from the breasts of your consolation.”
This text is based on Isaiah 66, where the Lord calls the people of Jerusalem who wept over her destruction to rejoice in anticipated joy of her salvation and vindication.
 
Lent is a season of repentance, an acceptable time to weep for our sins and the sins of the world, for the destruction that sin has caused in our lives and continues to cause everywhere in the world.  But today we are reminded that weeping is not the last word, and we are called to put on joy.  Why?  In a word, because what sin has destroyed, God has made whole.  This is the good news of the resurrection which we look towards at Easter, but which already exists, because Christ has been raised.  Our annual observance of Lent does not call for us to ‘forget’ that Christ has risen, or to act as if this were still a future event.  No, Christ’s resurrection is a historical fact and is the basis of our whole life as Christians.  Without resurrection, Lent would make no sense at all.  St Benedict, in his chapter on the observance of Lent, hints at this when he speaks of “prayer with tears” and “compunction of heart” (RB 49.4), but also of “the joy of the Holy Spirit” and “looking forward to Easter with joy and spiritual longing” (RB 49.6, 7).  Our Constitutions likewise speak of “a spirit of joyful penitence” (C.25).  I have often pondered what it means to be a joyful penitent and hope to unpack this a little today.
 
The introit calls to “rejoice with joy, you that have been in sadness.”  Our monastic tradition makes a careful distinction between two kinds of sadness: a sadness that kills, and one that gives life.  John Cassian describes the process of conversion as the conquest of territory in our hearts previously held by vice, now held more and more by virtue, for example: “a beneficial sadness and one that is full of joy will take over what death-dealing sadness had occupied” (Conf 5.23.2).  This death-dealing sadness is a barren grief which strips us of hope in God’s mercy and leaves us prey to cynicism and despair.  It is the “excessive sadness” that causes St Paul and St Benedict after him to call for the consolation of one who has sinned (2 Cor 2:7, RB 27.3).  On the other hand, the sadness full of joy is what the tradition calls ‘compunction’.  The word literally means a ‘piercing’ of the heart, connected with weeping for sins.  Cassian sees compunction as closely tied to hope in God’s mercy:
“Even I for my part, for all my insignificance, am not unaware of the feeling of compunction. For frequently, when tears well up at the memory of my past offenses, I am so shaken by an unspeakable joy at the Lord’s visitation … that the greatness of this happiness dictates that I should not despair of their being pardoned.” (Conf 9.28.1)
The experience of true sorrow for sin is at the same moment a taste of God’s merciful presence and closeness, of his tender love and desire to welcome us back.  There is joy in being wrong.
 
Today’s gospel parable provides us with an unforgettable account of compunction in the form of a story.  The prodigal son demonstrates a universal human tendency to wander away and get into trouble.  St Bernard, in the first of his Parables, which is a riff on the story of the Prodigal Son, makes a parallel between Adam and Eve’s departure from Eden and this young man’s departure from his father’s house.  His wandering off to a foreign land expresses a spiritual movement, a departure from intimacy with his father in search of novelty and self-determination.  In the process he loses himself.  At the critical turning point in the story the gospel text says that he “came to himself” (Lk 15:17).  This means that he realized, all of a sudden, that he was lost.  We could say that he hit rock-bottom and knew that he couldn’t lift himself up.  The twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous begins exactly here: “We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.”  Powerless.  Unmanageable.  Lost.  Coming to oneself is a graced moment for an addict or for any of us.  Something pierces through our illusion of self-sufficiency and brings us to consciousness of our true situation: everything is not ok; we are trapped in misery and cannot rescue ourselves.  With our back against the wall, we have to admit our need for God’s mercy.
 
Today’s parable is the third of a trilogy in chapter 15 of Luke’s Gospel.  Each one is concerned with the recovery of something lost.  First comes the parable of the lost sheep, in which the shepherd runs out to seek his sheep in the wilderness to which it has strayed; “When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices” (Lk 15:5) and then invites friends and neighbors to share in his joy.  Similarly, in the parable of the lost coin, a woman searches her house with lamp and broom for a missing coin, and having found it, she too calls friends and neighbors to rejoice with her.  The rejoicing in what was lost and has been found is the obvious parallel with our gospel.  But notice the intense involvement of the protagonist (the shepherd, the mistress of the house) in seeking and finding the lost, and in taking it back to themselves.  The father of the prodigal seems a little different in this respect; he stays home and waits for his lost son to come back.  St Bernard fills in the apparent lacuna in the story by pointing out the action of God’s mercy at every stage of the process of conversion:
 
            “Meanwhile, where was the Father who was so powerful and kind and generous? Could he forget his own son? Never! Never! He did not forget him; he pitied him and grieved and mourned for his son’s absence and loss. He instructed his friends and begged his slaves and roused them all to make a search for him. Now, one of the slaves, whose name was Fear, following the fugitive's traces according to his Master's instructions, found the King's son in a deep dungeon. He was covered with the prison dirt of sin and held fast by the bonds and chains of evil habit. He was unhappy, but unmindful, and though badly treated he was still secure and smiling.
            With words and with blows Fear urged him to get out and return, but he so upset the poor boy that he fell to the ground, lying there as one near death. On the heels of Fear came another slave whose name was Hope. Hope, seeing that the King’s son was stunned but not saved by Fear, cast down and not helped, gently came forward. From the dust he lifts up the lowly; from the dunghill he raises the poor. He raises the boy’s head and wipes his eyes and his face with the cloth of consolation: ‘Alas,’ he says, ‘how many servants in your Father's house have more bread than they need, and here are you dying of starvation. Rise up, I beg you, and go to your Father and say to him: ‘Father, make me one of your servants’. At this the boy finally began to return to himself somewhat. ‘Who are you? Are you Hope? How is it that Hope is able to find entry into the ugly depths of my despair?’ The other replied, ‘Yes, I am Hope. I was sent by your Father to be your help, and not to leave your side until I bring you to your Father's house and into the room of the one who conceived you’.
 (Bernard of Clairvaux, Parable 1)
 
This collaboration between fear and hope is a wonderful way of expressing the experience of compunction.  Reality presses in, and there is fear – I am lost!  But then hope comes and reminds us who we are, and who our Father is, the one who seeks us.  Guerric of Igny, who comments on this parable in one of his Lenten sermons, also emphasizes God’s initiative:
 
“Everywhere mercy precedes.  It had preceded the will to confess by inspiring it; it preceded also the words of confession by forgiving what was to be confessed.  ‘When he was still far off,’ we read, ‘his father saw him and was moved with compassion, and running to meet him fell upon his neck and kissed him.’  These words seem to suggest that the father was even more anxious to pardon his son than the son was to be pardoned.  He hastened to absolve the guilty one from what was tormenting his conscience, as if the merciful father suffered more in his compassion for the miserable son than the son did in his own miseries.”  (Guerric of Igny, Sermon 21)
                                                
Just as the Father’s mercy and compassion both precede and exceed the son’s misery and desire for repentance, so does the Father’s joy precede and exceed that of the son.  We rejoice in being rescued from the misery and despair of separation from God; we rejoice in being drawn into his embrace and welcomed to our own home.  But our rejoicing is just a drop in the ocean of God’s joy: the joy of a Father who has long awaited and worked toward and sacrificed everything for the return of his beloved son.  In a sense, ours is joy anticipated, because we are still on our journey, still working our way through the region of unlikeness, which we realize (at least some of the time) is not our home.  I mentioned earlier that our observance of Lent does not call for us to ‘forget’ that Christ has risen, or to act as if this were still a future event.  It could also be said that joy in God’s victory over sin and death through the Paschal mystery of his Son does not oblige us to ‘forget’ about the continuing effects of sin and death in our lives and in our world.  How could we?  The Desert Fathers spoke of continual compunction, and St Benedict of a continual Lent.  Whether or not we feel up to this, we do keep finding ourselves back in the pigsty.  Our life on earth is the working out of God’s victory in Christ through time.  Mysteriously, we hold together the continuing need for repentance with the joy of God’s victory already completed.  In this sense, we are joyful penitents – sharers in the infinite joy of the Father’s heart.