IT’S when we decide to return to God after we fall, no
matter how grave or ugly our fall is. This is what gives him the
greater joy. In all those parables about the lost sheep, the lost coin
and the prodigal son narrated in chapter 15 of the gospel of St. Luke,
the common conclusion is that there is “more joy in heaven over one
sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who have no need of
repentance.”
God is never scandalized by any sin. He can take anything
that our stupidity, that can have infinite possibilities, can produce.
He simply wants to forgive as long as the persons concerned also are
at least open to forgiveness.
If he is happy already with creating us, and endowing us
the best of things, he’d be happier still if after messing up his plan
for us, we decide to go back to him. In this is shown the ultimate
dimension of love and goodness, and together with it, wisdom and
justice.
We have to learn to return to God as quickly as possible
everytime we happen to find ourselves separated from him, even if the
separation is regarded as slight. God never tires in forgiving us.
What Christ told his disciples to forgive one another not only seven
times, but seventy times seven, meaning always, is first of all
practiced and lived by him.
We have to be wary of our tendency to be overtaken by
shame and fear because of the sins we commit. Let’s not allow this
misplaced sense of shame and fear to restrain us from returning to God
as soon as we should.
Like the prodigal son, let’s be both humble and courageous
enough to acknowledge our helplessness and to go back to our Father
God as quickly as we can. As seen in that beautiful story of the
prodigal son, the father, who is the figure of God, readily accepted
him and threw a big celebration for him, because he “was dead, and is
back to life, he was lost, and is found.”
We need to keep these parables of the lost sheep, lost
coin and the prodigal son deeply embedded in our memory to reassure us
of God’s ever-ready mercy, and to avoid falling into the games and
tricks of the devil who will always make use of our feelings and
emotions to stir shame and fear in us.
And even if we have returned to God in some more or less
definitive way, and yet continue to make some falls—hopefully not
anymore very big or major falls, in spite of our best efforts—we can
still count on God’s endless mercy.
This is true even if we feel as if we are already abusing
God’s goodness and mercy for us. We just have to go back to him as
quickly as possible. We should not waste time, entangled with our
misplaced emotions.
God, who is ever so kind and merciful, will always give us
all the chances we need to go back to him. Besides, we know that God
allows certain bad things to happen to us because he wants us to learn
a greater good from them.
It could be that he wants to strengthen our faith, hope
and charity, or to enrich our temperance, fortitude and patience, or
to give a more nuanced knowledge about ourselves, about others and
about the world in general. We know that many times a deeper knowledge
is achieved by the mistakes we commit.
We should just learn to be sport and game in this life, an
attitude that should spring from our complete trust in God’s word and
promises. We should be wary when we depend unduly on our feelings and
our human estimations which, because they are very limited, often lead
us to some dead-ends and short-circuits, and eventually to
helplessness and despair.
This is what the devil likes. When we rely too much on our
emotions and our human and worldly knowledge, we practically would be
playing his game. Sooner or later, we would find ourselves cornered.
In a sense, we should be happy when we find ourselves in
difficulties, or in some irregular or sinful situations, not because
we are rationalizing them to be good, but rather because they are good
occasions to trigger the great mercy of God for us.
God never abandons us. In fact, he gives more solicitous
attention to us when we are in some predicament that alienates us from
him. We should give him the greater joy of going back to him.
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