Hearing again the Exodus account of the perversion of the people of Israel, who had made themselves a molten metal calf to worship, the same people had the opportunity to remember how their privileged position as God's people depended on God's free choice, and on God forgiving their sins before even expecting their repentance, and certainly not because of their exemplary behavior in comparison with that of other peoples.
It is certainly suggestive how in this passage the Bible expresses itself anthropomorphically as if there had been a path of repentance in God, favored by the intercession of Moses. In this way, God even sets himself, before his people, as an example of repentance, of change of way of thinking and acting, thus suggesting to his people to act in the same way, to forgive to
To be like God who forgives. To be faithful in love in spite of the possible betrayals of the loved one. Moses himself, who reminds God of his promises and oaths, is the protagonist of a story of God's forgiveness: despite the slaughter of the Egyptian, and the decades of flight in the desert, God called him to liberate his people.
Paul had the same experience: God chose him to be His apostle and to take the Gospel to the nations, even though he was "blasphemous, persecuting and violent."as he reminds his disciple Timothy.
God is like this, and Jesus seeks every occasion to reaffirm this in an environment such as his, in which Pharisees and scribes, for whom "sinners" were a category of people defined by them according to their behavior, thought they should be judged and condemned, distancing them and not maintaining any relationship with them. Instead, Jesus welcomes them and eats with them. They "murmur", like the people in the desert who protested to God, and so they become the sinners God tries to save, telling them parables about God's mercy.
The behavior he proposes to them is surely disconcerting: to leave the ninety-nine sheep, not in a safe place, but in the desert, to go and look for the one lost one. And then not to return for them, but to go and celebrate a feast with friends. The dimension of the search for what was lost runs through the three words of Jesus: to go in search of the lost sheep, to look carefully for the lost coin, to scan the horizon.
waiting for the son who has wandered away, going out of the house to recover the one who was inside the house but because of his hardness of heart had been left out of the feast of forgiveness, with the joy of the son and of the reunited brother. The joy of heaven, the joy of the angels, the joy of God, the joy that spreads among friends give the whole journey of repentance and forgiveness a dimension of exultation that encourages everyone to walk this path, that of asking for forgiveness and giving mercy.
The homily on the readings of Sunday 24th Sunday
The priest Luis Herrera Campo offers its nanomiliaa small one-minute reflection for these readings.
