I’m convinced that when we die we will have many surprises in store for us. Hopefully, the surprises will be good ones. One of our surprises may be that someone who we least expected to get to Heaven, made it into Heaven. Another surprise may be that someone who we thought was a great person didn’t make the cut.
In the Gospel for this Sunday, we hear the story of the prodigal son. In the story, the father welcomes back the son who has squandered his wealth. Instead of being happy, the father’s other son is upset and jealous. He was wondering why his brother was getting showered with good things when he has committed so much wrong? To us humans, it’s not fair, but to God it is absolutely deserved.
We are taught from an early age what fair is and when we see something that isn’t fair we complain. If we look at the story from the viewpoint of the good son, we can see how he may feel like the situation is unfair. He spent his whole life being responsible and respectful, but the bad son is getting a party thrown for him. This story is similar to the story of the workers in the field where those who worked only a short time get the same daily wage as those who worked the entire day. God isn’t unfair, He is generous. If God followed our definition of fair, none of us would get to Heaven.
We can learn a lot from the father’s generosity and forgiveness of his son in the story. We should try to forgive others as God forgives us. We also need to stop thinking of life as a competition and stop comparing ourselves to others. When other people get good things, don’t be upset and jealous. We need to be happy for that person. I admit that I am very competitive in games and I am not happy when someone else wins, but life isn’t a game and there can be multiple winners in life. Getting to Heaven is a team effort and we should be happy to see others achieve that goal, especially if they were on the brink of failure and had a change of heart at the last minute. While we do enjoy seeing someone who did wrong get punished, we should be saddened when they fall from grace and joyful when they turn back to the light.
God offers forgiveness at every moment of our lives. Remember, many of the Saints started their lives as very bad people. Don’t ever get discouraged and depressed. Don’t ever lose hope and give up. Humanity turned away from God in the beginning and God sent His Son to redeem us. We killed Jesus as He was begging His Father to forgive us. Even now, we still turn away from God many times and choose to do our own thing. I’m sure we can all say that we had a prodigal son moment at one time or another by doing something we regretted and then turning back to say, “I’m sorry.” When we find ourselves unhappy or angry, give forgiveness a try. We may find ourselves carrying a lot lighter load and our spirits will seem to soar to Heaven.
