Precious & Invaluable in His Sight

 

Deacon Dave · Precious & Invaluable in His Sight

Homily for the 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Sept. 11, 2022. Gospel of Luke 15:1-32. Theme: Precious & Invaluable in His Sight 

Today’s gospel presents us with three of Jesus’ classic parables aimed at helping us better understand and live our relationship with God. Each one is so full of meaning within itself that it could stand alone as its own Sunday Gospel. Each one teaches us how precious and invaluable we are as individuals in God’s eyes. Each one illustrates in its own way the heart of the Gospel message: that God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son to save us and restore us to an intimate relationship with him, both in this life and in the next. 

Jesus tells us that like the shepherd of the one lost sheep, God goes seeking after us and continues this quest until he has found us. And when he finds us he scoops us up in his arms, so to speak, presses us to his heart, and carries us home over his shoulders. What a beautiful image of God’s tenderness! It shows us how precious we are to God. It reminds us that the individual is important to God; that we are not just one person lost in a crowd of a billion faces to him. 

Like the woman devoting herself wholeheartedly to finding the one lost coin, God never gives up on us. The coin that Jesus is talking about was called a drachma and it was worth a day’s wages. The drachma was extremely tiny and easily lost in the straw and dirt floors of the day. And so, the lady of the house turned the entire place upside down until she found her missing treasure. This shows us that even if we feel like we are nearly invisible in life, small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things, we are extremely valuable in God’s sight. No matter what mess we may have made with the drachma that is our life, God does not give up his efforts to bring us back to a relationship with him. 

Like the father of the prodigal son, God is on the lookout for us, awaiting our return home. And as soon as he sees the tiniest bit of remorse within us, his joy over our change of heart causes him to run out and embrace us. And not only does he welcome us home, he goes above and beyond, dressing us in the finest clothes and jewelry, which are symbols in the parable of the many graces and blessings God showers down upon us. You see, with God, there is no such thing as a “lost cause” or a “hopeless person”. There’s no such thing as God holding a grudge! He is always reaching out to us and before we can even confess our sin, he is wrapping his arms around us and enveloping us in his mercy. 

These three parables are deeply touching examples of what we call reconciliation: the act of being restored to a personal intimate relationship with God that has been ruptured by sin. The healing of this broken relationship is made possible only through the intervention of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who obtained it for us by his Cross and Resurrection. He took on our fallen human nature so that as one of us, he could break the power of sin over us along with its consequence of spiritual alienation from God. Reconciliation with God through Christ was an “inside job” carried out by the only human being who was himself without sin and had the power of divinity within himself to accomplish it. 

But our reconciliation isn’t automatic, it doesn’t work like magic. We must do our part and respond to God with mindfulness and intentional action. The Gospel of Jesus shows us the way to do this. It calls us to repent, that is, to turn away from our selfish behavior and take on a new way of thinking, a new way of acting and new way of loving, patterned after the example of Jesus. It encourages us to have faith, that is, to trust in Christ as our Merciful Savior who has offered himself up for us. And it requires us to open our hearts to the action of the Holy Spirit who is the agent making this reconciliation with the Father through the Son a reality within us. 

Why in the world would Almighty God, who created the vast universe, care so much about us little mortals, specks of human life on planet Earth? Why would this same God leave the glory of Heaven and become man, freely going to the cross as a sacrifice of reconciliation for us sinners? Well, the only answer as to why he did all this can be found in the uniquely Christian revelation that God is love. And this means that we - each and everyone of us - are individually precious to him and invaluable in his sight. This is where we find our true value, our real dignity. It’s not in how we look, or where we live, or how much money we have, or what kind of work we do. It’s simply in the fact that God loves us and desires to be in a relationship with us both here and now as well as for all eternity.