God's Eternal Welcome

In the Gospel reading on Sunday, we heard about how Jesus returned to his home town, where he was met with curiosity because of his growing reputation as a teacher and preacher. Ultimately the town people rejected him because they couldn’t envision the son of a carpenter as a prophet, and thus they cut themselves off from the healing and wisdom he offered. 

Although Jesus regretted the response he received, he wasn’t crushed by it — either physically by the crowd that would have thrown him off a cliff or spiritually. As Christine Valters Paintner has stated, “Returning home means remembering that there is a source of eternal love and compassion within each of us always available to us.” Jesus drew his strength from his relationship with his heavenly Father, who dwelled within him and thus was always accessible to him.

Jesus helped us understand this source of eternal love and compassion that is always available to us through his parable of the prodigal son. When the wayward son became destitute, he was banking on the same thinking displayed by the husband in Robert Frost’s poem, The Death of the Hired Man: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” The wife in the poem sees home more as God does: “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, God does not demand that we earn a home through good behavior or by meeting certain expectations. We always have a welcome from God, whose house has many rooms (Jn 14:2), and who always leaves a light on for us.