There’s one aspect of holidays at my mum’s that taints the experience a little; one that never fails to frustrate and irritate me a tiny bit. Wherever we go together she introduces me to her acquaintances and friends that we come across; in her small town that’s effectively every other person. That makes a walk more like driving in a traffic jam: stop & start without making much progress. It also ruins my desire to keep a low profile – in itself quite hard because of my substantial height – because she always proudly announces that I am a priest in Scotland and so on… Although I dislike this, I understand why she does it. Like most parents, she is very proud of me and of what I’ve become as an individual. Though many wouldn’t consider the position of a parish priest in a small parish in Aberdeen as prestigious, my mum thinks of it as a great achievement. The parents’ reward for their sleepless nights, sacrifices, worries, anxieties and challenges to bring up their children is to see them having achieved something or having found purpose in their lives, or even just living decent lives.
Let’s not be naive that all families share the same experience. The tributes to our late Queen that are currently flooding our airwaves and newspapers tell us of someone who had to deal with challenges brought by her own offspring. No social nor political position can guarantee the successful upbringing of children. Whether rich or poor, prominent or powerless, highly educated or without any qualification – no parent can be sure that their efforts will produce the expected results. We can try and do our best over the years only to see our children making decisions their parents find hard to swallow or completely wasting their lives in one way or another.
The first of today’s readings presents an anti-climax to the spectacularly successful escape from enslavement in Egypt. Led by Moses, the people of Israel travelled towards the sunlit uplands of the promised land, taking a detour to the mount of Horeb where they were supposed to enter a special covenant with God. What had been deemed to be a turning point in their journey, turned out to be a disaster. While Moses on the mountain was literally setting the new covenant in stone, the people of Israel dropped their newly acquired faith and returned to what they had known: the worship of idols. The dialogue between God and Moses can be seen as the latter’s own dilemma of what to do with the unruly, reckless and foolhardy crowd Moses had been given charge of. It’s a dilemma for every parent or educator facing challenging behaviour, attitude or actions of their children or wards. What to do? How to react? What’s the best way of dealing with that? We can sense Moses’ mix of disappointment, anger and frustration: “They have been quick to leave the way I marked out for them.” The instinctive reaction was a harsh punishment: “my wrath shall blaze out against them and devour them.” There was even a temptation to start from scratch as illustrated by these words: “of you, however, I will make a great nation.”
But then there’s the other side of Moses’ attitude, reflected in his pleading with God to spare the rebellious people: “why should your wrath blaze out against this people of yours whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?” Particularly striking is the phrase “this people of yours” as if Moses has conceded that the ultimate responsibility for the people wasn’t his. Whatever he’d done, however diligently and clearly he’d explained everything to the people of Israel, they had to make up their mind in response, accept it and change their lives accordingly. But it doesn’t always work like that; in fact, most often it doesn’t. There’s a reason why ancient Romans coined the proverb “repetition is the mother of learning” – it takes many attempts to master a new skill, acquire and retain knowledge, change behaviour and so on. We are not talking about a mindless repetition as in “wash, rinse, repeat” but a reflective one when things are explained from various angles, and experienced in different ways. Consequently, upbringing, teaching or training requires almost limitless patience. The same applies to our everyday interactions with people other than our children or charges because we all need to keep learning, adopting new skills and adapting to new situations. In a way, each one of us is an educator as much as the one being educated. If we dismiss the latter as not applicable to us we expose ourselves to a great danger – that of becoming rigidly hypocritical and aloof.
That was the attitude of the Pharisees and the scribes who were displeased with Jesus in today’s gospel. They considered themselves as finished, perfectly polished spiritual and religious elites; the model and pattern that others should follow and imitate. Those who failed to do so were seen as unworthy of their attention, human scum to be avoided, marginalised and condemned. Jesus’ opponents, with their sublime knowledge and manners, were appalled that He was dealing with such low life. In response, Jesus told them a made-up story we know as the parable of the prodigal son. The Pharisees and the scribes were represented by the older son who never left the father, unlike his vicious, nasty and wasteful little brother. In his outburst, he revealed his resentment and bitterness towards his father: “all these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed your orders, yet you never offered me so much as a kid for me to celebrate with my friends.” He begrudged his father’s generosity of spirit; he saw it as rewarding the appalling misbehaviour of his brother: “for this son of yours, when he comes back after swallowing up your property – he and his women – you kill the calf we had been fattening.” The father offered a different perspective of the situation and in a way, he educated his older son: “it was only right we should celebrate and rejoice, because your brother here was dead and has come to life; he was lost and is found.” The parable’s conclusion was obvious but left open for Jesus’ opponents to give their own response. Similarly, it asks us whether our spiritual and moral ‘superiority’ is a tool of condemnation and derision or a vehicle for lifting up those who have fallen. Each one of us must answer individually.
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