Believing In God’s All-Embracing Love
By The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams
Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”
The famous first line of today’s Psalm is often understood as a warning to evildoers, as a declaration that if they do not stop being fools, they will be broken by God’s justice.
And indeed Psalm 53 presents it that way. It declares that despite God searching humanity “to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God,” that search is in vain. “There is no one who does good, no, not one.”
These fools will crash headlong into God’s justice, the Psalm concludes. “For God will scatter the bones of the ungodly; they will be put to shame, for God has rejected them.”
But there is a dynamic tension in scripture between God’s absolute justice and God’s endless compassion. That is a mystery beyond human grasp – that both realities are true, that both dimensions provide us glimpses of the incomprehensible, transcendent God.
For a hint of God’s boundless and overwhelming love, we have only to turn to yesterday’s Gospel, commonly called the parable of the Prodigal Son, but actually a focus on the Loving Father. As Jesus unfolds the story, the father loved not only the younger son, waiting for him and watching for him to return, forgiving him, clothing him in a ring and the robe and shoes of a free man (not the servant he had asked to be), and giving him a feast. He also loved the older son, leaving the celebration to go out to him, assuring him of his devotion, and urging him to come into the party and enter his father’s house.
Jesus means to say that God is that loving father, of course. God indulges us, giving us our freedom to squander our birthright or to resent and condemn others who do. God also respects our freedom and lets us reap the consequences of our actions, like the father in the story who allows one son to hit rock bottom in a far-off country or the other to stew in his own self-righteous juices. But God longs for us to mature and to move past our selfishness. God eagerly and patiently waits for all of us to take our places as loving children, watching for us, going out to us, forgiving us, inviting us into the Father’s house. Just as God has generously given us all we have and are, so lavishly does God also forgive and welcome us home, clothing us in a ring and a robe and shoes and throwing us a feast.
Can we really believe that? Can God be so giving and forgiving? Perhaps another dimension to our quote, “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God,’” is that fools refuse to believe in a God as compassionate and forgiving as Jesus reveals to us. “There is no God that patient and loving,” we foolishly insist. But if we cannot believe Jesus, the human embodiment of his Father, whom are we going to believe?!
Jesus uses this engaging story to say, “Even though your behavior as God’s child is frequently selfish and sinful, even though you are not very grateful for all you have been given, even though you are not generous with others with what you have freely received, even though you do not easily forgive those who have hurt you, even though you act like spoiled children, still your heavenly Father loves you and shares all with you and watches for you to return and forgives you and delights in you and celebrates with you.”
Lent is a time to become less foolish, to accept God’s incomprehensible forgiveness, to say in our hearts, “There is a loving God.”
