Fourth Sunday of Lent, C – March 21, 2004

            Have you ever wondered why it is that beautiful things so move us?  Why is it that the setting sun on the calm waters of the ocean speak to us?  How is it that autumn colors here in our state attract so many visitors and cause them (and us) to stop our busyness, to look, to smell, to drink in the beauty of the scenes before us?  At such times, what is it that wells up in our hearts in response to the display of loveliness?  Contentment, a happy satisfaction, a mere release of ordinary, daily stress, a kind of entertainment or distraction from day-to-day cares and sorrows?  I don’t think so.  Rather, at least some of the time, what surfaces in our heart of hearts in response to the beauty of nature or great works of art is a longing -- a sweet longing for... for what?

            The writer, C. S. Lewis, in his book Surprised By Joy, explained what it was that led him into the Christian faith.  Surprisingly, it was longing.  Desire for something he could hardly put into words, because there seemed to be no fulfillment to this longing.  He searched everywhere:  in the world of books, in friendship, in sex, in the intellect.  It was nowhere to be found.  However, in each of these areas there were hints of this one overwhelming desire and its fulfillment.  But only hints. 

            How strange, he wondered.  Every desire, he had thought, has it gratification.  We hunger, and we have food to eat.  We thirst, and we can quench it.  We long for love from our fellows, and we experience the warm affection of our families, friendship, and romance.  Our minds crave knowledge, and we have our books to read and famous places to visit.  In a sense the whole universe is at our disposal -- to satisfy our wonder, our curiosity.  The whole earth is our playground of diversions.  We need beauty and there it is around us in vistas of mountains, oceans, and forest.  Or, following the urge of the artist, we create our own beauty in imitation of the beauty around us.  And we drink it in.

            But even with all this, in the end, when our feelings have subsided back into the ordinary calm of life, in the afterglow of our latest exhilaration, the void remains.  The hunger, the thirst, the ache, the longing ... for what?...remains with us.   This peculiar desire is a very real longing, Lewis claimed; it implies, then, a real fulfillment, just as all these other desires do.  Lewis asked himself, What is the one thing, naturally speaking, that we want that we cannot have? 

            That one thing that we desire and yet can never fully grasp is exactly what St. Paul is writing about in today’s second reading:  a new creation.  For as beautiful as the present creation is, it is still wracked with storms, with our sins and all the sad consequences of our sins, with a kind of futility and ultimately with death.  Yes, the old creation, this present order of things, lovely as it is in many ways, is passing away, and all of us within it.  But something else has already been born to take its place -- a new creation.

            St. Paul wrote, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old order has passed away; now all is new!”  With these words we plunge into the very core of the Christian mystery:  God becomes Man in order to save a dying world.  Sin wrecked the first creation and caused it to begin to die; God in Christ has made all things new.  This new creation has begun and is completely fulfilled in Christ; we enter into it through him.  Yes, of course, we still experience the fear and pain of the storms of this present life.  But for those who are united to Christ in faith and baptism, who follow Him in this life, they know that what is only glimpsed in the moments of beauty during the here and now is fulfilled forever in the eternity of God’s new creation.

            Is this mere “pie-in-the-sky” escapism?  Is this the way that Christians can hide from the harsh realities of life by just thinking about another, better life?  Hardly.  Rather it is a true facing up to the reality of the joys and disappointments of this life, strengthened by the hope that that deep-down longing for something not fully available in this life will indeed be fulfilled in us by our God who has made all things new in Christ. 

            The problem is we tend to keep falling back into the old creation.  And by that I mean by doing what the son did in today’s gospel reading.  “Father,” we say along with the young son in the parable, “give me the share of the estate that is coming to me.”  I want it now.  I want happiness, that for which I was brought into existence, and I want it now, on my own terms, in my own way.  There’s the falling back into the old creation.  There’s the sin in the Garden of Eden all over again:  Adam and Eve telling God that they would find their own happiness; they would be as gods. 

            But we are not God.  We are creatures who need God our Creator to find that happiness only hinted at in the best things of this life.  We are creatures living in a world that is not big enough to satisfy us, because we are made for another world that is yet to fully come.  This world is not big enough because it is passing away; and we too are moving through time.  Our time on this earth had a beginning and it will have an end. 

            And so to try to find our ultimate happiness in this world is to bet on a losing horse.  For the happiness we really long for is everlasting.  It is located in our Father’s house, to which the young son in today’s Gospel story returned.  Yes, like we do sometimes, he wandered around back in the old creation and ended up almost lost in it.  But he came to his senses.  He got up and went back to his father.  And he was surprised by the great welcoming he got. 

            What Christ has done for us is open up the way back to our Father’s house.  As St. Paul wrote in the second reading:  “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old order has passed away; no all is new!  All this has been done by God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ....”  The way of Christ teaches us to see through the false promises of a passing world, the old creation, and to recognize the new creation that He offers us.  That new creation is God the Father’s house, the only place ultimately that we will really be at home.