Scripture Reading:
Luke 15:1-10
Henri Nouwen told a parable about an old man who used to meditate each day near the Ganges River in India. One morning he saw a scorpion floating on the water. When the scorpion drifted near the old man he reached to rescue it but was stung by it. A bit later he tried again and was stung again, the bite swelling his hand painfully and giving him much pain. Another man passing by saw what was happening and yelled at the old man, “Hey, old man, what’s wrong with you? Only a fool would risk his life for the sake of an ugly, evil creature. Don’t you know you could kill yourself trying to save that ungrateful scorpion?” The old man calmly replied, “My friend, just because it is in the scorpion’s nature to sting, does not change my nature to save.” It is God’s nature to save because it is God’s nature to love, because God is love. God seeks the lost, heals the wounded, forgives the offender and gives hope to those who are in despair. This is what God does because this is what God is. Because we are created in the image and likeness of God, this is also what we are called to be, assisted by God’s grace: to be one who seeks the lost, heals the wounded, forgives the offender, and gives hope to those who are in despair. We are called to love our enemies, to forgive those who hurt us, especially the ones who seem to have in their nature a natural tendency to hurt us. We can love even them because our nature has become transformed in Christ into a nature that is supernaturally inclined to save, a nature that spontaneously imitates the Good Shepherd in going the long distance over rough terrain, whatever the cost, to find and bring back the lost sheep; a nature that spontaneously imitates God, the furiously sweeping woman, lighting the lamp and sweeping the house energetically in search of the lost coin. Our nature can become so transformed by grace that we can use the expression normally applied only to God: God is love. We can say, like St. Thérèse de Lisieux: “I will be love.” As she said in The Story of a Soul, “Then, overcome by joy, I cried, 'Jesus, my love. At last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love. In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love . . .” This is our vocation as Christians: to be love; to be able to feel compassion, as God does, even for those who have hurt us most; to be one who forgives even the worst of sinners; to be one who seeks to save especially those most gripped by sin, drowning, as it were, like the scorpion, in the river of their sinfulness, even when they sting us, recognizing that that scorpion was once us, or may very well be us, as we are now. We are called to be love, like God, to be able to gaze upon every person to see with spiritual vision the image and likeness of God in them; to be able to grasp with spiritual perception the infinite significance that each person has in the mind of God; and to be able to sense with spiritual compassion the infinite dignity that each person has in the heart of God.
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