You Can Come Home Now
March 5, 2025
Fr. John Riccardo
Brothers and sisters: We are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Working together, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says: In an acceptable time I heard you, and on the day of salvation I helped you.
Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2).
And so it begins, this extraordinary time of grace that is offered to us in the Church to take a sober look at ourselves, ponder anew all that God has done for us in His Son, and prayerfully consider not only how we can better respond personally to Jesus’ death and resurrection but continue the work of the recreation of this world that He began on Easter Sunday.
As we enter into these days, I’m lingering with just one line from Paul’s words to us on this Ash Wednesday: “as if God were appealing through us.” What exactly is the appeal? Drawing from what immediately precedes this, we could say, “Be reconciled to God,” of course. And that’s true. But is there another way we might understand it and communicate it to others?
Lent is a great opportunity to ponder again the story, the narrative arc of history, if you will. Doing so allows us the chance to reflect on God’s intention in bringing everything into being in the first place, what the conclusion will be, and what our role as disciples is until that day. At the risk of being overly simplistic – and surely this will be! – here's a way I’ve found helpful to reflect on these things.
God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is infinitely happy, lacking in nothing, and out of His sheer love willed into being everything that exists. The highlight of all that exists is the human person, created in His own image and likeness, male and female. He created us out of love for love, both with Him and with each other. As Ronda Chervin wrote in a recent Magnificat reflection, “It is impossible for our reason to grasp why God should have created us at all.” In other words, God created us to be part of His family. We see this plan poetically described for us in Genesis 1 and 2.
However, this plan takes a tragic and fateful turn when the enemy of our race, himself a creature created good by God, rebels against God out of envy of God’s plan for us, and deceives our first parents into thinking that God is not a good Father, cannot be trusted, and that they can be happier apart from Him. They fall for the deception and the result is catastrophic. Not only is their relationship with God ruptured, but so too is their relationship with one another, within themselves, and with all of creation. Death and Sin enter the story. And with them comes division. The once united family is scattered to the ends of the earth as we see in the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.
Genesis 12, however, reveals that God’s plan is not thwarted and that He is going to gather the nations again as one. This is going to happen through the call of Abram, soon to have his name changed to Abraham, the father of many nations. In this one man’s offspring, God promises, “All the nations of the earth will be blessed” (Gen 22:18). Note, though, that it will not be Abraham who does this but his “offspring.” This is because Abraham himself belongs to a race that is in need of being rescued from the powers of Sin, Death and the enemy of our race, and so is incapable of doing this.
That offspring, of course, is Jesus, the God-man. Jesus, the rightful King, in C.S. Lewis’ language, “lands in disguise,” like an invading one-man S.E.A.L. team to rescue our race from the powers we cannot defeat, and to restore God’s plan for His family. One of the places we see this most forcefully articulated in John 11:51-2. There, we read how Caiaphas, the high priest, unknowingly prophesied what Jesus had come to do, namely, that “Jesus would die for the nation [i.e., the Jewish people], and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.” This, in fact, He does by His death, resurrection, and ascension, whereby He defeats the principalities and powers that had enslaved us from that horrible day in Eden, and reconciles us to the Father.
Shortly after His ascension comes the day of Pentecost, and what do we see? “Devout men from every nation” that had been scattered hearing of what God had done in His Son – a direct reference back to Babel. They, in turn, go back to their homes, announcing to others this good news that Death and Sin have been defeated and no longer bind us, that we have been reconciled to God, and that we are being reconciled to one another too.
As we read the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters, we not only hear time and again the proclamation of this, but see in the small Church a visible model of the renewed human family by the power of the Holy Spirit at work through the sacraments, the proclamation of the gospel, and other means. And little by little that family grows, uniting people across every social and ethnic boundary. This was truly a new thing, only made possible by the power of the Spirit.
Finally, when we take a peek at the end of the story, as seen in the Book of Revelation, what do we find? Not humans escaping this world and heading off into the sky. Instead, John writes, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God’” (Rev 21:1-3).
After this far, far too brief journey across the narrative arc of the story, let me go back to the question I have been reflecting on: what’s the appeal Paul is making? I think it’s as straightforward as this: God is a good Father, and your true identity is His beloved son or daughter. That identity has been restored by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and – wait for it: you can come home now. The Church’s mission is to announce this extraordinary news, bear witness to it, and bring it about by the power of the Spirit.
Yes, of course, there will be things we will need to do as we respond, behaviors we might have to change, new attitudes we will have to take on and much more. If we’re truly going to be God’s family, then we will need to be conformed to the image of our Lord, Savior and Brother, Jesus. But this doesn’t come first. This is all the more urgent and important to announce and bear witness to right now in our culture where countless people are living in fear, loneliness, isolation, anxiety and so many more struggles.
“O God, in the covenant of your Christ, you never cease to gather to yourself from all nations a people growing together in unity through the Spirit; grant, we pray, that your Church, faithful to the mission entrusted to her, may continually go forward with the human family and always be the leaven and the soul of human society, to renew it in Christ and transform it into the family of God” (Collect, Mass For the Church).
ACTS XXIX Prayer Intentions
March 2025
For Archbishop Edward Weisenburger, our new shepherd for the Archdiocese of Detroit, who will be installed on March 18, 2025. Please pray for him and the entire archdiocese in this time of transition and his leadership in the years to come. St. Anne, pray for us.
For the Chaldean presbyterate retreat, that our time together would be an occasion of refreshment and renewal for them.
For the students of Ave Maria University in Florida, that our retreat with these young men and women would lead them to an ever deeper encounter with Jesus and in their identity as beloved sons and daughters of the Father.
For the Rescue LIVE revival in Lafayette, Louisiana, that the Holy Spirit would fall afresh on all those gathered together, that everyone would be overwhelmed by the power of the gospel, surrender their lives to Jesus and be mobilized for mission.
For the lay leaders from across the country who will be joining us on campus for a Leadership Immersive, that their time with ACTS XXIX will bear fruit in their respective missions and lives.
For our partners across the globe, that God would richly reward them for the variety of ways their partnership makes the mission of ACTS XXIX possible.
For God’s protection upon Fr. John Riccardo and the ACTS XXIX family.
