Is There More Than One Perspective? The gospel stories during the Easter season are filled with Jesus sightings. After all, Jesus spent a lot of time healing blindness. He claimed he came for the “recovery of sight to the blind” (Lk 4:18). Now resurrected, even the people who lived with him for the last three years have a hard time seeing and recognizing him. In each case, it’s only after they have listened to what he has to say that they recognize him. “My sheep hear my voice” (Jn 10:27). It almost appears that what we see is based on how we hear. I recently enjoyed a homily by Father Mark Thibodeaux about perspective. How we see Jesus and his message sometimes depends on what we really hear which may alter our perspective. In the homily, he explains how a Lutheran minister asked North American seminarians why the young man in the story of the Prodigal Son ended up starving in a pig pen (Lk 15: 11-32). The answers were all pretty unanimous that the boy had sinned terribly, betrayed his father, took the money, and squandered it on dissolute living, and now he finds himself starving in poverty. It’s 6
CATHOLIC CONNECTION
all because of his sinful ways. I think most of us would answer the question the same way. Then this minister went to St. Petersburg, Russia, and asked seminarians there the same question. Their answer was entirely different. They said the reason the boy was starving was that there was a famine. Verse 14 of the story says there was a famine in the land and the boy was hungry. It was a famine that the Russian seminarians focused on. Why? The grandparents of these seminarians lived in St. Petersburg in 1941 when the Nazis surrounded their city and would not allow food to get through. It is said that over a million residents starved to death. After listening to these seminarians explain how they had heard this story many times, it was easy to see their perspective was not on the sins of the Prodigal Son but was on the famine. Finally, the minister traveled to Tanzania in Africa and asked the same question to seminarians there: Why did the Prodigal Son end up starving and living with pigs? Was it because the boy sinned, or was it because
