St. John Bosco

January 31,2004

by Rev. Herbert Nichols

The prophet Nathan had never before received a mission from the Lord which was so challenging and demanding such courage. He was to confront King David and awaken him to the gravity of his sins, and hopefully, grace would move him to repentance.

Prudently, and with a great deal of ingenuity, he related to the king a parable of a very rich and selfish man. In condemning the wickedness of the man in the parable; one can only imagine the shock in David’s ears and heart when he heard the word of the Lord from Nathan’s mouth: You are that man.

But the words were more than a condemnation. They were an invitation to repentance, to which David responded by saying: I have sinned against the Lord. That was all that God waited to hear. He immediately forgave David.

Forgiveness of sin comes immediately with acknowledgement, or as we call it, confession. But repentance is never the end but only the beginning of the story. A sinful dynamic has tragic consequences; in this case we saw yesterday it has a rippling effect. Repentance is often the beginning of a long effort to repair the damage done by sin.

Finite creatures that we are, we would be overwhelmed by this Goliath; that is why the messiah came to reconcile sinners. This episode teaches that although God does not ignore sin and is eager to forgive and even more eager to save through the grace of repentance.

Today we honor St. John Bosco who had an intriguing gift of dreaming. His dreams came true. He had personal dreams, dreams about the future, dreams of various crises and recoveries. His dreams did not leave him paralyzed in speculation, but caused him to work all the harder in the present to prepare the church to face whatever came in the future.

Unlike John Bosco, most of us are not gifted with such dreams, or prophecies, as was Nathan, but we too can be a strength for the Church to face whatever future by being faithful in the present, and in that way repenting for whatever we have done in the past. That is the mystery of our faith. That is the history of our salvation.