But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him (St. Luke 15:20).
Today’s parable is inarguably the most famous example of our Lord’s illustrations of the Kingdom of God through story. Even secular literary anthologies will feature this tale of imprudent living and overwhelming forgiveness our culture just takes for granted. In our modern Western world, it is expected that parents forgive their children almost no matter what they do. That feature of our society was not the norm in history, and it still isn’t the norm throughout the world, but even Westerners who hate Jesus and loathe Christianity can’t escape the ways in which this story has molded us all for the better. An unfortunate part of the popular baggage which accompanies this parable can be found in its common name: “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” (a name nowhere to found on our Lord’s lips). The title is unfortunate because the younger son is really not the main character of the story; there are whole scenes where he is absent and every movement of the story is driven by forces outside of him, forces acting upon him. Even his momentous act of repentance only comes after the reality of poverty and despair make his continued self-reliance a certain death sentence. Indeed, if we are looking for a hero in this story, we need look no further than the father whose love and mercy are so recklessly applied; a love and mercy our Lord offers as the only true hope of mankind.
To truly understand the father’s love, we need to step back in time a bit. It is common in our world for children to leave their home and go to the big city to make their fortune; however, this practice like so many we take for granted is pretty new. In less “up to date” times, it would have been a terrible insult for a man to abandon the land of his family, not least because who then would take care of his father and mother in their old age? If he was away, how would a dutiful son return the care and love he received when he was weak and powerless? One of the Ten commandments is devoted to this idea, but the Pharisees (the original target for today’s parable) often shirked this duty by giving the temple a big donation to be held until their parents died, and after the funeral, they would then get the money back. Ours is not the first or last generation to selfishly wish old people would just go somewhere and quietly die.
But, in today’s parable it’s actually even worse, because the younger son can’t even wait until his father dies or becomes so enfeebled that custody of the land falls to him and his brother, so he demands his inheritance early. This request is the 1st century equivalent of going up to one’s father and screaming, “I wish you were dead.” The most common response, then as now, would be for the father to say, “Go to Hell” or “Get out of my house, you ungrateful loser.” That was the response the original audience was waiting for, but Jesus tells us this father is different; this father gives the son what he wants, cutting up his ancestral lands like a pelican feeding her fledglings with her own blood.
We are meant to see the many parallels between the love and patience of this father and the love and patience of our heavenly Father. In Exodus 34, the Living God graciously describes Himself to his creature Moses in this way, “The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…” (Exodus 34:6-7). Our Creator gifts us with existence; He gives us a life we haven’t earned in a world we didn’t build. Our only reasonable response is to wake up every day imagining new ways to show our gratitude in love and service to our Creator and fellow creatures. Instead, we demand God prove Himself to us, as if our every breath wasn’t a witness to the glory of our Father’s love and mercy, and we spend the Father’s gift of our very being on “reckless living.” Surely, the prodigal son is meant to represent the whores and tax collectors Jesus was calling into his Kingdom as He walked among men, but we would be quite blind not to realize how much of our modern lives demands we compromise ourselves in ways not too far removed from those whom the Pharisees saw as the unclean scum of the earth. Modernity’s moral goal is to make us all harlots and traitors to our father’s beliefs, and humanity is so twisted that we look out onto a world of evil and see this as evidence of God’s absence or non-existence, when we should see it as the great evidence of His mercy and long-suffering goodness. He allows us to take our inheritance as children of men and to do with it as we please until we are broken by the weight of trying to be little gods in fallen world—broken by the consequences of our rebellion.
Which brings us to the younger brother: the libertine son. What is the best thing that happens to him in this story? The best thing that happens to him is the poverty and destitution which drives him to repentance. At his lowest point, starving to death as he watched his master’s more valuable swine get fatter and fatter—at this rock bottom—the libertine son is infinitely closer to redemption than when he was flush with cash to spend on fake friends and lovers of convenience. It is only in his brokenness that he seeks out the one who gave him life in the first place. How strange and unusual is this observation in our culture. We tend to like stories about drug users hitting rock bottom and finding redemption; we are much less comfortable when someone points out that without Christ we are always at rock bottom ourselves, and without his grace have never truly repented of the evil which makes the world black. If grace is not our story, then we are simply watching the swine of our own time get fat on the temporary slop of this world, hoping some rancid morsels fall off their plates. And before grace we must be leveled by our contact with the Holy God’s law. If we haven’t been crushed by the weight of God’s law then we will never beat upon our breasts, saying, “God, be merciful to me a sinner” (St. Luke 18:14). If we haven’t been crushed by the grave poverty of our souls, we will never say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants” (St. Luke 18:18).
So, the libertine son desires to be a hired servant, but is that what he deserves? No, he deserves death. As we read in Deuteronomy: “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear” (Deut. 21:18-21). The severity of this punishment only shocks us because of the parable we have before us today and the ways in which it has shaped Western attitudes, but beyond that, what this terrible punishment is meant to show us is the seriousness with which God takes the rebellion of sons against their fathers. This artifact of the Israelite civil law is a teaching device revealing to us and the world the penalty for rebelling against the Heavenly Father even after He has disciplined us through the suffering He allows to befall us. The penalty for failing to reflect the love and goodness required of being an image bearer of God is to be given what we are asking for: it is to be purged from the perfect world the Creator won’t let our sin ruin.
If death is what the returning son deserves, why doesn’t he then receive the just reward for his evil? Jesus tells us it is the compassion of the father alone which transforms slave into freeman, dead rebel into living son. The repentant son falls on his knees a stranger and rises a restored member of the family; it is the fatted calf which is killed, not the son who deserves nothing but death. Jesus can tell this story because He is the means by which the Heavenly Father is making slaves into freemen, dead rebels into livings sons; He is the means by which the forgiving, compassionate love of the Father comes to all those who have stood up from the pig trough and come to feast at the Lord’s Table. It is fascinating that the very next law stated in Deuteronomy, right after the command to stone rebellious sons, is the declaration that a man hanged on a tree is cursed (Deut. 21:22-23). Jesus Christ can tell us this story because He is the man who will take on the curse of our sin to make our reunion with the Father possible, as St. Paul writes, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Gal. 3:13-14). The Father’s love is not free, the pain and death God the Son endured on Calvary was not free, and our surrender to God’s love isn’t free either, but what blooms from this reunion of Creator and creature is the end of that yearning for home which plagues all the children of men. We find that even the elder brother, blinded by his self-righteousness, must surrender to a love he’s been around but never in, a love he cannot earn but for which he must die.
Today’s parable ends without an ending. We don’t know how either brother responds to their father’s gracious love, just as we don’t know how all the younger and older brothers in our own time will respond to God’s incomprehensible love and mercy. Let us pray we all respond to the unending feast God has prepared for us surrendered rebels, let us pray we respond with even the dullest reflection of the love and mercy and grace necessary to transform us from dead to alive, from lost to found, from orphans into the sons and daughters of the Living God.