Lent IV
Luke 15. 1 - 3, 11b - 32
Fr Alex
One thing I’ve noticed whenever I’ve been into a primary school is how much effort teachers put into encouraging children to make the right choices, and not to make the wrong choices. To use ‘kind words’ and ‘kind hands,’ in the playground, and not mean ones.
But of course that black and white, either/or approach to life has its limits, doesn’t it? I’ve occasionally found myself at home, separating two fighting children, shouting “make the right choice, make the right choice!” – as if it was that simple for a five-year-old in a rage.
Even as adults, we know that making the right choice can be a really difficult thing to do. And sometimes the choices that people make, and their consequences, defy easy explanation.
Our parable today seems to be all about choices and consequences; and just like real life, and indeed all of Jesus’ parables, it too defies easy explanation.
The younger son makes all the wrong choices, yet he is welcomed in and treated with honour. The elder son, on the other hand, does the right thing by his father; but by the end of the story, he’s left out in the cold.
So what’s going on?
I think the clue is actually in our Gospel reading we heard last week. You might remember Jesus’ mini-parable about the fig tree that wasn’t bearing any fruit.
I talked about the way humans tell themselves a narrative of scarcity – that there’s not enough to go around – and the need to transform our view to see the abundance of God’s provision.
This was summed up by the fig tree. The owner wanted to cut it down; it was living in its own tiny world of scarcity, wasting the soil by simply living for itself.
But the gardener offered it the chance to transform its life of selfishness to one of shared flourishing. By sacrificing its fruit and giving of itself, it would expand its world and receive care from others.
And of course when Christ gave of himself on the cross, and reconciled us to God, he brought about the ultimate transformation: abundant life out of death.
I sense the same sort of message in today’s much longer parable: an encouragement to transform our narrative of scarcity, and open our eyes to God’s abundance.
We might think the elder brother is the sign of this abundance. He’s the loyal and hardworking son, he’s had a lifetime of status and security, and stands to inherit all his father has.
But in all this abundant provision, he’s actually trapped in an imagination of scarcity; he’s angry that his brother is shown mercy, he’s resentful that his father has never honoured him in the same way. Love and mercy are in short supply, and must be earned, and can be counted.
A bit like the fig tree, his world diminishes as he cuts off relationships: he refuses to join the crowd at the party; he can’t even acknowledge that he has a brother any more: “this son of yours,” he says to his father. The story ends uncertainly; perhaps he will cut his father off too.
But it’s the younger son, in his experience of scarcity, who is shown the reality of the abundance.
He leaves his family behind, he squanders his inheritance in dissolute living. Not only has he run out of his own money, he can’t rely on the charity of others; there’s a famine, and no one can give him anything. The one squalid job he can find still leaves him “dying of hunger,” and he considers eating the pig’s food.
At this lowest moment, he sees the error of his ways, and repents. Or does he? We read that he “comes to himself;” in other words he stops moping around and thinks clearly again, and his clear thought is that his father has plenty of food and money; even his hired hands have bread to spare.
So he carefully prepares a pious statement to get back in father’s good books, saying he isn’t “worthy” to be called his son. But note that he still starts his speech with the word “Father,” preserving his status as the son. “Sir,” or “Master” would be more appropriate for someone who really thought they should be treated like a hired hand.
And he obviously rehearses this speech very carefully on his journey back, as he starts reciting it to his father word-perfectly. But he is stopped in his tracks by two amazing things.
First, “while he was still far off,” his father sees him—he has been looking for him to return—and runs to embrace him and kiss him, even in his poverty and filth. And before the son can complete his speech, far from treating him like a hired hand, his father exalts him to the place of honour, and treats him like the master of the house.
Love and mercy in absolute abundance. And working out just how sincere the younger son’s repentance is, in a sense, doesn’t matter. It certainly doesn’t matter to the father. He has come back; and there is nothing else he can do that could earn this love and mercy; it simply pours out from the father. It is the father’s grace that makes all the difference to the son’s situation, nothing else.
I said at the beginning that this parable defies easy explanation, and that’s certainly true. It doesn’t fit perfectly to identify the father in the story as God; but surely the way the father acts is what we mean when we talk about the abundant grace of God; “grace to cover all our sin,” as we sang on Ash Wednesday, regardless of what we deserve.
But I think this parable takes it even further than that. Because this grace, this love, is so abundant that it doesn’t just cover all our sin, but takes it on: love that not only forgives the prodigal ones, but becomes the prodigal, for their sake.
Again, it doesn’t fit perfectly to identify the younger son in the story as Jesus, by any means; but as the Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen wrote: “[This parable] touches the mystery that Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father’s home.”
“Let us eat and celebrate,” says the father, “for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
Perhaps this is part of what St Paul means in our first reading: “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
By taking on our sin and reconciling us to God, Christ gives us a share in his divine righteousness; and that righteousness makes us part of that process of reconciliation for others. As Paul says, “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”
There are many ways to read today’s parable. But however we choose to interpret it, the consequences of God’s choice to pour out his abundant grace so freely to us, are unavoidable. For Paul, it means nothing less than the transformation of our lives, and of the whole of creation. May it inspire the same transformation in us as we follow Christ to his cross, and into his abundant life, at Easter.
“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” Amen.