A time to 'come to our senses'
The story of the prodigal son has been called the best and most familiar short story in the Western world, and it probably is the best-known of all the parables of Jesus. But I’m not so sure how really well-known this story is. For instance, if you were to stop 100 Christians on the street and ask them to tell you the story of the prodigal son, I’m willing to bet many of them would get it wrong. Here’s what I mean: I think if you asked those people “How does the story end?” many would say, “Oh, that’s easy. The son is a sinner, but he has a change of heart and returns to his father, and his father forgives him and welcomes him back. A beautiful story.”
Well, yes, all of that happens, and it is a beautiful story, but that answer is wrong. Jesus’ story of the prodigal son does not end with “happy ever after.” The story ends with a question mark. At the end, the father is out in the field, trying to persuade his angry elder son to come in to the welcome home party for his younger brother. And Jesus does not tell us whether or not the son comes in.
So much for a sweet, sentimental story with all the loose strings tied up neatly. In fact, the story of the prodigal son begins much more harshly than we realize. The crowd that heard the story for the first time would have noticed that. Jesus tells us that the younger son goes to his father and demands his inheritance now. In the Israel of Jesus the elder son received two-thirds of his father’s estate and the younger son received one-third. And they received it after the father’s death. So the younger son is saying to his father: “I’m bored out of my mind. I can’t wait around for you to die. That could take years. Let’s pretend you’re dead now, and I’ll take my share.”
So far not a very sentimental story. But the father loves his son and gives him his share of the estate. The boy squanders it all and ends up feeding a rich man’s pigs. For Jews, pigs were the most unclean of animals, and eating their flesh was strictly forbidden. The younger son has fallen as low as he can. We are told that he “comes to his senses.” He realizes that being a slave back home would be better by far than staying as he is.
So the son returns to his father. His father has never stopped loving his son and watching for him, so he sees him coming when the boy is still a long way off. The father embraces his son and begins to give the servants orders to restore his son to his former status: a robe, a ring, and shoes for his feet. (Slaves were forced to go barefoot.) His father doesn’t even pay attention to the son’s little set speech about wanting to be only a servant now. It reminds me of the person who asked Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War how he would deal with the southern states after the war was over. Lincoln said: “I will treat them as if they had never been away.”
Jesus tells this story to show his own disciples how forgiving God is toward sinners, and to respond to the Pharisees’ criticism of him for welcoming sinners and eating with them. St. John Chrysostom, a fourth-century theologian, commented on this parable. He said: “All God looks for is the slightest opening, and he forgives even great sins.” Chrysostom anticipated the question of self-righteous, judgmental people in every age; he said, “You will ask, ‘Is this what the son gets for his wickedness?’ and I answer, ‘not for his wickedness, but for his return home.’”
The prodigal son’s elder brother is the first of a long line of self-righteous, judgmental people to question the judgment of the forgiving father. The older brother is an unhappy, resentful man, as judgmental people often are. In this story he is just angry enough to tell his father how he sees his own life on the farm as a grim round of duty; he demonstrates his complete lack of sympathy for his brother, whom he refers to as “this son of yours;” the elder son also has a nasty mind — he’s the one who imagines that his brother wasted his money with harlots. This story proves once again that each of us is better off by far to be judged by God than by one another!
But one of the most important, hidden lessons of this story of the prodigal son is that each of us has a share of each of those brothers within us. We are the younger son: we know we are all sinners, that we wander far from God sometimes, wasting the gifts he has given us, loving him more for what we can get out of him than for himself and in response to his love for us. Lent is the season for us to “come to our senses” and return to our father.
But we are also the older son: we sum up and write off others for their sins and failings, never forgiving them or showing compassion. We resent God for treating his other children better than we think he has treated us. And the judgmental elder son inside us often turns on the younger son inside us and says something like, “You’re disgusting. You’ll never get any better. You think God can love or forgive you, the way you are? Forget it!”
Sometimes I imagine how this story would have turned out if the elder son had spotted his brother before their father did. We might never have had the reunion and reconciliation between the prodigal and his father. Then I imagine that many a Catholic never gets to confession because the voice of the older son inside him or her says, “Forget it. You could never be forgiven.”
But that’s all wrong! What St. Paul is telling us in our second reading this morning is the good news: God our Father has reconciled all of us to himself in Jesus Christ. God’s Son, who was sinless, “became sin” on the Cross, so that we might share God’s life in its fullness. The old order has passed away; we are a new creation. This is the Easter good news, and Lent is given to us to “come to our senses,” to turn away from our own personal brands of “nonsense” and to turn back toward our sense of ourselves as loved children of the Father and brothers and sisters in Christ.
San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer delivered the homily above March 14 at St. Robert Parish in San Bruno at an Installation Mass for new Pastor Father Roberto Andrey.
By Archbishop George H. Niederauer
From March 19, 2010 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
