(Note:
This blog entry is based on the text for “The Prodigal Son”, originally shared
on March 21, 2022. It was the 200th video for our YouTube Channel,
Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Why do people flee from God, from the Creator who died for them in order for them to be what they were created to be? Today, we’re going to find out.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of
the best-known stories in the Bible. It’s one that is very often studied by
people who are not really interested in the authority of the Bible, but just
want to study it as literature.
It kind of sounds like it belongs in the Old
Testament, it contains such sweeping themes and starchy drama, but it is a
parable told by Jesus, and only found in the gospel of Luke.
It’s called the Parable of the “Prodigal” Son
because of the son’s excesses. “Prodigal” means excessive, wastefully
extravagant, spending money recklessly, lavish. It has the same root word as “prodigious”,
as in “President Taft had a prodigious waistline”. A “prodigy is someone who is
exceptionally talented.
Here’s the setting, in Luke 15:1-3,
15 Now all the tax
collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And
the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes
sinners and eats with them.”
3 So he told them this parable:
A parable is “an earthly
story, with a heavenly meaning”, as my Confirmation pastor told me. Note that
is has “a heavenly meaning”. It’s not an allegory, it isn’t full of symbols
that all stand for something. It usually has just one meaning.
Now we jump from verse 3
to verse 11. Wait, what? Why?
Because there are two
other parables stuck in-between, The Parable of the Lost Sheep, and The Parable
of the Lost Coin. Spoiler alert! All three are about what the Pharisees (and a
key person in the parable) see as God’s prodigal generosity.
Jesus says this in a
parable about something else that’s precious that can be lost, in Luke
15:11b-20a. We’ll start those with verses Luke 15:11a-12,
“There was a man who had
two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his
father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So
he divided his property between them.
Did you hear that. The
younger of two sons goes to his father and says in effect, “Dad, I can’t wait
for you to die. I’m young. I want to enjoy the money you’re going to leave me
while I can. I want to live large. I want to have fun. I want the money now.”
Arrrgh! And his father says, “Yes”!
My great-grandfather,
Terje Berkedal, came to this country because Norway practiced primogeniture
during a time called “the hundred-year hunger”. That meant that all the parents’
property, the inheritance, was left to the oldest son, who would then take care
of the rest of the family. That kept the farms from being divided into
properties too small to support anyone.
But it assumed that
families all got along, and that older brothers would be benevolent and
competent managers. That may not have been the case for my great-grandfather
because he left Norway for the United States and never looked back. He never
wrote back, either. He cut ties and our family didn’t know who our family was
in Norway until the Internet Age. When I and my family went back, we were the
first people with the family name to visit Norway in about 120 years.
Our relatives showed us
the book of our family history, and next to his entry it said in Norwegian, “We
think he died.” It’s regrettable but understandable that he left for greater
opportunities, as many people from Norway and from other countries have done
over time.
This parable, however, tells about a young man
who didn’t want opportunities or even to support himself. He wanted to indulge
himself, with his father’s money. And he did. The parable continues with verse
13,
13 A few days later the younger son
gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered
his property in dissolute living.
His older brother would
later accuse him of spending his money on prostitutes. Maybe he did. Wine women
and song. He was living in prodigal excess. But then the party ended. He hadn’t
made good in a distant country. He was played out. We see the consequences,
starting in verse 14,
14 When he had spent everything, a
severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in
need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of
the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the
pigs. 16 He would gladly have filled himself
with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him
anything.
Didn’t he have any
friends? You mean all the people he partied with were nowhere to be found once
his money ran out? I’m shocked! Shocked!
So, he gets a job with
someone who owes him nothing, with whom he has no kinship ties, and he becomes a
caregiver to pigs, about the lowest job a child of Israel could imagine. And
what kind of job doesn’t pay enough to buy pig food to eat? Sounds like he’s
back in slavery in Egypt. He was living in prodigious humiliation.
But…But then, he sees the
solution in verses 17-20a,
17 But when he came to himself he
said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but
here I am dying of hunger! 18 I will get up and go
to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and
before you; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called
your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ 20 So
he set off and went to his father.
How many of our children, or the
children of people we know, have found themselves in that same far country.
Have cut all ties for a life of drugs, alcohol, unfettered sex, even crime, and
what the parable describes as dissolute living, life without morals or
restraint, who think they have found “friends” who care for them?
How many people have finally hit the bottom and remembered that there is
a way back? That they still have someone who really loves them.
Parents long for that. So does God. And we the Church see not only
individual sons and daughters going down the same path, but whole cultures.
Could we not describe our culture as one that has squandered its
inheritance in order to seek temporary personal pleasure, consumed with toys, and
tied to materialism and outward appearances? One that has lost its way in the
distant country of absence from God? Do we not work and long for its return to
God, the One who loves them?
There is a line in the Robert Frost poem, “Death of A Hired Man” that
goes, “Home is the place that, when you have to go there, they have to let you
in.”
That’s the place that the prodigal son came to. That’s all he believed
he could expect.
His father’s hired hands were treated well. He could repent. Maybe his
father would give him a job, and he could at least live, not as a son but as an
employee.
“He came to himself.” Isn’t that a beautiful poetic way to put it? He
remembered who he was. He remembered who he had been created to be. There was a
core there that his poor choices hadn’t worn away. He came to remember who
loved him. He came to himself.
The son was prodigal in his excessive and destructive living, but he was
still a son. He would now throw himself on the defining mercy of his father. If
you were the father, what would you do?
Would you have good news or bad news for the son? Jesus proclaimed this
at the beginning of his 3-year public ministry, in Mark 1:14-15,
14 Now
after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of
God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
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