In English, our parable does not convey
the
force of life and death
at work in the original Greek.
Our English keeps going on about property.
The Son says “Give me the share of the
property that will belong to me.”
The Father divides his “property.”
The son squanderes his “property”.
But in Greek, the son asks for the father’s “being.”
The father divides his “life” between his
sons.
The younger son then squanders his “being.”
This isn’t about money or property.
The money is a symbol of life.
The son wants his life cut loose from his
father’s life.
So, like King Lear, the old man hands over
his own livelihood.
The son takes the money and runs.
Having no more need of his impoverished
father,
the
prodigal son abandons him.
The son’s selfishness sets this plot in
motion.
But it is not guilt that makes the young man
come home.
It’s what happens next.
He squanders his being.
We can get distracted by the part about
dissolute living.
It doesn’t matter whether he spent his life
carousing
in a casino or climbing the corporate ladder.
What matters is that he has squandered his
life,
his
resources, his energy, and his time
on
things that are not real and do not last.
Cut off by his own selfishness, he is now
spiritually
and
existentially dead.
When did he notice that his heart no longer
beat?
When did he realize that he could no longer
hear birds sing?
Not until the famine hit.
Not until the useless things he had spent his
life on ran out.
This is no spiritual awakening
–
only a drunk noticing that the bottle is empty.
That’s when he contrived his next
manipulative scheme.
He would go home to his father with crocodile
tears,
and
say the kind of rubbish the old man liked to hear,
“Father
I have sinned . . . .”
and
at least the old fool would give him a decent job.
I am concerned that we may not be able to
relate
to
the prodigal son because
we
do not experience ourselves as sinners.
We have ways to fortify our consciences
against guilt.
So let’s leave the prodigal son at this point
and
turn our attention to the whiskey priest
in
Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.
Grahame Greene tears down those
fortifications of conscience.
He tells the story of the whiskey priest, a
bad priest,
a
drunk who sells the sacraments,
fathers
a child by one of his church members,
is
a coward, a liar, and thief.
It is 1920’s Mexico when the church was
banned,
so
the priest is in hiding.
He gets arrested for possession of brandy,
and
spends the night in jail,
sure
the police will recognize him
and execute him in the morning.
In the hot, crowded jail cell with a throng
of criminals, he notices:
“This
place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust
and crime and unhappy love. It stank to
heaven. . . . but it was
possible to find peace there. . . . He was
moved
by an irrational affection for the inhabitants of this prison.
A
phrase came to him. “God so loved the world.”
The next morning he sees the wanted poster
with
the picture of himself as a young priest.
He no longer resembles the picture, and he
thinks,
“It
is not very like me now.
What an unbearable creature he must have been
in
those days – and yet in those days
he
had been comparatively innocent . . . .
Then
in his innocence he had felt no love for anyone;”
Later the whiskey priest recalls the innocent
time
when
his conscience was easy.
And he thinks,
“God
might forgive cowardice and passion,
but was it possible to forgive the habit of
piety?”
What does this have to do with us?
I fear many of us, myself included,
have
cultivated the habit of piety.
It is not the same piety our grandparents practiced.
Their generation had fairly attainable moral
standards.
Their code limited violence, theft,
and
some forms of sexual indulgence.
We have dropped a few of their “Thou shalt
not’s”
and
have added a few new “Thou shalt nots.”
Our moral code allows us to say words in
public
that
would have made our grandparents blush.
But there are countless things they said
unabashedly
that
would get us socially ostracized.
We are about as moralistic as our
grandparents
–
not much more, not much less.
We construct a neatly doable moral code,
stick
to it close enough, and feel at ease.
But, all the while, we seek our own will
instead of God’s.
We come nowhere near loving God with all our
hearts,
nowhere
near loving our neighbor as ourselves.
We anesthetize our consciences
with
our politically correct habits of piety,
while
our souls wither from failure to love deeply
and
we squander our lives on things that do not endure.
“Why do you spend your money on that which is
not bread,
and
your labor for that which does not satisfy?”
Isaiah
Chapter 55
It was not guilt but poverty that sent the
prodigal son home.
It was discovering that his life had been squandered
it.
It was like the Kris Kristofferson’s song
lyrics,
“Lord
help me Jesus. I’ve wasted it.”
I’ve felt that. I’ve sensed the waste of my
life
despite
my habits of piety.
Maybe you have too or maybe you will someday.
So the son went home with a confession
written
on his cuff sleeve.
It was a new habit of piety, this confession.
He was hoping to get a job.
But his plot was foiled by grace. Jesus says,
“(W)hile
he was still far off his father saw him
and
was filled with compassion.
He
ran out and put his arms around him and kissed him.”
The son did not need to confess to be
forgiven.
He had been forgiven all along, loved all
along.
The meaning and value of his life was there
all along.
He just hadn’t been there to experience it.
He was so shocked by his welcome
that
he began to stammer the confession,
without
any ulterior motive from his heart,
“Father,
I have sinned . . . I am no longer worthy
to
be called your son.”
But he never got the chance to ask for the job.
His Father interrupted him,
and
shouted to the servants,
“Quickly
bring a robe – the best one – and put it on him . . .
let
us eat and celebrate,
for
this son of mine was dead and is alive again . . . .
And
they began to celebrate.”
The Father didn’t need any confession.
Though the Father’s love did make the son
need to confess.
The Father wasn’t thinking about the sin of
selfish living,
but
the consequences of spiritual death.
His son had been dead. But now he was alive.
So let he could not do anything but celebrate.
If our consciences were sufficiently alive
and sentient,
we
might feel contrition and repent.
That happens.
Eventually, enough selfishness, enough
neglect,
enough
failed attempts at self-deception,
break
through and we feel contrition.
But usually what we feel is the emptiness of
a life
lived
too much for too small a version of ourselves.
Usually we recognize that the idol of our
egos has clay feet,
that
we have polished our resumes too much
and
loved life too little.
Usually we feel the emptiness.
If we are not too fatally sophisticated, we
say something like,
“Lord
help me Jesus, I’ve wasted it.”
Then while we are still far off,
our
Father sees us and is filled with compassion.
We take a few faltering steps toward him
and
he comes running toward us,
enfolds
us in the arms of grace
and
infuses our hearts with life
so
deep, so wide, so rich, so strong,
the
only word we have for it is “eternal.”
Then we and all creation celebrate.
