Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. 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.
Then Jesus said… - Jesus introduces this parable by linking it to the previous two, that of the lost sheep and the lost coin. The ones lost inside the house but still within the fold, that is, the coin, the 99 sheep and the elder son, all come to symbolize the Pharisees. The others lost outside the fold, that is, the one lost sheep and the prodigal son, both represent the publicans, the prostitutes and sinners in general. For Jesus, both groups are sinners in need of forgiveness, both are sick and in need of healing. In truth, as the Scripture says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6). Christ died for all because all are sinners.
Father, give me the share of the property… - According to the Jewish law, a father could not dispose of his property as he wished. In this situation, the elder son had the right to two thirds and the younger son to one third of the property (Deut. 21:17). In this third parable, the drama is brought into focus. It no longer deals with the loss of a sheep, or a coin, and not even parts of a property; what concerns this father is the loss of his son. In order to understand his affliction, let us recall Jacob’s anguish when he judged that he had lost Joseph, at that time his youngest and most favorite son by Rachel, the woman he loved at first sight and for whom he had to labour 14 years.
The tragedy of this father, implicit in the parable, is the ingratitude of his younger son. To ask for the inheritance before the death of his father, is like telling him: “For me you have already died and therefore the inheritance must be divided; what or who you are means nothing to me, only what you have; since I no longer want to live with you, I am not waiting around for you to die; I want now what already belongs to me!”
So he (the father) divided his property between them – Despite being profoundly offended by his son’s ingratitude, the father neither argues nor tries to convince him that what he intends to do is wrong. He knows all too well that life will teach his son with heartaches what he could not teach him with love; failures and sufferings are oftentimes the integral part of the learning process. In fact, we generally learn more from our mistakes than from our successes; in this sense, in good faith “there is no evil out of which good does not come".
In respecting the freedom of man, the Almighty God reveals his powerlessness. We can compel children to do what is good, but with adults, goodness must come from their own free choice. Alike God many parents have to stand by and watch in desperation as their children destroy their lives through vices or laziness without being able to do anything.
Women are nowhere to be found in this parable because women in those days did not own any properties nor could they inherit any; but we see one father with attitudes and traits that are traditionally more in tune with those of a mother from which we can say that the woman, meaning the female character, is also figuratively present in this parable.
A few days later (…) gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, (…) he began to be in need. (…) 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!
He came to himself – It was necessary to fall deeply before he would come to himself and take responsibility for his situation; he had to suffer deep hunger pangs, and fall to the state of being a pig keeper, the most impure of all animals whose pods he could not even have to ease his hunger, before he became aware of his wrongdoings.
Deus intimior intimo meo est (St. Augustine) – God is beyond my inmost self so that the path to God is through my innermost being; therefore when we walk to God, we walk towards a greater awareness of ourselves. Similarly, when we return to God like the prodigal son did, we come back to ourselves; but while being outside of self, like the drug addicts and alcoholics, the prodigal son walks haggardly fleeing from God and from himself.
He does not embrace the reality of being a child of God, hence in some way, he goes back to his “animality”, to the time of evolution of species when human beings still primitive did not have the awareness of selves. While possessed by a passion or a vice, when we do evil we walk outside of ourselves and lose self-awareness, self-control, and identity.
I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’” So he set off and went to his father...
He decides to go back home not out of remorse but out of hunger... primum vivere deinde filosofare… by returning he still only has his own self-interest in mind; he goes back because he is hungry and needs more things; he does not go back because he misses his father, but rather in his father’s house even the servants are better off than him as a pig keeper. He is not worthy of being a son, as he says in his preparatory speech, nor does he appear interested in being a son.
The prodigal son wants to impose a penance on himself; he wants in some way to make restitution, to compensate for what he has done, but the father does not let him finish the speech that he had prepared beforehand and embraces him after hearing only part of his confession. God does not need our restitution nor our penance to forgive us; God forgives and forgets. But then, why purgatory? It is a necessity of our human nature and not that of God; because God forgives us more easily and more readily than we forgive ourselves.
But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his slaves, “Quickly, bring out a robe – the best one – and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” And they began to celebrate.
At a distance, it is not the son who first sees the father, but the father who sees the son whom he has been waiting for because he has never stopped waiting, never forgot him nor did he get on with his life, as people usually do. On the contrary, he never gave up on him but lived in the hope that he would return one day. When we move away from God, the place that we occupy in His heart is not taken up by someone else and so it remains always empty until we come back to Him if ever we do come back.
The son makes a small attempt to reconcile with his father, but it is the father who makes the biggest move towards reconciliation because he never gave the son up as hopelessly lost. So when the son eventually appears as a labourer, without any resentment and full of compassion the father receives him back as a son, embraces him, something that no boss does to a worker, kisses him like one kisses a beloved son, and treating him as an equal, he does not let his son kneel before him. He then places a signet ring on his son’s finger as the seal of power and dresses him in the better garment of a beloved son, like Jacob did for Joseph. Finally at the end he orders the fatted calf to be killed to celebrate and rejoice at his son’s return.
Now his elder son (…) heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” Then he became angry and refused to go in…
The son who transgressed learned a lesson; how often do we need to be deprived of things before we appreciate their worth. The younger son understands now what the love of the father is because he had denied it and had fled far from it. The elder son never comes to understand it. It is precisely in this sense that St. Augustine develops his theology of “Felix Culpa” referring to the fall of Adam, and Luther adds his paradox “pecca fortiter, sed crede fortius”, if one sins, sin greatly because only a great sin is cause for a great conversion. The “peccata minuta” of the elder son, however, is not enough to dissuade him from his sinful life.
‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”’ (Lk. 15:11-32)
The sin of the younger son is his rejection of his father’s paternity, and the sin of the elder son is the same; he also does not regard himself as a son but rather as a hired hand, perceiving his father as a righteous taskmaster whom he obeys not out of love but out of fear. Like the rich young man and the Pharisees who never transgressed a single commandment, and who only complied with the letter of the law because, as Jesus put it so well, their interiors were full of filth and so is the interior of the elder son as is clear by the way he describes his brother’s dissolute living. The elder son is, in some way, like those who only behave well before law enforcers and authority; the ones rightly depicted by the saying “when the cat’s away, the mice will play.”
If the elder son had been a true son, he would have shared his life and belongings with the father and behaved according to the “freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Furthermore, if he had been a true son, it would not have been necessary for him to ask for a young goat because he still had the inheritance that was due to those who are and behave like children of God (Matt. 25).
How the prodigal son spent his father’s money we do not find out from the narrator but from the elder son; throughout the text there is no mention of prostitutes until the elder son mentions them; this is the sort of accusation that a puritan mentality would make in order to ask for a harsher punishment. In the Church we have not yet gotten rid of that sort of moral theology that judges all sexual matters as serious and mortal sins but turns a blind eye to the sins of social justice.
Furthermore, if we psychoanalyze the emphasis the elder son gives to the way his brother spent the money, we come to the conclusion that after all the prodigal son only did what his elder brother always wanted and wished to do but never had the courage to do so. It is, therefore, a question of envy what the elder son feels for his brother.
Unlike the younger son who is genuine in his calling of ‘Father’, the elder son upon addressing the Father does not treat him as such. He also does not treat his brother as a brother referring to him only as “this son of yours”. When God is not the Father, then others are not brothers, but rather enemies or rivals towards whom we feel envy, resentment, and hatred. Many speak of the love of neighbour as being the most important thing and as the proof that we love God, but it is only when we love God that our neighbour is truly a neighbour and not a stranger or a rival.
A catechist after having told the parable of the prodigal son to a group of children asked them to recount it in their own words. One child retold the parable as such until the moment the prodigal son appeared on the horizon. Then he said that when the father saw the son he grabbed a club and began to run towards him.
On the way. he met his elder son who asked him where he was going, and the father told him that he was going to meet his brother. Upon hearing that his brother had returned, he too grabbed a club and they both went to meet the wretched prodigal son; after beating him with the clubs and discharging their anger for what he had done, they took a deep breath and looking at each other satisfied said, ‘Now let us feast, eat and drink to the health of this rascal!’
This child expressed what any father in this world would naturally have done, but this is not the way God is - for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are yours ways my ways, says the Lord (Isa. 55:8).
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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