Reflection This Week
AVOIDING THE ISSUE

  This past week I re-read Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. I had read it years ago, no doubt in order to get some ideas on how to preach on that parable from Luke’s Gospel. I do not remember what I said in that sermon, but I suspect it was not what I would preach about were I to do so today. The reason is that back then and in the intervening years I have conveniently avoided the real issue that Nouwen concludes is the point of the parable.

   There are three characters in the parable: the younger son who takes his inheritance and is prodigal with it: he spends it on loose living and quickly at that. With no money, no friends, and living among strangers, he has to go to work feeding pigs just to survive from day to day. Fortunately he comes to his senses and realizes that he has a home to which he might return even if it means working as a slave for his own father. He returns home and is welcomed with opened arms by his dad, who then throws a huge home-coming party for him

  There is the elder son, the Good son, the one who obeys his father, works the land, is loyal to all. He is secretly jealous of his younger brother, perhaps because he would have liked to have done the same, but he did not. Then, when the kid comes crawling back home, instead of being reprimanded by dad, he is welcomed back as if he had done nothing wrong. He is so angry he could spit.

  Finally, there is dad who simply forgives and forgets. He rejoices that his younger son has come to his senses and returned home. He wants his older brother to do the same. “The past is passed,” he says to the older son. “We cannot undo it. We can only rejoice that it is over and that your brother has found new life. Let’s do so!”

  Whenever I have read this parable in the past, I have always focused more on the two sons than on the father. In my preaching I have done the same. After all, who has not been a little prodigal now and then? We have all wasted our time and talent and treasure on frivolity, even in sin. We came to our senses and changed our lives, perhaps not totally, of course. There is still some of the younger son in us, still the waster of our God-given gifts, still forgiven, still welcomed back by God.

  There is also much of the older son in me as well – in all of us, I dare say. We want others to pay for their sins and we get bent out of shape when some person or some institution, even the justice system, lets them off with only a slap on the wrist, if that. Like the older son, we find it difficult if not impossible to rejoice that their punishment was commuted or their sins forgiven. We are convinced that were the shoe on the other food, were we the one crawling back home, no one would throw a party for us.

  It has always been easy for me to relate to the two sons. Yet, as Nouwen concludes, the point of the parable – which I, for one, seem to have conveniently avoided is that we are to grow up and become the father/mother. We are to welcome back the lost, rejoice that s/he has been found, and celebrate that person’s new life, that person’s resurrection.

  That is who our God is: our Father/Mother who loves each child totally and unconditionally, always waiting by the door for the child to return, never giving up, always rejoicing when S/He sees the child coming back, always willing to forgive and forget – and throwing a party to celebrate and give thanks. That is who we are to be as well.     WJP