4th Sunday in Lent

This is a parable that we all know very well. I would suspect that when we hear this parable most of us are inclined to see ourselves in one of the sons. But I would like to invite you today to focus on the Father, for it was not really the son who was prodigal, but rather the Father. Too often we as Christians are accustomed to seeing salvation in individualistic terms and this is how we read this parable – from the individualistic perspective of either the older son or the younger son, whichever one we most identify with. For us moderns, this parable is a tale of a wayward sinner who finds unlimited forgiveness and salvation in a loving Father. But this is not how Jesus’ hearers would have heard this parable. They would have interpreted this parable from a far more communal perspective as the story of a community rent apart by the headstrong arrogance of one of its younger members and restored to wholeness by the prodigal humility and generosity of its eldest member.

In first century Palestine, it was the father’s duty was to ensure the unity of the family and ensure its safety and continuity. This was because perhaps more so than in our day, the family was the locus of virtually every facet of a person’s life : it was the household, but also the workplace and the guarantor of personal survival, protection and security. In a close-knit village society, the unity and internal cohesion of the family was everything, within the village people were often bound by blood-lines through inter-marriage and the solidarity that existed amongst them was such that they would come to each other’s aid at the time of harvest, in time of need and of danger. To threaten the unity of a family was to the threaten the life of the village. It was therefore the duty of the father to keep the family together to ensure the survival of not only his own family – but that of the village. However is it understandable how, in such close living-quarters, sons could quickly begin to resent the control exerted by their fathers over the family unit. Their longing for independence would surely give way to many arguments and fights. It is not like our contemporary society where the son can move fairly far away and set up house in a different neighborhood or even different country from his father. Our society doesn’t necessarily expect a son to be a part of the family business, he can strike off on his own and carve out a niche for himself in society as he climbs the social ladder. This was not the case in the ancient Near East at the time of Jesus. Outside of the family unit a person did not really have a very good chance of survival. Since life at that time was so precarious, with no people to turn to in times of hardship, a person would either be robbed by thieves, or, at the very least, be quickly reduced to poverty.

Viewed in this light, what the younger son does is unpardonable. To ask for his share of the inheritance is not only to wish his father dead, but also to put his whole family’s survival at risk. When the text says “the father divided the property,” the word used for “property” is actually the Greek word bios – meaning “life.” No father in his right mind would agree to what his son was requesting, for to accede to this request would be to put the survival of the whole family at risk. Further to this, it would have been a huge embarrassment to the father to let his family be broken up like this. It would have represented a huge loss in dignity and status in the face of other members of the community who would have regarded the father as a failure on account of his son’s errancy and his failure to control his son. In our modern minds the tragedy and the locus for sin is the dissolute living of the younger son, the fact that he squanders his father’s wealth on loose living. To an ancient mind, this latter fact was merely adding insult to injury, the greater locus of tragedy and sin was the fact that the unity of the family had been compromised and thus its very survival had been compromised. The father had failed in his duty to keep the family together.

The resolution of this problematic therefore is not so much the embrace of the father that we moderns have so fixated upon as the image par excellence of reconciliation. It is without a doubt a very poignant image forgiveness and certainly we should take comfort in such an image when we have strayed far from God and need to remember God’s unconditional love for us and lose ourselves in God’s embrace. But if the central problem for Jesus’ listeners was the loss of unity of the family, it is not so much the Father’s embrace as it is the feast that the Father holds in honor of his returned son that restores the son to his rightful place in the family and reconciles him with the whole village whose lives he had jeopardized by leaving with half the wealth. The fact that the rest of the family and the village come to the feast shows that after the example set by the father, they too forgive their wayward relative. But not everyone comes, as we know, there is one who is not prepared to so easily forgive his brother for the pain that he has caused them, and who resents the generosity of the Father. Once again, the father cannot rest until the unity of his family is restored. He realizes that his eldest son is missing – so he goes out to search for him. Again this is not in keeping with the regal figure of the patriarchal head of the family who would go out looking for his son who is away in the fields sulking.

When we hear this story, are wont to focus on the embrace of the wayward son by the merciful father, because that’s what appeals to our modern individualistic sensibilities. But what we often neglect to think about is the feast thrown by the father for the son, which is a symbol of the Kingdom of God that Jesus is announcing. This is the really important symbol. When Jesus says that there is more rejoicing over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine people who don’t need repentance, he does not say this because God loves a repentant sinner more than he loves a righteous person, no! he is saying this because what God desires most is the unity of God’s family. In this way God is just as much pained by the selfish sinner who departs from the family as the self-righteous elder brother who refuses to join the party because he feels some people don’t deserve to be invited to the party. The reason Jesus tells the three parables that we heard in our gospel today is because the Pharisees have been complaining that he consorts with sinners. What Jesus is trying to do is to restore the unity of the family that has been split apart for so long now. The Pharisees are the elder brothers who resent Jesus’ generosity in trying to bring back into the fold these sinners.

I would like to suggest to you today that instead of identifying with one of the sons, as I’m sure we have had many occasions to do in the past, and still will have many in the future as well, that today we try to identify with the Father, and realize that we too are called to be agents of reconciliation in our families and in our communities. The figure of the father teaches us an important lesson – that in order to be a minister of reconciliation we need to humble our pride and be prepared to have our reputations dragged through the mud. We need to be prepared to be told that we are completely crazy, that we are nuts and that we are putting our families’ survival at risk. I would suggest to you that if we remain fixated on our own individual salvation, we run the risk of becoming like the elder son, obsessed with what we have done for God and missing the big picture that it isn’t really about what we have done for God, but about what God is doing for us as a family, as a church community, as a nation. We may think that the parable has a happy ending – the younger son comes back and is reintegrated into the family. But in fact the parable has an open ending for we do not know whether the younger son comes to the party or not. In some ways this is like our world and our families – it is an open question, will everyone be able to swallow their pride or their self-righteousness and enter into the fun, into the party? This is the task that Jesus has assigned to us as his disciples: to get everyone into the party. In trying to do this, we will be confronted with both sinners and people who think that they are saints. We cannot say that Jesus loved the sinners more than the self-righteous Pharisees – but it was the sinners who were prepared to accept the love of the Father. Questions for reflection

1. When was the last time I was an agent of reconciliation?
2. As I consider the different communities/families to which I belong, where might my contribution as an agent of reconciliation most be needed?
3. What parts of my pride might I have to swallow in order to collaborate with God’s work of reconciliation?