The Prodigal Father

Fourth Sunday of Lent. Fr Gregory Pearson preaches on the extravagance of God’s mercy.

We call the parable we read in today’s Gospel the Parable of the Prodigal Son; it’s probably, along with the Good Samaritan, one of the best known of the parables we find in St Luke’s Gospel, and the name of the parable is so familiar (and the word ‘prodigal’ otherwise so rare in English) that it took me a long time as a child to work out that prodigal meant anything more specific than just ‘wayward’ or ‘naughty’. It’s striking, though, that the quality of the younger son which the tradition has latched onto (at least in most European languages) as characterising what’s wrong with his behaviour is his wastefulness or extravagance. It’s striking not least because, if the younger son’s actions are those of a spendthrift, then the father’s are hardly a model of financial caution. After all, the son only wastes his inheritance once, but the father, having given away in his lifetime the property his son was due to inherit, then lavishes expensive gifts and hosts an enormous party when that same son returns with nothing. If the son is a prodigal son, is not the father also a prodigal father?

The older brother picks up on this irony: though he dismisses his brother’s wasteful and immoral behaviour (‘he has devoured your property with prostitutes’), his criticism is aimed principally at his father. He states pointedly that it is ‘your’ (i.e. the father’s) property that has been thus wasted, and the nub of his complaint is the fact that more money is now being spent by his father in celebration of his brother’s return. It is the extravagance of his father, even more than his brother, that really annoys him, and it annoys him because it doesn’t seem to be fair. He contrasts the festivities on his spendthrift brother’s return with his own hard work and the lack of any celebration of that.

The younger brother too recognises that he has no claim in justice on a welcome from his father, or any help from him. He has taken all that his father owed to him as an inheritance – and in taking it while his father was still alive, has very much burnt his bridges – and, as he plans what he will say to his father, he dares hope for no more than the status of a hired servant because, as he says, ‘I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ The father owes him nothing, so when he does welcome him back with open arms and great (and expensive) rejoicing, it is an act of utterly gratuitous mercy: not something he has to do, but something he chooses to do.

Although in the text of this parable, Jesus does not draw an explicit parallel with the rejoicing in heaven over repentant sinners, it accompanies two others (those of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin) which do precisely that, and this more extended parable illustrates not only the joy which repentance prompts, but also the mercy of God which responds to repentance with forgiveness and so enables that celebration. In the enormous scale of the prodigal son’s offence and of the subsequent feast on his return, we are reminded both of the enormity of humanity’s offence against God – rejecting the inheritance of friendship with him, lost through original sin – but also, therefore, of the extravagant generosity of his mercy. It is not just a settling of a small misunderstanding, but so radical a transformation and renewal that St Paul, in our second reading, speaks of this reconciliation as a new creation. This is the core of the good news, the message which is entrusted to him – and to us – to preach to all creation: God’s invitation to be reconciled to him, to be made anew. As we are invited, on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, to be glad (‘Lætare’) in the midst of our Lenten penance, it is because our awareness of the ways we have used God’s gifts wastefully is not the end of the story, but rather, in the light of the Gospel, the occasion to learn more deeply the prodigal generosity of God’s merciful love.

Readings: Joshua 5:9-12 | 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 | Luke 15:1-3,11-32

Image: from a stained glass window at the church of St Mary de Castro, Leicester, photographed by Fr Lawrence Lew OP