10th March: 4th Sunday in Lent Two Sermons on the Parable of the Prodigal Son

The Prodigal Society?

In recent years we have heard a great deal about the Big Society but it is an empty phrase lacking any real content, which is why the government has had such difficulty in communicating the concept. A better phrase would be “The Responsible Society” whereby we take responsibility for ourselves and for each other. “The Prodigal Society” would be the reverse of that, whereby we are only concerned to gain what we can for ourselves regardless of others. It is perhaps significant that the German word for responsibility “Verantwortlichkeit” implies that responsibility means that we are making our response to the Word.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is a distinctively Lucan parable and it is often thought misnamed. It can be the story of the Two Brothers, or the Lost Son, or the story of the Accepting Father. The origin of this parable probably lies in the story in Matthew 21.28-32 where the one son says he will obey his father and does not, and the other son does the reverse.

Luke derives a great deal from the book of Deuteronomy and it is there that we read that the eldest son should inherit (Deut 21.15-17) and later (vv.18-21) we read that a son who is a riotous liver and a drunkard is to be stoned. However, it has been pointed out ¹ that the relationship between two sons is a key theme throughout the Old Testament and often considerable favour is given to the youngest son. Consider Cain and Abel or Esau and Jacob. It is Joseph who delivers his family from famine; the great King David is the youngest son of Jesse. Moreover the two deliverers of Israel, Gideon and Judas Maccabeus were also youngest sons. In the Matthew story it is the elder son who rebels but is finally obedient and the youngest one who does not obey. In this parable Luke reverses this order.

In the parable, the father ignores the advice of Ecclesiasticus (33.19-23) not to distribute your goods until you die. So the youngest son takes his share and goes out into a world of riotous, wasteful living, leading to famine. That is not a bad description of much of our own world, where so much is wasted and so many live and die in famine. A world that worships market forces leads to this end. Like Hosea’s wife (Hosea 2.7) the prodigal realises that he would be better off with his father even as a slave. So he returns and his father, like Joseph greeting his father, rushes out to greet him and falls on his neck and kisses him.

But the father goes much further, and gives the prodigal son great dignity. The robe gives him honour, the ring signifies authority (like the ring Pharaoh gives to Joseph) and the shoes imply that he is not a slave but a freeman. But verses 1 and 3, where Jesus is attacked for receiving sinners and eating with them may relate to this. The prodigal son implies the sinful and unrespectable Jew compared with the elder son who is more like a Pharisee. Maybe, at this point in Jesus’ ministry he can see both living together and accepting each other.

Killing the fatted calf is a great sign of hospitality, like that offered by Abraham to his strange visitors (Genesis 18.7). There is then a celebration (including music) and the elder son hears it but comes home resentful. It is not clear whether he is as able as his father to accept the return of the prodigal.

The father offers an example to both sons. They need to accept each other, regardless of what they have done. We see this echoes in the well-known phrase of Paul Tillich “Accepting acceptance is to have the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.” The father, like Jacob, finds that his son that was lost is alive. So the father offers an example of acceptance to both his sons, and both need to to repent in different way.

Even in a Prodigal Society, where much is wasted and people are encouraged to live a life of “Bread and circuses”, we may see that there is hope. We can see that even the Prodigal Society can become the accepting society where we take responsibility for each other in mutual sharing and acceptance. Robert van de Weyer in his book Guru Jesus describes the first time he received communion. It was in a Christian Ashram and it led him to see that “In this single act I had proclaimed my oneness, not only with Jesus Christ himself, but with all his other followers in the world be they humble workers in India or pinstriped members of the British Conservative Party. As a disciple of Jesus I am now bound in love to people I loathe.” ²

There is hope for the Prodigal Society. We are all called to receive and eat with each other, and so become a mutual society. We see this in the call from Isaiah Chapter 55 to be in a covenant with God and each other. For ours is a mutual pilgrimage, where we all share in the life of Christ (I Cor. 10.1-4). Only so do we respond to the Word of God.