Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal son is like a folk tale, and like most folk tales it bristles with questions. Why did the father just give the money, no questions asked? Surely he knew his son, and what he would do with it. Why did the son get his inheritance early? The father must know he would go and splurge it. If the other son complained about not having enough to celebrate with his friends, why didn’t he ask for his inheritance as well? These illogicalities are part of the spice of folk tales. They make the story feel like a ritual, an over-simplification of life, focusing down inexorably on one simple thing. That simple thing here is the utter generosity of the father.
In our culture today this story could be told about a mother and her daughter, but in first-century Palestine neither woman would have enjoyed that kind of freedom. It would be interesting to see how such a story could be told in modern vein. We expect mothers always to be welcoming to their erring children, while fathers can be touchy and unpredictable. This father is utterly generous to an astonishing degree. He simply gives his son his inheritance. He obviously represents God, God who gives shaken down and running over.
The Prodigal on the other hand is you … and me. Surely, you will say, I haven’t been so naughty as the boy in the story. I try my best to lead a good life.
Well, let’s look at that. What God has given to us, no questions asked, is stupendous. We never stop to think how extraordinary our life is. If I think of my eyesight – what we see with our eyes, if we are bleesed with the figt of sight, is fantastic – utterly extraordinary, and all the time. Never mind all the wonders of nature – just look at this place and the people in it – the mystery of our vision is a miracle.
My body – it works more or less – this one has been doing so for the last 79 years. My liver does an highly specialized job in sorting out all the nutrients and sending them to the right place and so on and so on. All of our life – the people we love, our language, music and the arts, the whole incredible experience is sheer miracle. I am so glad I’m not a slug. Despite living amongst this constgnat miracle, human beings have an great capacity for reducing everything to the level of the humdrum. We come to take eveything for granted, and even often complain about it. In William Wordsworth’s words, “trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home …”, But “At length the Man perceives it die away, and fade into the light of common day”. Children have all the wonder at this miracle of life. Thomas Traherne wrote of his childhood the “The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. … The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things: … Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared … I knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, … So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.”
God’s amazing generosity has given us all this, and it quickly becomes for us humdrum, matter-of-fact. God can’t tell us – we just need to learn. The father as he handed over the inheritance could not tell the son a thing or two – it was no good trying to tell him – he just needed to learn. God gives us this world and with it a complete freedom to do good or ill. This freedom means that God suffers what we do to his creation and what we do to each other.
If God is the generous one, we are the unaware ones. We might not feel we live like the Prodigal son, but we’re in the same boat. Sin big, sin little, it’s all sin. We, prodigal or no, are all sinners, whatever the scale might be. Sin is the other great theme of the parable. In my conversations with atheists and agnostics over the last year or so I have become very aware of the power of the Christian understanding of sin. Non-believers have a strong awareness of human imperfection, of course. It is seen as a very unfortunate, and something we need to work against. For Christians, however, sin is not just unfortunate imperfection – sin is dramatic. It is part of a drama full of hinterland and undertones. It is rich first of all because it bears with it a presupposition of the divine forgiveness. It evokes the larger picture of our redemption. When we mention the workings of sin within a group, we are conjuring up that drama of loss and redemption. In this sense, sin is a reality that bristles with hope. Mere human imperfection leaves us dissatisfied and wanting to change it. The followers of Christ on the other hand can look on sin with a degree of calmness because of God’s promises, and because of what was won for us on the cross. In the light of this you can understand the author of the Exultet, singing of that happy fault that merited such redemption.
That doesn’t take the edge off the evil of sin. The news at the moment is enough to demonstrate the lengths human sin can go to. Sin is no joke, and lack of understanding of it diminishes us. Our world has very inadequate understanding of the ramifications of sin. So when there is news of something going wrong, everyone looks for someone to blame, and then the entire public bashes them and gives them hell. There is no understanding here here about not judging your brother and sister. Nothing here about knowing that we are just as bad a sinner, that we are all in the same pickle. JD Vance may have become a Roman Catholic, but he hasn’t yet learnt the Christian understanding of sin, and its warnings against sitting in judgment.
If our modern world is quick to judge, it is also hopelessly unrealistic in the other direction, about human virtue. People who accuse wrongdoers can see themselves as righteous. We get onto particularly sticky ground nowadays with our tacit presumption of the virtue of the victim. All of this shows a naivety about sin that only the gospel can put right. We are all sinners, all sinning. We can’t claim that at least we’re doing better than the prodigal son. No one can claim to be righteous. We would love life to be a struggle bweteen goodies (that is us) and baddies (that is them), but the gospel shows that to be blind makebelieve.
So God gives us treasures galore, and God gives us freedom, a reckless freedom. We for our part are sinners, we take our money and run, whether it’s in a prodigal way or innless obvious ways. The son in the parable will have expected his father to be fierce with him – he only turned to him when he was absolutely forced to. What he got was a big surprise.