“And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him… ‘for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to make merry” (Luke 15:20,24)
It’s termed the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, a prelude to Great Lent; but it may well be called the parable of a father’s inexplicable love. We respond to our Lord Jesus Christ’s fabulous tale of a Jewish father’s overwhelming compassion for a son who had abused that paternal affection by rejecting it as just too much. Where on earth would we find such a father? The Lord might say: “Nowhere.” That’s the point of the tale. This is not about a lad gone wrong, but a father responding to excessive wrongheadedness with a love that exceeds all human expectations. This is about the heavenly Father of the Son of God. This is the Father of Jesus Christ.
Among the plethora of lessons to be garnered from the parable of the Loving Father, notice when the string of his fortunes ran out. Starving, humiliated, threatened not to eat the pods he was to feed the swine, aware that he was close to death from starvation, finally the illumination. “He came to himself.” [v.17] Leaving the parable setting, since this is really the story of our heavenly Father in relation to Adam [all prodigals since Eden], why would a loving Creator wait so long to come to the aid of His pathetic creature? The question is raised in a variety of forms.
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov has the atheist Ivan explaining to his believing brother that if a single tear of suffering of an innocent child is the price of a passport to paradise, he respectfully returns the ticket. Just last month at a reception, I tried explaining the working of a patient, loving God in a world working out its salvation through humanity without violating the free will of each person, regardless of how long the process will play out. My adversary, a self-styled agnostic, was prepared to believe only in a deity who created a perfect world. As my grandmother would say, it was like tossing peas against a wall.
Another theme is portrayed, or rather, an extension of the same insight of divine love combined with a respect for the human being’s free will that the Lord will not violate regardless of the suffering that the man or woman brings upon himself or herself. Imagine the agony of the parents for their foolish, sinful son. Did they hear rumors of where the young man was throughout his absence from the homestead – when he ran out of funds…where he went to seek solace…what he reduced himself to doing in order to stave off starvation? How many times did the loving father hold back from going out in search of the foolish lad – but he would not. Neither is it the way of our heavenly Father. If the gift of human nature includes freedom, then that free choice must be ours, even if we should perish without reconciliation to Christ’s Father and our Father in heaven. Salvation is not a game that always results in a happy ending.
The final lesson is drawn from the resentful elder son who was infuriated by the royal treatment accorded to his profligate brother. Most likely, our Lord Jesus had first in mind the Pharisees of His time on earth who scorned the tax collectors and social rejects or as in the parable of the Good Samaritan, all non-Jews. In our day, it applies to the Orthodox Christians who are unconcerned with the visitors to their churches, or the superiority of the cradle Orthodox towards converts.