RUN, PRODIGAL SON! _[1]

BROAD HIGHWAY

1.  The younger brother of Jesus’ parable is not a story-book character nor a mysterious hieroglyph of an ancient culture. He is each of us, he is all of us. Luke’s remembrance of Jesus’ parable is likewise authentic, for it reflects truthfully the deepest longing of the human heart for healing and redemption.

2. We can insert ourselves easily into the evangelists story because sin, and the suffering it causes, is a comprehensive disorder affecting humanity. The young man’s sorrow is our sorrow. We careen down the same broad highway in sin "for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many".  [Mt 7:13] 

FILIAL PROTOCOL 

3. And, like the prodigal son, God arouses our conscience to opt for right thinking; he leads us to the narrow gate:  "For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few."  [Mt 7:14; cf. Isa 45:13]  The elder brother in Luke's parable, concerned with filial protocol, censures his brother as an opportunistic sinner.

4. Unmoved by his brother's return, he refuses to grant him freedom to change, to begin again, to become a new person. Hence, Luke's story identifies sin as acts of commission--referencing the younger sibling's known and unknown sinful acts--and as acts of omission--as in the example of the aloof brother who refuses to extend benevolence.

PROFOUND DESOLATION 

5. That the boy's father does not catalogue the sins of his son is crucial. Whether venial or mortal, all sin serves as a warning to man that his need for God is genuine and urgent. Should one suppress or varnish his sins, or worse yet receives applause for his wickedness, he will not escape the consequences of evil in his own soul.

6. His soul is bruised and marred by sin, and in the case of serious sin, grievously wounded. Luke poignantly illustrates this reality by recalling the son's profound desolation:  "He would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything."  [Lk 15:16] 

"NOISE OF TEARING" 

7. Why must one linger in sin until he perceives that meaningful repentance will be less traumatic to the soul than the sin which threatens to annihilate his whole being? Why is he more disposed to die in sin than to live in grace? The civil war-era poet Stephen Crane, writing in the 19th century, observed with respect to man's fallen nature:  No strange move can I make/  Without noise of tearing.^[2]

8. Sin is each man's strange move and the noise of tearing is the damage being wrought to his own soul. Every man becomes a prodigal and an adulterer when he rejects God's covenant authority in his life: 

EXCLUSION OF God, rupture with God, disobedience to God: throughout the history of mankind this has been and is, in various forms, sin. It can go as far as a very denial of God and his existence: this is the phenomenon called atheism.

IT IS the disobedience of a person who, by a free act, does not acknowledge God's sovereignty over his or her life, at least at that particular moment in which he or she transgresses God's law.^[3]   

PERSONAL SELFISHNESS

9. We betray the sacredness of our relationships. We sacrifice the common good for our own personal selfishness. We corrupt the moral and ethical way of life given to us by the Lord. We misuse God’s gifts and grasp for what is not ours to have. We deny ourselves the possibility of being God’s instruments of reconciliation. We experience cold relief when someone else is savaged and treated mercilessly.

10. We gawk at misery. We are amused by persons whose debilitation is huckstered by media profiteers. We collaborate with cultural parasites to belittle misery and pander callous voyeurism in the name of reality entertainment. Only the human person, whose heart grows cold and selfish from sin, would choose to withhold the virtuous love that a spouse or child desperately needs.

PRAYER OF TEARS

11. Among all living creatures, only man is capable of intentional savagery. He will betray the heart of the one who loves him most. The human person cries out when he experiences the heartbreak of his own helplessness and his radical impoverishment in the world. He weeps because he needs something greater than his own wounded humanity. The human heart, a vessel for receiving and pouring out love, cannot conserve love when it is broken. The starved heart, even in its poverty, prays for fair love that seeks its authentic good.

12. Every tear is a prayer of the body; every tear reveals man's longing for divine love and mercy.^[4] Human tears betray a sorrow deeper than words can express, a sorrow the very roots of which penetrate the recesses of the soul. Sin is spiritual sickness which has as its object the disintegration of man’s humanity. A disease afflicting human wholeness, sin has a recognizable guest-host pathology—Satan preying upon the integral human person.

HUMAN HOST

13. Sin, disguised as enlightenment, disguises itself as a good in man’s social environment. Ever opportunistic, it infects any human host whose will and intellect are compromised. How swiftly man is wounded and destroyed without understanding the nature of sin or even recognizing that he is suffering!^[5] The story of the prodigal son reveals that: 

CONSEQUENTLY, ONE can speak of a communion of sin, whereby a soul that lowers itself through sin drags down with itself the Church and, in some way, the whole world. In other words, there is no sin, not even the most intimate and secret one, the most strictly individual one, that exclusively concerns the person committing it.^[6] 

14. The prodigal son proves the worth his faith, hope and love by reconciling himself to his father. In like manner, the Christian community affirms its nuptial bond to Christ as a visible Church whose essential ministry is reconciliation and the healing of wounded souls. Christ, whose sacrificial love was betrayed by cunning and deceitful men and requited by the Father’s salutary love, is infinitely more powerful than our sin, our past, and our history, no matter what it may be.

TRUE SIGN 

15. He has destroyed the power of the Destroyer and his feculent realm. Your flesh with its appetites is bound to the earth until the day of glory. You cannot present your body to God for judgment. Moreover, your flesh possesses no power to bring about its own fulfillment. Though sometimes appeased, its cravings are never satisfied. Your body, if it were to speak, would talk only of its consumption.

16. The essence of your personhood and the true sign of your humanity, however, is your eternal soul. Your soul, immaterial and immortal, is destined to everlasting punishment or tranquility. For its fulfillment, man must heed God’s call and present himself to the Most High. In spite of his grievous sins, there remains ever in man's humanity signs of earth and heaven and a capacity for redemptive love.

CULTURAL NORMS 

17. For his part, God—creator of the universe and its sustaining power—takes "no pleasure in the death of any one" but delights when a sinner turns and lives.  [Eze 18:32]   Departing the swine and the far country to which he had wandered, the young man sets his course for home. He is hopeful despite his profound distress.

18. If Jesus' parable had conformed to the cultural norms of his day, the father of the story would not have acknowledged his younger son, a known sinner. He would have directed his overseer to drive him away. The father in Jesus’ parable, however, feels compassion and hurries to embrace his wayward son on the difficult road.  [cf. Lk 15:20] 

"BEST ROBE" 

19. "Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him," the father orders his servants, "and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet."  [Lk 15:22]  The father knew that his son’s heart was a broken vessel  [cf. Jer 2:13], parched and begging to be filled. "He was lost and is found," the father cries out. [Lk 15:32] 

20. Without doubt, Jesus’ parable proclaims the extravagant love of our heavenly Father for his repentant human children. To merely turn and look down the spiritual road leading to the narrow gate is enough to stir our heavenly Father’s compassionate Spirit. Run prodigal son, on the heavenly way!

FIRST CLAIM 

21. Allow him to receive and welcome you into his love! Surrender your wounded soul to his healing embrace! Let his merciful kiss of grace and forgiveness rouse your wounded soul from the exhaustion of sin! Pour your heart out "like water before the presence of the Lord"  [Lam 2:19]  who has prepared a place for you!  [cf. Jn 14:1-7]: 

AND A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not pass over it, and fools shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. 

AND THE ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.  [Isa 35:8-10] 

22. This parable of the prodigal son has flourished for twenty centuries precisely because it is a story of compassion. The Father’s benevolent treatment of his youngest son proves that the poor and the poor in spirit  [cf. Mt 5:3, Lk 6:20]  have a first claim to the Gospel, not because they deserve it or because poverty is hidden wealth, but because they are more receptive to the Good News.

OPPORTUNITY FOR GRACE 

23. The younger son’s repentance projects him into an unfamiliar setting—he approaches his father’s house as would a stranger—to seek out his father, drawing near to him with humility in the hope that the turmoil in his heart would be healed. He returns his father’s embrace and speaks sorrowfully:  "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son."  [Lk 15:21] 

24. Yet he became worthy in that instant did he not?  Pope John Paul II speaks of the critical moment in which man confronts his own sin and, by so doing, his true self. The experience of genuine self-awareness offers the sinner an opportunity for grace:  ...to recognize (himself) as being a sinner, capable of sin and inclined to commit sin, is the essential first step in returning to God."^[7]

"LORD IS MERCY" 

25. When we give our lives to God, he kindles our darkened hearts to radiate the fire of his love. What is wounded within us become the very means by which we are saved: 

(DIVINE MERCY) is a love more powerful than sin, stronger than death. When we realize that God's love for us does not cease in the face of our sin or recoil before our offenses, but becomes even more attentive and generous; when we realize that this love went so far as to cause the Passion and Death of the Word made flesh who consented to redeem us at the price of his own blood, then we exclaim in gratitude: 'Yes the Lord is rich in mercy,' and even:  "The Lord is mercy."^[8]     

26. Luke's gospel drives home a poignant truth. For the one who renounces virtuous love, seeking forgiveness becomes an act of futility. Should our frail and wounded human love recoil before Our Lord's redemptive love, it cannot survive at all. Any direction that leads away from the Father is the wrong direction.

ARDUOUS PATH 

27. Any expression in the name of love that excludes the incarnation and the passion, death and resurrection of Christ is a doxology  (Lat. doxologia, praise words)  of death. No one may call himself Christian who denies Our Lord’s proofs of love, that is to say, the corpus  (Lat. body)  of his divine revelation, the hierarchical order by which truth is systematized, and the hope of our ultimate union with the Divine Logos  (Gk. word) himself.

28. The redemption won by Christ on the cross is vital for God’s chosen people. Sacramental reconciliation, the stronghold of which is the sacrifice of Our Lord’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, safeguards the Christian community on the arduous path. Indeed, we may assert with unerring conviction that the way of reconciliation is itself the arduous path. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," says the Lord. "No one comes to the Father, but by me."  [Jn 14:6] 

REDEMPTIVE LOVE 

29. Hence, Our Lord’s ministry of saving mercy finds its home in the hearts of countless men and women of good will in every generation, the great crowd who follow him in every time and place. We must acknowledge the limitations of the past-present paradigm. Was lost-is found tends to suggest mere recovery or restoration, whereas in God reconciliation propels one to the experience of life triumphing over death.

30. With God there is no separation of past, present, and future. In God, these dimensions of time are one and the same. Not encompassed by temporal beginnings or endings, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell in perfect love outside of human time. We remember the prodigal son's story in this place and in our time because Jesus willed that his great act of redemptive love—the instrument by which he would obtain for us divine pardon and grace—would cross the boundaries of time.

"WASH YOURSELVES" 

31. Because the Lord is deeply moved by our sincerity, he frees us in the present moment from enslavement to the past that we might be restored to the promise of our future. Therefore, make every effort to "...wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow."  [Isa 1:16-17] 

32. The intrepid son found forgiveness. In the same way, we must be courageous followers of Jesus Christ—searching for our Lord wherever he may be found—even to entering old territory in a startling new way and suffering the condemnation of others. We must seek out the divine help, for all of us are in need of the first gift which, before all others in the matter of salvation, is God’s merciful requital of our sins.

GOD'S WILL BE DONE!

33. Let us never forsake the One-Who-Forgives: God the Father, Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen.^[9] God's promises are going to come true. We must act in faith and abide, not in helplessness and hopelessness, but in the reality that these promises are being fulfilled now in our very midst. You may say in the turmoil of your heart on that day, Lord, the hour of my love for you has not yet come  [cf. Jn 2:4], but pray from the bottom of your soul that His will, not yours, be done!  [cf. Mt. 6:10, 26:42]  

^[1]  Cycle C   /Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time   /Exo 32:7-11, 13-14   /1Tim 1:12-17   /Lk 15:1-32.  

^[2]  Stephen Crane,  THE COLLECTED POEMS OF STEPHEN CRANE,  "The Black Riders and Other Lines",  XL,  ed. Wilson Follett  (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941)  42.   

^[3]  John Paul II,  RECONCILIATIO ET PAENITENTIA,  no. 14  (1984). 

^[4]  Cf  Augustine of Hippo,  THE CONFESSIONS,  Book III,  Chapt. 12,  no. 21,  NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS,  vol. 1  (1886; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994)  67.  "Monica, lamenting the debased behavior of her son Augustine, went to a bishop in their native Africa renown for holiness. He attempted to console her by the experience of his own youth.  (When Monica) would not be satisfied, but repeated more earnestly her entreaties, shedding copious tears (the bishop), a little vexed at her importunity, exclaimed, 'Go thy way, and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.' Which answer she accepted as though it were a voice from heaven."   

^[5]  Cf  Msgr. Luigi Giussani,  "By Grace, Always",  Thirty Days  3  (1993):  66-71.  "For it is possible to be destroyed and wounded without suffering and, therefore, without embarking on the search for an answer..."     

^[6]  John Paul II,  Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, no. 16  (1984).  

^[7]  Ibid.,  no. 13. 

^[8]  Ibid.,  no. 22. 

^[9]  SACRAMENTARY, "Profession of Faith", Nicene Creed  (1985).