Fatherhood and the Prodigal Son PDF Print E-mail
Written by Michael D. O'Brien   
Saturday, 30 July 2005 00:00
Page 1 of 3
All of us are to some degree afflicted with a tragically stunted image of who we are. This tendency in human nature has never been so pronounced as in our times, when we are continually bombarded with false messages about the meaning of human life, the value of the human person and his ultimate destiny. Indeed, at every turn we are saturated in anti-words, false words. In Jesus we have been given the true Word made flesh, who shows us what we really are and points the way to what we are to become. He does this not only through his teachings, but also by the witness of his life. In Christ, God lays bare his heart in the total vulnerability of being fully human, to the point of permitting himself to be crucified.

He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, as the prophet Isaiah says. He knew joy, but he accepted the suffering of our state in life. He accepted it because he knew that in the passage through the eye of the needle, a great secret is to be found. The priceless "secret" is that on the other side of the needle's eye is a vast and beautiful kingdom—an infinite kingdom in which the beauty of God the Father is ever creating more and more beauty, more and more love. And even in this world we, created in the image and likeness of God, can reflect this. Like him, we must go through the eye of the needle and, following his example, through the Cross. For most of us this is a lifelong journey, with many trials and errors, and even some false trails. Yet, because Christ is who he says he is, because he is Love, he is always leading us back on the path that will bring us to the Father.

Parables of the Father

Throughout the Gospels, there are a number of parables, as well as less metaphorical teachings, where Jesus tells us about the Father's love. We are most familiar with the parable of the prodigal son. We understand that it is about forgiveness and about being restored again, given a new start. But there are depths of meaning in it that are often unexplored. Of course Jesus wants us to consider the most obvious meaning of the story, but he also wants us to go deeper, in order to better know our heavenly Father.

A man had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the share of the estate that is coming to me." So the father divided up the property. Days later, this younger son collected all his belongings and went off to a distant land where he squandered his money on dissolute living. After he had spent everything, a great famine broke out in that country and he was in dire need. So he attached himself to one of the propertied class of the place, who sent him to his farm to take care of the pigs. He longed to fill his belly with husks that were the fodder for the pigs, but no one made a move to give him anything. Coming to his senses at last, he said, "How many hired hands at my father's place have more than enough to eat while here I am starving. I will get up and return to my father and say to him, 'Father I have sinned against God and against you, I no longer deserve to be called your son. Treat me like one of your hired hands.'" With that he set off for his father's house.

While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him and was deeply moved. He ran out to meet him, threw his arms around his son and kissed him. The son said to him, "Father I have sinned against God and against you and I no longer deserve to be called your son." The father said to his servants, "Quickly bring out the finest robe and put it on him, put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet. Take the fatted calf and kill it. Let us eat and celebrate because this son of mine was dead and has come back to life, he was lost and is found." And then the celebration began.

Meanwhile the elder son was out on the land and, as he neared the house on his way home, he heard the sound of music and dancing. He called one of the servants and asked him the reason for the dancing and the music. The servant answered, "Your brother is home and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has him back in good health." The son grew angry and would not go in. But his father came out and began to plead with him. He said to his father in reply, "For years now I have slaved for you. I never disobeyed one of your orders, yet you never gave me so much as kid to celebrate with my friends. Then when this son of yours returns after having gone through your property with loose women, you kill the fatted calf for him."

"My son," replied the father, "you are with me always and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice. This brother of yours was dead and has come back to life. He was lost and is found" (Luke 15: 11-32).

Numerous insights could be extracted from this story, though it is deceptively simple. We are looking here at three different characters, a father and his two sons. Obviously, the elder son is a righteous young man, good, responsible, and loyal. He has done everything correctly. What is Jesus telling us here? He is showing us among other things that the elder son in his own hidden way, hidden from his own eyes, is himself a prodigal son. Listen to the words which the Lord uses in constructing the tale. The elder son reproaches his father, saying, "this son of yours," and the father corrects him, saying, "this brother of yours." The elder son has in some way rejected his brother. He despises him; he doesn't just despise his sin, he holds his whole being in contempt. The father is gently reminding him that he and his brother are connected by more than blood, by more than a social contract, or by a formal membership in a clan or a family. He is asking the elder son to see that in some indefinable but real way their souls are bound together, they belong to each other.

Pride, our root sin, is strongly at work in the elder brother, though he does not recognize it in himself. He believes that the universe is constructed on Justice alone, a kind of rigid framework in which if you obey all the laws you should reap all the rewards. He believes that this principle (for which he has labored and sacrificed much) has been betrayed by his father's mercy. It is interesting that the prodigal son makes no such appeal to justice. He simply throws himself into his father's arms knowing full well that he deserves nothing. In contrast, the elder son makes a case that he deserves everything.

Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus teaches with great firmness about the necessity of obedience to the law and about the deadly nature of sin and error. However, in such parables as the prodigal son and the good shepherd, he points out that Mercy is a necessary component of Justice, just as Justice is necessary to Mercy. Neither can function well without the other. Without mercy, it is difficult, if not impossible, for men to be restored to living a just life. Without justice, human mercy all too easily dissolves into sentimentalism and false compassion, leading to an increase of sin and error.

Revelation in a Foreign Land

When I was traveling in Russia a few years ago, I visited the city of St. Petersburg, and there I spent an afternoon in the former winter palace of the Czars, which is now a museum called the Hermitage. It contains more than three million works of art. As an artist, I was soon overwhelmed by fabulously beautiful works of art of all ages, and began to stagger around the Hermitage in a kind of a trance-like state, mentally and emotionally overloaded. Without knowing where I was going, I wandered up a magnificent marble staircase to another wing of the museum.

There I entered a large gallery, only vaguely conscious that it contained Dutch and Flemish art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As I walked through the door and looked up, I suddenly found myself face to face with Rembrandt's famous painting The Return of the Prodigal Son.

Let me describe it for those who haven't seen reproductions of it: It is a huge work, the figures in it life-size. The artist has depicted the three main characters of the parable. The father is the central image. He is a little old wizened man portrayed at the very moment when the son has thrown himself into his father's arms. The son is kneeling, dressed in rags, covered with filth, diseased, his shoes torn and falling off his feet. He is a total disaster, a ne'er-do-well of the worst sort. He has lost everything, he has no claim to anything, he has been reduced to the absolute poverty of our human condition. He is a sinner. He is not only a sinner, he is a stupid sinner. The only thing he has left are these old arms around him. The son's face is turned away in shame. His eyes are closed, for he cannot bear to look at his father's face. The father is bending over the son, gazing down at him, with his two hands on the son's back, enfolding him, drawing him in with very great tenderness. And on that old face one can see not only pity (after all, pity is not so hard to find in our hearts), but something deeper than pity. A kind of mystical and holy mercy.

We must distinguish between mercy and pity. It is as if the father is gazing through dimensions of time, and seeing the infant he once held in his arms not so many years before. He sees also the healthy young man who strode off into the world with all his hopes, all his resources, all this strength, and has now returned shattered and humiliated. The artist is trying to evoke in us an understanding of the great heart of this human father, and through him to offer a glimpse of the great heart of our Father in Heaven. The father of the prodigal son is gazing deeply through the layers of the son's mistakes, deep into the core of who this child really is in the eyes of God. He also sees the man the Father intended him to be from the beginning, the identity he lost through his wrong choices. But the true father does not forget, and God does not forget. He sees who his son is called to be. He believes in the image of God within the degraded image of the son, even though the son does not yet believe in it, does not yet know himself.

It is interesting to note that just preceding the prodigal son parable in the Gospel is to be found the parables of the lost sheep and the lost talent. In this context we can see that Jesus is emphasizing again and again the love of the Father. In all three stories the Father seeks the lost. In the parable of the prodigal son there is a variation, for the father does not go out seeking, but waits until the son makes the move to return home. We must remember that the father has been seeking him constantly in his heart, which is revealed in the way he instantly runs out to greet him before his arrival, welcoming him wholeheartedly. This seeking on the father's part is also revealed in the more mysterious spiritual welcome, in the way the father seeks the image of God in his son, and finds it long before the son becomes capable of knowing himself.

Wasting Our Inheritance

How can the son believe that he is anything other than worthless? The father must believe for him. He shows him the truth by offering his unqualified mercy, thus giving to him the faith and hope that is necessary if he would grow beyond his errors. The prodigal son has wasted his inheritance. How easy it is to think ill of him, to say to ourselves, Well, thank God we are not like that! But do we not all waste our inheritance? We all of us waste our inheritance of grace, not because we willfully choose to go out and plunge into corruption like the prodigal son (though some of us do). Much of our habit of wasting grace comes from not knowing who we are in the eyes of God. We do not really believe what he tells us about who we are and who he is. Of course, we accept the theological abstractions, we acknowledge on some level the truth of what Jesus tell us, but it does not burn in our hearts. It remains semi-dormant in our heads, and whenever it comes to mind we perhaps think to ourselves, yes, that's a wonderful truth and isn't it great to have a good God like this. But it rarely if ever brings us to the point of throwing ourselves into the arms of God. We work hard to prevent ourselves becoming that weak—as weak as a child in desperate need of his father's mercy. We become that weak whenever life brings us to moments of encounter with physical, emotional, or material failure in the ordinary and extraordinary trials of existence.

The trials of life are never more intense than when raising children in a time of history such as ours. John Paul II frequently reminded us that we live in what he called "the culture of death." And it is exactly that: it is a culture which rewards deadly activities and punishes life practically at every turn. I would like to tell you two stories which pertain to this culture, and which may shed a little light on how mercy and weakness have much to teach us about building a civilization of love.

No Place to Go but Up!

When my wife and I were first married, it was at a time when we had both discerned that God was asking me to be a Christian artist, a rather daunting task in these times. We had no real resources, we weren't wealthy, our families didn't have money. We knew it would demand a great deal of sacrifice, with a strong likelihood of failure. The decision was the result of much prayer and discussion, and we had come to a peace about it, a mutual agreement that we would risk our lives responding totally to God's call. As a result, for the next twenty-five years we lived in a style to which we would rather not have grown accustomed. I hesitate to use the word poverty in a world where so many people suffer acute poverty, where their basic necessities are not met. But in our society, my wife and I have lived pretty much at the bottom level. There was no place to go but up! We still shop at second hand stores, drive old wrecks, and are often blessed with help from friends and neighbors, without which we could not keep going. I am not here to complain about it, but to speak about what it has taught me, to say that I now value this poverty as the greatest treasure of my life, after faith, and my wife, and my children.

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