The Prodigal Son and Our Belovedness in the Father, Part I

Selections from Part I of a talk I gave on the Parable of the Prodigal Son

Younger son (YS) – “give me” mentality, I deserve my inheritance, it belongs to me – I take; “The son is as impatient as the father was kind” (Peter Chrysologus).  (Grasping and grabbing)  Really saying to the Father: “I wish you were dead.”  It is usually only when someone dies that we receive inheritance.

Imagine what takes place during those few days before the son leaves.  When the son leaves and sets off to a distant country, he is not only leaving home, but he is leaving himself.  He wishes to leave his identity behind.  He wants to be his own person.  How often are we tempted by this?  “Be somebody” the world tells us.  Somebody powerful, rich, and famous.  Be somebody.  We are already somebody.  We are God’s beloved.  Each one of us.  We are loved by the Father from all eternity.  “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”  Apart from his father, he has no identity.  By leaving, he rejects his identity as son.  He loses himself.  We separate ourselves from Christ and the Father.  However, the Father gives him his share of the inheritance. By doing so, the Father is saying “I love you.”  You are still my son and so I give you MY inheritance.  In the same way, we too are given this enduring inheritance at baptism.  Though we sin, the Spirit never leaves us.  The son may have rejected his identity, but the Father never stops loving, never withholds his love.  He is His son forever.  More on this later. 

We are told that the son “squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation.”  The YS had the freedom to choose what to do with the money.  He did not choose to save up, buy a house, and start a life of responsibility, but rather a life of sin. God gives us many gifts.  Through our baptism we receive the Holy Spirit and even more so in Confirmation.  How do we choose to use the gifts of the Holy Spirit?  How do we choose to use the gifts God has given to us?  Our inheritance is our life in Christ.  How do we choose to use His love and mercy?  “To be in the realm of lustful passion is the same as in the realm of darkness” (Augustine).  When we choose to use our inheritance in the darkness and on worldly pleasures, we draw ourselves away from the light, we abandon our identity. 

After he used up all his money, a famine struck the country.  Coincidence or providential?  Punishment or grace?  When the YS has used up every last penny, then famine strikes.  Some may say how can God be so hard on the son and at the most desperate point of his life when he has no more funds to cast a famine?  This can be viewed as punishment for a life of sin and dissipation.  However, it is actually a great gift and grace God gives to the YS.  How so?  By wasting the inheritance given to him by the Father, the son finally experienced the pain and suffering that comes with losing everything, not just his money and material possession, but himself.  It is at this desperate point of the son’s life that the Father attempts to remind the son of who he is.  But the son could not hear the Father’s call.  He recognized that he was in “dire need” but he did not realize that only the Father could satisfy those needs.  St. Ambrose tells us that this famine was one of good works and virtues.  “Whoever leaves treasure lacks.  Whoever departs from wisdom is stupefied.  Whoever departs from virtue is destroyed. … He who does not know how to be filled with eternal nourishment always suffers starvation.” 

The YS “hired himself out” to the “local citizens.”  Instead of turning to the Father he attached himself to the world by hiring himself out (trading his very self, his identity) to the people of the world (earthly comforts).  He tends the pigs.  How desperate he must have been for a Jewish man to touch pigs.  The YS would have done anything just to eat what the pigs ate, but “nobody gave him any.” He received none because what he really longed to eat was not what the pigs were eating, but rather the food that eternally sustains and the waters that are living – “Man does not live on bread alone but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.”  He could not be sustained by the food of the swine.  Like the woman at the well, he would need to keep returning. 

How do we use our inheritance?  How have I encountered and battled the famines of my life?  Did I see those famines as punishments from God and bore them begrudgingly or did I see them as moments of grace where God was drawing me closer to Himself, inviting us to a deeper trust in Him?  Do we seek to live on earthly bread, or do we seek to live on heavenly bread?  Do we move farther away from God and attach ourselves more securely to the world during those periods of starvation in our lives?  It is especially at those moments that we must see that the immediate comforts the world offers are not eternal.  It is only a quick fix.  It only treats the symptoms, it does not cure.  We must courageously embrace the pain and suffering and do so uniting ourselves with Our Lord on the Cross.  It does not matter how far away we have traveled, as long as we recognize we are in dire need and turn to God, He will always lead us back to Himself.

At this point the YS comes to that realization.  He remembered who he was.  His heart was opened.  And thus the gifts of the Holy Spirit was put to work and its fruits were slowly growing.  The YS recognized that he still had a father at home and that he was still a son.  This was possible because of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit never left him.  By our Baptism, though we sin, the Holy Spirit never leaves us.  Grace is never withheld.  We choose to receive or reject.  The YS realized he did not belong here.  He begins to see the light.  The Spirit never leaves us, even at our darkest moments.  Call out to Him.  “Come Holy Spirit!”  “Let us too return to our Father’s house, my brothers, and do not become captivated with desire for this transient earth – for your true city is in Eden” (Hymns on Paradise 14.7, Ephrem the Syrian).   

The YS makes a confession.  The desire of this confession was reconciliation.  This desire for reconciliation and communion moved the son to get up and go back to his father.  “I do not deserve.”  A gift.  All is gift and all is grace.  “You are a son through baptism, friend through virtue, hired servant through labor, and slave through fear” (Ambrose).  Like the YS we all begin at sonship, but we choose to become enslaved by rooting our identity in someone and something other than the Father and His love.