Chapter 2
Awareness, Repentance, and Reconciliation
Prayerfully read Luke 15:11–32
During his public ministry, Jesus taught in parables. Parables are stories that engage interest and teach lessons through the details, images, and trends of daily life within a culture. Among Jesus’ many parables, the parable of the prodigal son stands out as a paradigm of conversion. We might also call it the parable of the loving father, or the parable of two sons. Even though it is a story and not an encounter with Jesus during his public ministry, it is still good to consider because it provides us with deep insights into important aspects of conversion.
We know and love this story so well, probably because we all see a little bit of ourselves in each of the characters. Each of us has been like the younger son, saying hurtful things and squandering the inheritance we receive from our families and our Church. Each of us has probably been like the older son, refusing to enter into a relationship with someone because we wanted them to receive “justice,” not mercy. Each of us has many opportunities to be like the loving father, waiting eagerly for reconciliation with a family member or friend despite the deep hurt they have caused us. In each of these scenarios, there is a lesson for us as we seek to enter more deeply into a life of ongoing conversion.
A troubled history
Parables have many layers of meaning. Here, the first layer of meaning is God’s plan for his whole kingdom. In this story, Jesus provides an allegorical account of Israel’s sordid history. A man has two sons, one of whom demands his inheritance and leaves home for “a far country” (Lk 15:11–13). Jesus intends to teach his audience about the ways that Israel has rejected the Father’s perfect plan over the centuries. Jesus tells the parable so that we, too, can remember the Father’s great blessings and so that we will not leave for “a far country” in our modern age.
After the reigns of King David and King Solomon, the high point of Israel’s history, around the eighth century BC, the kingdom split into two because of a feud between Solomon’s sons. The descendants of the ten northern tribes became the kingdom of Israel, while the descendants of the two southern tribes became the kingdom of Judah. After more than 200 years of civil and social strife, and ignoring messages from prophets, both kingdoms were exiled to the “far countries” of Assyria and Babylon. While they were exiled in Assyria, the descendants of the ten northern tribes of Israel began to worship idols and abandoned the one true God.4
After the period of exile, only the southern kingdom of Judah returned to the promised land. The ten northern tribes assimilated into the cultures of the surrounding nations. Like the younger son in the parable, they squandered their inheritance from the Lord by rejecting his perfect plan for them.
In the parable, the older son is bitter about the father’s mercy toward the younger son. This is a bit like the way the descendants of the kingdom of Judah felt toward the descendants of the kingdom of Israel. By the time of Christ, the Samaritans were the remnant of those tribes. After several centuries of life and culture divorced from covenant relationship with God, the Samaritans were a sort of religious half-breed.5 They wanted to mix the worship of the one true God with the beliefs and rituals of the surrounding pagan nations. This caused the Jews to view them as traitors to the covenant. Elsewhere in the Gospels, we read that “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (Jn 4:9). By interacting with Samaritans and sinners, Jesus wants to show that God wants his lost tribes restored to full relationship and status in his kingdom.
This is where the parable of the prodigal son comes into play. God has a plan for his new people, the Church, too. Yet many of us have rejected his will and strayed from his divine plan, sometimes causing others to stray too. Because of this, we are always in need of conversion, as has been true of God’s people in every age of salvation history. The only way for the whole people of God to be fully in right relationship with him is for each of us to return to him day after day, season after season. We can find inspiration for that conversion when we read parables such as this. In fact, that’s why Jesus told these parables: so we can constantly find inspiration to begin anew, despite our selfish ways. We realize too that the conversion of the whole Church happens only when each individual — you and I — convert more fully to the Lord’s plan.
Seeing myself in the son
I mentioned that the first layer of meaning in the parable was historical. The parables can also be read morally (how they teach us to act) and anagogically (how they teach us about eschatological realities, the things that will come about at the end of history). The remainder of our discussion of this parable will focus primarily on the moral sense.
From the very beginning of the parable, we sense that something is amiss in the dynamics of this family. An inheritance only passes from father to son when the father dies. So when the younger son demands his inheritance, what he means is, “Father, you are dead to me.”
This raises a number of questions for us. First, have I ever treated my father (or any person of importance in my life) the way the son treats his father in this story? If I had a son who treated me this way, how would I react? Would I be very hurt? Would I react as any rational human being might and reject the demand? At certain points in my life, my relationship with my father was incredibly strained. Both of us said and did hurtful things. At one point, we didn’t speak for many months while I went on living with my self-righteous attitude. Only now, as a father of sons myself, can I imagine the anguish and pain I caused my father.
Yet, the loving father in the parable simply “divided his living” between the sons (Lk 15:12). One note about biblical translation is interesting here. The word translated as “living” is the Greek word bios. That is also the Greek word for life — human life.6 The use of this word in the parable implies that what is divided is more than simply an income or a trust fund. The father’s very life is torn in two. Half of his heart has been taken from him. Or more accurately, he gives away half of his heart to the younger son.
Just think about the love our heavenly Father has for each of us. How many times, out of pride or greed or lust or anger, have we acted in ways that tore his fatherly heart in two? Jesus Christ, upon his crucifixion, had his very heart pierced, and blood and water flowed out. One of the greatest, most popular devotions that we have in the Church today is the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in which we come to know his pierced heart more fully, even sharing in Jesus’ suffering. When we enter into the heart of Jesus and the love of our heavenly Father, we can recognize the ways that we have chosen ourselves over God’s more perfect plan, and that awareness enables us to change.
A far country
The younger son gathers his belongings and begins his journey into a “far country,” where he “squandered his property in loose living” (Lk 15:13). This “far country” is not simply geographical. It is emotional and spiritual as well. Because of his hardness of heart, this son moves away from his loving father emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. He squanders everything because he doesn’t recognize that it has been a gift from his father.
How many of us have acted in this way throughout our lives? Because of the sinfulness that dwells in us, it is easy for us to take off for that far country, away from our heavenly Father, and to squander the gifts that he has granted to us, because we are seeking pleasure or power or both.
After squandering his inheritance, the son “began to be in want” because of a great famine (Lk 15:14). What have we done in our lives that has left us hungry for better things, hungry for the solid things that God provides instead of what the world provides? Have we found ourselves trying to fill our deep spiritual hunger with the wrong things?
One of the most poignant passages of the whole parable comes next: “So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country” (Lk 15:15). This young man left his father’s house and became a resident of a far country.