Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius April 10, 2015 Spiritual Ponderings Prodigal Son
For the month of April as we transition from Lent into Easter, I would like to reflect with you on the insights of the parable of the Prodigal Son as shared with us through Fr. Nouwen’s Book:
The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming and Rembrandt’s painting
The Prodigal Son. Quotes from Nouwen’s book will be in bold and my commentary will be in regular font.
Kenneth Bailey, in his penetrating explanation of Luke’s story, shows that the son’s manner of leaving is tantamount to wishing the father dead. The son’s “leaving” is, therefore, a much more offensive act than it seems at first reading. It is a heartless rejection of the home in which the son was born and nurtured and a break with the most precious tradition carefully upheld by the larger community of which he was a part. The younger son basically tells his father to “drop dead.” He no longer wants any sort of relationship with him. He has chosen pleasure and adventure over his family. I can barely imagine how crushing this must have been to the Father. I do this all the time when I sin. I reject all that God has given me and tell God I wish he as dead because I rather have momentary pleasure then everlasting life.
When Luke writes, “and left for a distant country,” he indicates much more than the desire of a young man to see the world. He speaks about a drastic cutting loose from the way of living, thinking, and acting that has been handed down to him from generation to generation as a sacred legacy. More than disrespect, it is a betrayal of the treasured values of family and community. The “distant country” is the world in which everything considered holy at home is disregarded. Once again Luke is driving home the fact that the younger son has sinned against his father not in some small way but in the ultimate way possible.
More than any other story in the Gospel, the parable of the prodigal son expresses the boundlessness of God’s compassionate love. Meister Eckhart, a medieval theologian once said, “In order to get at God in his greatest, we must get at ourselves at our worse.” In other words the more realize just how bad our sins are and that God still loves us the more we see the greatness of God.
Leaving home is, then, much more than an historical event bound to time and place. It is a denial of the spiritual reality that I belong to God with every part of my being, that God holds me safe in an eternal embrace, that I am indeed carved in the palms of God’s hands and hidden in their shadows. Leaving home means ignoring the truth that God has “fashioned me in secret, molded me in the depths of the earth and knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” Leaving home is living as though I do not yet have a home and must look far and wide to find one. When I know that I am loved by God then I follow his commandments with greater ease. When I doubt God’s love for me following God’s commandments becomes much more difficult.
One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness. There is something in us humans that keep us clinging to our sins and prevents us from letting God erase our fast and offer us a completely new beginning. Sometimes it even seems as though I want to prove to God that my darkness is too great to overcome. While God wants to restore me to the full dignity of sonship, I keep insisting that I will settle for being a hires servant. At Baptism God adopted us and made us His sons and daughters. He desires to not be an absentee father. He really wants to spend eternity with each of us around His dinner table.