PRODIGAL SON

12 things you need to know about the Prodigal Son

by Jimmy Akin

On the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the gospel reading is the famous parable of the "prodigal son."

It is a moving story that teaches us about God's love for us and his willingness to forgive us no matter what we have done.

But there is more to the story than meets the eye . . . much more.

Here are 12 things you need to know.

1. What does "prodigal" mean?

The word "prodigal" is mysterious to us. Almost the only time we ever hear it is in the title of this parable. It's basic meaning is "wasteful"--particularly with regard to money.

It comes from Latin roots that mean "forth" (pro-) and "to drive" (agere). It indicates the quality of a person who drives forth his money--who wastes it by spending with reckless abandon.

That's what the prodigal son does in this story.

2. Why does Jesus tell this parable?

This question is answered at the beginning of Luke 15, where we read:

[1] Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him [Jesus]. [2] And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, "This man receives sinners and eats with them." [3] So he told them this parable . . . Actually, Jesus tells three parables:

• The parable of the lost sheep
• The parable of the lost coin
• The parable of the lost son (or, as we know it, the parable of the prodigal son)

All three parables are on the subject of recovering the lost, which is the implicit explanation of why Jesus receives sinners and eats with them: They are lost, and he wants to recover them.

Interestingly, the parable of the prodigal son (and the parable of the lost coin) occur only in Luke.

3. What's happening in the parable?

Jesus' parables are based on real-life situations, though they often veer off from the expected course of events in surprising ways. Those surprises teach us lessons.

Here, Jesus relates the situation of a father who has two sons, one of whom can't wait for his inheritance.

In Jewish society, there were laws regarding how inheritances were typically divided. The oldest brother got a double share (cf. Deut. 21:17), while the other brothers got a single share.

When there were two brothers (as here), the older brother would get 2/3rds of the estate, and the younger brother would get 1/3rd.

4. What is the prodigal son asking for?

In this parable, the younger son demands "the share of property that falls to me" (v. 12).

That means he is asking for the 1/3rd of the father's possessions that he would ordinarily get when the father dies.

Think about that.

He's asking his father to give him 1/3rd of everything that he owns right now, before the father is dead, when his father would still have use for these possessions.

How many fathers would receive that suggestion well today? How many would comply with it if one of their children asked it?

Not many!

This is a truly astonishing request, and it would have been even more astonishing in the ancient world.

In a society that highly reverenced parents, it would have been equivalent to saying: "Father, I can't even wait for you to die. Give me 1/3rd of everything you have right now."

5. What does the father's reaction teach us?

Despite the breathtaking--and insulting--audacity of the younger son's request, the father grants it!

Amazing!

This reflects the amazing indulgence that God shows toward us. Even when we are acting as selfishly as the prodigal son, God indulges us.

He yields what is his and allows us to misuse it out of respect for the freedom that he has given us.

But he knows that the misuse of our freedom will have no better results than it did with the prodigal son's misuse of his freedom, and God trusts that we will learn our lesson and come back to him.

6. What does the prodigal son do next?

After he gets 1/3rd of his father's estate, he takes everything he has and goes "into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living" (v. 13).

In context, this means that he abandoned the Holy Land to go, voluntarily, into exile into a gentile, pagan country where he could live loosely without being censured by fellow Jews living all around him.

He wanted to get out of God's land so that he could live in sin and fund his sinful lifestyle by what he took from his father.

But eventually the resources he had were exhausted and a hard time came.

If he had not spent what he had on loose living (as we will later learn, on prostitutes), he would have had the money he needed to weather the hard time, but he didn't.

Thus he was reduced to a state of hunger and had to subject himself to a pagan (humiliation #1) and to feed the pagan's pigs (humiliation #2).

He would have been happy just to eat as well as the pigs (humiliation #3), but nobody gave him anything to eat, not even from the pigs' slop (humiliation #4).

Having been brought to such a low state, he recalled how his righteous father treated even his hired servants better: "How many of my father's hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger!" (v. 17).

He thus plans to return to his father and say three things:

(a) "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you" (v. 18),

(b) "I am no longer worthy to be called your son" (v. 19a),

(c) "treat me as one of your hired servants" (v. 19b).

Even being treated as one of his father's hired servants would be better than the treatment he is receiving in the gentile world.

7. What do the actions of the prodigal son teach us?

They teaches us the depths to which our own misuse of freedom will bring us.

If we are bent on leaving God, things will go badly for us. We will be humiliated in the uncaring world.

The farther we get from the Father's loving care, the worse off we will be, and our best course is to return to God and his forgiveness.

8. What does the father do next?

When the prodigal son returns to his father, something significant happens.

While he is still at a distance, the father sees him, has compassion upon him, runs to him, hugs him, and kisses him.

This is far from the humiliating reunion that the son might expect based on his previous audacious and insulting treatment of his father!

The returning son must have been astonished!

But he continues by beginning to recite his pre-scripted speech to his father, and he manages to get the first two parts of it out. He says:

(a) "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you" (v. 21a),

(b) "I am no longer worthy to be called your son" (v. 21b).

But before he can say the third part--before he can ask to be treated merely as a servant--the father interrupts things and takes them in a very different direction.

Rather than treating his younger son as a mere servant, he turns to the actual servants and orders a celebration.

9. What do the actions of the father teach us?

The first lesson is that the father will not treat a son as a hired servant. The younger son is still a son!

As a result, his return is something to be celebrated!

He is to wear a fancy robe! A fancy ring! Shoes! There is to be a fancy feast for everyone! There is to be music and dancing!

Why?

Because "This my son was dead, and is alive again" and "He was lost, and is found."

This shows us God's reaction when we return from being lost in sin.

He doesn't begrudge us what we have done. He doesn't take us back reluctantly.

Like the father in the parable, he takes us back joyously! Eagerly!

But this is not all there is to the story . . .

10. What does the older brother do next?

There is usually at least one major lesson per parable for each major figure in it, and now we come to the lesson that the older brother can teach us.

He didn't demand his inheritance. He stayed faithful to his father. And now he is angry.

Why should his younger, wasteful, sinful brother receive such a reception by their father?

The older brother is so angry that he refuses to go inside and join the party.

Naturally, his father hears about it and comes to talk to him.

When that happens, we discover that he's not just angry with his brother, he's angry with his father, too.

He points out that he has never disobeyed his father's commands but that his father has never given him a kid (a young goat) so that he could slaughter it and have a party with his friends.

In contrast, the younger brother has "devoured your living with harlots" (wasting a third of the father's estate!), but when he comes back "the fatted calf" (that is, the best, most tender and delicious animal, specially raised to be so) is killed!

The older brother sees this difference in treatment as a manifest injustice toward him and is angry with his father because of it.

As we will see, he even seems to be worrying about his own security in the family since the father is showing such seeming favoritism to the younger son.

11. What does the father do?

The father tells the son three things.

First, he tells him: "Son, you are always with me." This seems to be a reassurance to the elder son that he has not lost his place in the family. His place is secure.

Second, he tells him: "and all that is mine is yours." This is because the division of property has already taken place.

The younger soon took his third, so the two-thirds that remain will go entirely to the older son.

This means that the current celebration does not represent a threat to the older brother or his inheritance. Instead, it is a celebration of joy occasioned by the return of the son.

Thus the father thirdly tells him: "It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.'"

12. What are the spiritual lessons for us?

From this parable we can draw a number of spiritual lessons:

• We can be a genuine son of the Father - who is spiritually "alive" - and be "lost" through sin.
• We can turn our backs on our heavenly Father and leave him of our own free will. Mortal sin is a real possibility.
• Mortal sin inevitably lands us in a far worse state than we were in originally.
• We can, however, return to the Father and be accepted by him with great joy. In fact, he is ready and eager to accept us back and forgive us, no matter what we've done.
• Christians who have never fallen should not resent those who come back. They should share in their Father's joy.

Their own place is secure and their heavenly reward is not threatened. God loves them just as much as he loves those who come back through a dramatic conversion.

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THE SACRAMENT OF RECONCILIATION

Celebrating God's Forgiveness

by Sandra DeGidio, O.S.M.

The well-known Parable of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most strikingly powerful illustration of the human process of reconciliation, and of the theology inherent in the new Rite of Reconciliation. But many of us find it difficult to believe the story (see Luke 15:11-32). The father welcomes the son back instantly—doesn't even wait for him to get to the house. And he isn't at all interested in the young man's confession, only in celebrating.

This is not the way we Catholics have viewed the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Even with the new Rite, most of us tend to view this sacrament with the attitude of the older son in the story: Forgiveness comes only after you recite your list of sins, agree to suffer a bit for them, do something to make up for your offenses, give some guarantee you won't commit the same sins again, and prove yourself worthy to join the rest of us who haven't been so foolish!

But God really is like the merciful parent in this parable: not out to catch us in our sin but intent on reaching out and hanging on to us in spite of our sin. Reconciliation (and the new Rite is careful to point this out) is not just a matter of getting rid of sin. Nor is its dominant concern what we, the penitents, do. The important point is what God does in, with and through us.

A journey home to God

God's reconciling work in us doesn't happen in an instant. Reconciliation is often a long, sometimes painful process. It is a journey not confined to, but completed in, sacramental celebration. It is a round-trip journey away from our home with God and back again that can be summed up in terms of three C's: conversion, confession and celebration—and in that order.

In the past the order was different: Receiving the sacrament meant beginning with a recitation of sins (confession). Then we expressed our sorrow with an Act of Contrition, agreed to make some satisfaction for our sins by accepting our penance, and resolved to change our ways (conversion). Celebration was seldom, if ever, part of the process.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son can help us understand the stages in our journey to reconciliation—and the order in which they occur. This helps us see why the theology of the new Rite of Reconciliation suggests a reordering in the pattern that we were familiar with in the past.

The journey for the young man in the parable (and for us) begins with the selfishness of sin. His sin takes him from the home of his parents—as our sin takes us from the shelter of God and the Christian community. His major concern in his new self-centered lifestyle—as is ours in sin—is himself and his personal gratification. None of the relationships he establishes are lasting. When his money runs out, so do his "friends." Eventually he discovers himself alone, mired in the mud of a pigpen, just as he is mired in sin. Then comes this significant phrase in the story: "Coming to his senses at last...." This is the beginning of the journey back, the beginning of conversion.

Conversion: An ongoing process

The conversion process begins with a "coming to one's senses," with a realization that all is not right with our values and style of life. Prompted by a faith response to God's call, conversion initiates a desire for change. Change is the essence of conversion. Shuv, the Old Testament term for conversion, suggests a physical change of direction; metanoia, the term the New Testament uses, suggests an internal turnabout, a change of heart that is revealed in one's conduct.

The Gospel vision of metanoia calls for an interior transformation that comes about when God's Spirit breaks into our lives with the Good News that God loves us unconditionally. Conversion is always a response to being loved by God. In fact, the most important part of the conversion process is the experience of being loved and realizing that God's love saves us—we do not save ourselves. Our part in this saving action is to be open to the gift of God's love—to be open to grace.

Moral conversion means making a personal, explicitly responsible decision to turn away from the evil that blinds us to God's love, and to turn toward God who gifts us with love in spite of our sinfulness.

Persons who turn to God in conversion will never be the same again, because conversion implies transforming the way we relate to others, to ourselves, to the world, to the universe and to God. Unless we can see that our values, attitudes and actions are in conflict with Christian ones, we will never see a need to change or desire to be reconciled.

The need for conversion does not extend only to those who have made a radical choice for evil. Most often metanoia means the small efforts all of us must continually make to respond to the call of God.

Conversion is not a once-in-a-lifetime moment but a continuous, ongoing, lifelong process which brings us ever closer to "the holiness and love of God." Each experience of moral conversion prompts us to turn more and more toward God, because each conversion experience reveals God in a new, brighter light.

When we discover in the examination of our values, attitudes and style of life that we are "missing the mark," we experience the next step in the conversion process—contrition. This step moves us to the next leg of our conversion journey: breaking away from our misdirected actions, leaving them behind and making some resolutions for the future.

Let's look again at our story. The young man takes the first step in the conversion process when he "comes to his senses," overcomes his blindness and sees what he must do. "I will break away and return to my father." Before he ever gets out of the pigpen, he admits his sinfulness. And in this acknowledgment of sin he both expresses contrition and determines his own penance. "I will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against God and against you....Treat me like one of your hired hands."

Contrition means examining our present relationships in the light of the Gospel imperative of love, and taking the necessary steps to repent and repair those relationships with others, ourselves and God. The repentance step in the conversion process is what is commonly called "making satisfaction for our sins," or "doing penance."

For many people in the past penance connoted "making up to God" by punishing ourselves for our sins. But true reparation is not punishment. At its root, reparation is repairing or correcting a sinful lifestyle. In the past we were told to do penance as temporal punishment for our sins. Now, however, we understand that our real "punishment" is the continuing pattern of sin in our lives and the harmful attitudes and actions it creates in us. The purpose of doing penance is to help us change that pattern. Penance is for growth, not for punishment. "Doing penance" means taking steps in the direction of living a changed life; it means making room for something new.

Lillian Hellman provides a wonderful image of this process of reconciliation in her explanation of the word pentimento at the beginning of Pentimento: A Book of Portraits: "Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented,' changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by the later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again."

Confession: Externalizing what is within

Confession, one aspect of the sacrament which used to receive the greatest emphasis, is now seen as just one step in the total process. Confession of sin can only be sincere if it is preceded by the process of conversion. It is actually the external expression of the interior transformation that conversion has brought about in us. It is a much less significant aspect of the sacrament than we made it out to be in the past. This does not mean that confession is unimportant—only that it is not the essence of the sacrament.

Look again at the parable. The father, seeing his son in the distance, runs out to meet him with an embrace and a kiss. Through one loving gesture, the father forgives the son—and the son hasn't even made his confession yet! When he does, it seems the father hardly listens. The confession is not the most important thing here; the important thing is that his son has returned. The son need not beg for forgiveness, he has been forgiven. This is the glorious Good News: God's forgiveness, like God's love, doesn't stop. In this parable, Jesus reveals to us a loving God who simply cannot not forgive!

Zorba the Greek—that earthy, raucous lover of life created by Nikos Kazantzakis—captures this loving God when he says: "I think of God as being exactly like me. Only bigger, stronger, crazier. And immortal, into the bargain. He's sitting on a pile of soft sheepskins, and his hut's the sky....In his right hand he's holding not a knife or a pair of scales—those damned instruments are meant for butchers and grocers—no, he's holding a large sponge full of water, like a rain cloud. On his right is Paradise, on his left Hell. Here comes a soul; the poor little thing's quite naked, because it's lost its cloak—its body, I mean—and it's shivering.

"...The naked soul throws itself at God's feet. 'Mercy!' it cries. 'I have sinned.' And away it goes reciting its sins. It recites a whole rigmarole and there's no end to it. God thinks this is too much of a good thing. He yawns. 'For heaven's sake stop!' he shouts. 'I've heard enough of all that!' Flap! Slap! a wipe of the sponge, and he washes out all the sins. 'Away with you, clear out, run off to Paradise!' he says to the soul....Because God, you know, is a great lord, and that's what being a lord means: to forgive!"

Our attitude toward the Sacrament of Reconciliation is intimately related to our image of God. We need to really believe that our God, like Zorba's, is not some big bogeyman waiting to trip us up, but a great Lord who is ever ready to reach out in forgiveness.

The Rite of Reconciliation reflects this image of a God of mercy. Formerly, it was the penitent who began the encounter in confession—"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned"—not unlike the way the sinner of Zorba's imagination approached God, or the way the son in our parable planned to greet his father. But both Zorba's God and the parent in the parable intervened. In the same vein, now in Reconciliation it is the confessor who takes the initiative, reaching out, welcoming the penitent and creating a hospitable environment of acceptance and love before there is any mention of sin. Thus, the sacramental moment of confession—just one of the sacramental moments in the whole Rite—focuses on God's love rather than our sin.

Of course the new Rite does concern itself with the confession of sins. But one's sinfulness is not always the same as one's sins. And, as a sacrament of healing, Reconciliation addresses the disease (sinfulness) rather than the symptoms (sins). So, the sacrament calls us to more than prepared speeches or lists of sins. We are challenged to search deep into our heart of hearts to discover the struggles, value conflicts and ambiguities (the disease) which cause the sinful acts (the symptoms) to appear.

A question that often arises is: Why confess my sins? And why confess to a priest? Why not confess directly to God, since God has already forgiven me anyway? From God's point of view, the simple answer is: There is no reason. But from our point of view, the answer is that as human beings who do not live in our minds alone, we need to externalize bodily—with words, signs and gestures—what is in our minds and heart. We need to see, hear and feel forgiveness—not just think about it.

We need other human beings to help us externalize what is within and open our hearts before the Lord, which puts confessors in a new light. They are best seen, not as faceless and impersonal judges, but as guides in our discernment, compassionately helping us experience and proclaim the mercy of God in our lives. As the Introduction to the Rite puts it, the confessor "fulfills a parental function...reveals the heart of the Father and shows the image of the Good Shepherd." Another of the confessor's roles is to say the prayer of absolution. Contrary to what we may have thought in the past, this prayer, which completes or seals the penitent's change of heart, is not a prayer asking for forgiveness. It is a prayer signifying God's forgiveness of us and our reconciliation with the Church—which is certainly something to celebrate.

Celebration: God always loves us

Celebration is a word we haven't often associated with the Sacrament of Reconciliation. But in Jesus' parable, it is obviously important and imperative. "Quick!" says the father. "Let us celebrate." And why? Because a sinner has converted, repented, confessed and returned.

Celebration makes sense only when there is really something to celebrate. Each of us has had the experience of going to gatherings with all the trappings of a celebration—people, food, drink, balloons, bands—and yet the festivity was a flop for us. For example, attending an office party can be such an empty gathering for the spouse or friend of an employee. Celebration flows from lived experience or it is meaningless. The need for celebration to follow common lived experiences is especially true of sacramental celebrations. All of the sacraments are communal celebrations of the lived experience of believing Christians.

Perhaps what we need to help us feel more comfortable with the idea of celebration in relation to Reconciliation is a conversion from our own rugged individualism. Let's face it—there is something about believing in a bogeyman God from whom we have to earn forgiveness that makes us feel good psychologically. It's harder to feel good about a God who loves and forgives us unconditionally—whether we know it or not, want it or not, like it or not. In the face of such love and forgiveness we feel uncomfortable. It creates a pressure within us that makes us feel we should "do something" to deserve such largess—or at least feel a little bit guilty.

The older brother in our story expresses this same discomfort. Upon witnessing the festivities, he appeals to fairness and legalism. In a sense, he is hanging on to the courtroom image of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, suggesting that there is no way everyone can feel good about the return of the younger brother until amends have been made.

But this older son is far too narrow in his understanding of life, of God and of the sacrament. He is too calculating, too quantitative, not unlike the butchers and grocers that Zorba refers to in his description of God. This son finds it difficult to understand that we are never not forgiven. The Sacrament of Reconciliation does not bring about something that was absent. It proclaims and enables us to own God's love and forgiveness that are already present.

The older brother's problem is a universal human one. It's tough for most of us to say, "I'm sorry." It is even tougher to say, "You're forgiven." And it is most difficult of all to say gracefully, "I accept your forgiveness." To be able to do that we must be able to forgive ourselves. That, too, is what we celebrate in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

The community's liturgical celebration of Reconciliation places a frame around the picture of our continual journey from sin to reconciliation. Only someone who has never experienced or reflected on that journey will fail to understand the need and value of celebrating the sacrament.

The older son in our story may be such a person. When the father calls for a celebration, everyone else in the household responds. Not only do they celebrate the younger son's return, they celebrate their own experience of forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation as well. They, like us, have been on that journey from which the young man has returned.

So there is something we can do about the unconditional forgiveness we receive from God: forgive as we have been forgiven. Having been forgiven, we are empowered to forgive ourselves and to forgive one another, heal one another and celebrate the fact that together we have come a step closer to the peace, justice and reconciliation that makes us the heralds of Christ's Kingdom on earth.

A communal celebration

Sacramental celebrations are communal because sacramental theology is horizontal. Sacraments happen in people who are in relationship with each other and with God. In the area of sin, forgiveness and reconciliation this is particularly evident. Our sinfulness disrupts our relationship in community as well as our relationship with God. And since the sacrament begins with our sinfulness, which affects others, it is only proper that it culminate with a communal expression of love and forgiveness that embodies the love and forgiveness of God.

Unconverted "older sons" will always be out of step with the Christian community. When we celebrate the sacrament, we celebrate with joy and thanksgiving because the forgiveness of the Christian community and of God has brought us to this moment—and that is worth celebrating. There is no room for the attitude that forgiveness comes "only when you have recited your list of sins, agreed to suffer a bit for them and proven yourself worthy to join the rest of us who haven't been so foolish."

Such "older sons" are looking for what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace"—grace without discipleship, without the cross, without faith, without Jesus Christ living and incarnate, and without the conversion necessary to live reconciliation within the Christian community. Such a person is hardly ready to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation as it is understood today.

Sandra DeGidio, O.S.M., lectures and writes on various religious topics like RCIA, parish ministry, the family and the sacraments. She lives near Minneapolis and is the author of RCIA: The Rites Revisited (Winston Press), and Re-Treat Your Family to Lent and Reconciliation: Sacrament With a Future (both by St. Anthony Messenger Press). This article is an abridged version of a chapter from the last-mentioned book.