We are all familiar with the parable of the prodigal son, so I would like to focus on just a few key points from this text to bring out its radical nature. The younger son, as we all know, begins to treat his father as if he were dead by demanding his share of the property that he will inherit upon his father’s death–he wants it now. When he finally comes to his senses after reducing himself to poverty, he makes plans to return to his father and formulates a proposal that he will deliver upon his return; he is going to confess his sin and declare that he is no longer worthy to be called “his son” and will ask to be treated as a hired hand.
The father sees him from a distance and immediately goes out to meet him, but the father cuts him off in mid-sentence, allowing him to confess his sins, but he does not allow his son to articulate his proposal. Instead, he is restored to his original position and given the signet ring that permits him to sign cheques–a gesture of tremendous trust. Finally, they celebrate with a fatted calf: “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found.” Now, the dead do not bring themselves back to life. So, who brought him back to life? Who found him? This is an important implication I will return to.
The elder son who resents all this treatment represents the attitude of the religious leaders, the Pharisees and scribes, as well as the attitude of a vast number of the faithful who still operate out of a juridical or legalistic mindset, that is, within a transactional model which says: If you will give me X, then I will give you Y in return; but if you don’t give me X, I won’t give you Y. That’s the model we understand most easily, because it is a natural business model. Unfortunately, it is a model that has been brought into the religious sphere, and that’s why the elder son just cannot understand his father’s behavior towards the younger son who squandered his inheritance, and that’s why the scholars of the law, the religious leaders, did not understand Jesus—they were legalists. And that’s why most people tend not to understand not only this parable but other parables of the kingdom of God, like the workers in the vineyard, in which Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a landowner who goes out early and hires laborers to work all day in the vineyard for a single denarius; he returns at 9 o’clock to hire more workers, and again at noon and then at 3, and then at 5 o’clock, each time hiring more laborers. At the end of the day, he pays each worker a single denarius, the same amount whether they’ve been working all day or just since the evening, which caused great resentment among those who worked all day.
Most people struggle with these parables because they think within a juridical paradigm, a legalistic model in which a transaction is measured by fairness; hence, legal justice becomes the principal value. But the fundamental value of the gospel proclaimed by Christ’s entire life is mercy. Christ, who is God the Son, reveals the divine mercy, which transcends justice and is utterly incomprehensible. If one insists on reading the New Testament within a juridical model, one will distort the gospel, at which point it is no longer extraordinarily good news, and this will do a great deal of damage to the religious lives of the faithful, which for centuries has happened and is still happening in many places.
The good news of the gospel is the revelation of the absolute and incomprehensible mercy of God: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost (apololos)” (Lk 19, 10). The Greek verb appolumi means ‘to destroy’, and the noun form appoleia is ‘destruction’, and so the meaning is that the Son of Man has come to seek out and save those who have destroyed their lives.
Where can God be found? We naturally believe he is found in the highest places, basilicas with ornate and breathtaking interiors-and these have their place; but the Son of Man descended to the sewers. It was this descent to the level of the swine that brought the prodigal son back to life. Our God is found in the lowest places; for Jesus had table fellowship with outcasts, the poor, the sick, sinners, and tax collectors. He came to liberate them from the bad news, the lie, that they were forsaken by God. Table fellowship brings about a profound intimacy between all those at the table. The very idea of the Pharisees and scribes sharing a meal with those with whom Jesus kept company was simply unthinkable; status was everything in first century Palestine, and Jesus lost that status by associating with the poor, the lame, tax collectors, and sinners.
Now, in this 15th chapter of Luke where we find the prodigal son, there are two other parables of the divine mercy, and they are there for a reason: we can misinterpret the prodigal son and mistakenly believe that the father showed mercy because the son first made a decision to return on his own. But that would be to miss the entire point of the parable; for the son was dead, and what is dead does not move. Hence, right before this parable are two others that are intended to make such a misreading less likely. I’m referring to the parable of the lost sheep, who wanders from the fold and is lost and cannot find his way back, unlike the prodigal son who does find his way back home. All the sheep can do is bleat, and hopefully the Shepherd will hear the bleating and find it, put it on his shoulders and take it back to the fold, which is what happened because the Shepherd actually goes out looking for the lost sheep.
However, this gets better; for if the sheep cries out, it means it is alive. But what if the one who is lost (destroyed) cannot cry out in the dark for help, or cannot get up and make his or her way back home? What if this person has turned his or her back on God completely, lives in utter darkness, and is spiritually dead? We have the parable of the lost coin: “What woman having ten coins and losing one would not light a lamp and sweep the house, searching carefully until she finds it?”
A coin is a piece of metal. It is inert, it is dead. It does not cry out nor make its way home. The mercy of God is compared this time to a woman who will search the house carefully and will not stop until she finds that lost and inert piece of matter. That’s what our God is like, compared this time to a woman because women don’t give up. More importantly, though, God does not wait for us to take the initiative and return; rather, she loves us first and goes out looking for the lost, the dead, the forsaken, those who live in darkness, and will not stop searching until she finds them.
You and I are where we are in our faith life not by virtue of anything we have done, but purely on the basis of God’s unutterable mercy. I was fortunate to have had a priest friend in my youth who would emphasize that repeatedly, but that isn’t typical. Today, there are many Catholic writers, podcasters and preachers who are moralizers, legalists, who seem to reduce the faith to a set of moral proscriptions, usually centering on issues of sexual ethics, and who think within a transactional paradigm. But as St. Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians, we are not saved by our works: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph 2, 8-9). In my experience, a large percentage of the faithful have unwittingly adopted semi-Pelagianism, believing that grace has entered our lives as a result of some initial good act of the will and as a reward for that action. But our cooperation with grace is itself a grace.
Faith is the grace that allows us to trust and to hope in the divine mercy. That’s what saves. Nothing frustrated Jesus more than people’s lack of trusting faith, which leads to fear, anxiety, and the abuse of authority, which in turn generates resentment and division, all rooted in a refusal to trust divine providence. But there was nothing that pleased Jesus more than finding that trusting faith in others, such as the Syrophoenician woman or the Roman Centurion, the woman with a hemorrhage, or the blind man naked on the road. That faith is what allowed Christ to work miracles in their lives and in the lives of those for whom they were interceding. Many of us are worried about our sons or daughters who have turned their backs on God and are now apparently lost and perhaps spiritually dead. If we believe in the God that Christ revealed, we know that fear is useless; in fact, it is harmful. It can cause us to do things that only alienate us from our children. If we learn to trust in the all-powerful and all-knowing God who pursues the lost and does not stop until he finds what he’s looking for, then there is nothing for us to worry about, for he will find them and bring them to himself in ways that we cannot think of on our own.
Image: The Prodigal Son in Misery. By John Raphael Smith – Yale Center for British Art, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113279410.
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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