Let’s begin with a quick recap of this famous parable, whose name varies with the emphasis—the parable of the prodigal son, the parable of the two brothers, the parable of the loving father.
This is explicitly recounted in the Gospel as a parable, not a real story, so the Lord himself invites us into the multiple layers of symbolic meanings. Perhaps the first layer is the immediate dynamic among the righteous, sinners, and God. Much like the story of the prophet Jonah, where God rebukes the prophet for his elder brother-like whining, the point is that God’s mercy is his own prerogative, not some sort of calculation where we get to sit around and fret about who deserves it. Jesus tells this parable in the context of the scribes and Pharisees complaining about his mercy toward sinners, so it also contains a subtle nod to the Lord’s own divinity. As with so many of the parables, although there is a great deal to learn about ourselves, perhaps the larger and more important message has to do with God.
A second layer would be the relationship between the lost northern tribes of Israel—the prodigal son who wastes his inheritance—and the more faithful southern tribe of Judah, the elder brother of the parable. Here, too, the story says something about Jesus himself. By this point, many Samaritans—descendants of those less faithful northern tribes, scorned by the Judeans—had begun to follow Jesus, no doubt turning many heads, not just of the scribes and Pharisees.
A third layer is closely related to the second, and that is the relationship between Israel and the world—or the Gentiles. Most of the peoples of the earth, since the days of Noah and Abraham, had run away from their inheritance. But Israel had been preserved as a righteous and faithful remnant. At this point, Jesus is still largely preaching to the Jews, and we don’t really see clearly the full weight of his universality until Pentecost, but already he had a reputation of both consorting with Gentiles and implying through many of his other parables that the elder brother, the people of Israel, has squandered his inheritance. In other words, despite their outward fidelity to the law, their hearts were not at all different from those of the Gentiles. The elder brother in the parable, despite his outward respect for his father, reveals in the end that he is not so different on the inside.
We could perhaps go on, but I want to mention one final layer of meaning—this time less a straightforward allegory than a resonance with our first reading from the book of Joshua. The people of Israel had been wandering the wilderness for forty years as a punishment for their rebellion. Just before this scene, the people cross the Jordan into the promised land. Tradition sees this wandering as a sign of the wandering of human nature in this present life before we are finally able to enter the kingdom of heaven. Connect that as well, of course, with these forty days of Lent as we look to Easter. At this moment, hope becomes reality. The manna from heaven—always seen by the Church Fathers as a type of the Eucharist—gives way to the produce of the land itself, which is to say the beatific vision.
In the end, whereas we might identify more with the prodigal son or the elder brother at different moments in time, the thing that matters most about the parable is the love and mercy of the father. He represents a new kind of family, a new kind of economy, a new creation—that true and final promised land—where grace and mercy reign. And the catalyst ushering in that new world is his heartbreak and longing for communion with his sons.
The heartbreak and longing are critical. This isn’t some cold, calculating father who looks at his accounts again and says, “Well, son, it’s been a good year for me, so I guess I can afford to give you another chance.” He doesn’t worry about the cost. This is God’s love for us: a selfless choice to tie his life to ours. He knows that it will hurt, and he does it anyway
Peter Kreeft writes, “If you want to avoid suffering at all costs, then the stupidest thing you can possibly do is to love someone, to give your heart to someone, because it will certainly be broken, many times, in many ways.” There is a great mystery here, wrapped up in the mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation, one that we can fully digest only when we cross the Jordan of this life. But we don’t have to understand everything about how this makes sense in terms of nature and theology and atonement to receive and grasp on some level the description of God’s character; as we say and as I often quote from our Prayer of Humble Access, our gracious Lord’s “property is always to have mercy.”
In other words, this is just who God is. It is just who Jesus is. We don’t have to understand it. We don’t even have to like it. At times we might be like the prodigal son, overwhelmed and confused at how the Father could possibly receive him back. At times we might be like the elder son, angry and envious, and also confused as to how all this works, unsure of whether his choices were in the end the right ones when the mercy seems so ridiculously free. But the father in this story, who is really more akin to the divine Son, stands at the crux of history, literally allowing his body to be beaten, his soul to be anguished, and his heart to be pierced because he would rather die a thousand deaths than see his brethren and children separated from him.
The old collect for today reminds us that though “for our evil deeds” we “do worthily deserve to be punished,” we can confidently ask God to be “mercifully relieved” by the comfort of his grace. Modern consciousness (and liturgy) shrinks back from that rather stark description of our plight, worrying that it makes God into some angry, punishing despot. But this is exactly opposite the point: God, despite all that we do, is more grieved than angry. The Sacred Heart isn’t bound by some kind of external law demanding punishment; God is rather bound to his own sovereign decision to give us freedom. He bears the cost of that decision himself in a way more infinite and total than any punishment we might ever imaginably bear in this life. He is not, in other words, standing around looking for ways to condemn us; we are quite capable of doing that for ourselves. He is rather always looking for ways to pardon us, to revive us, to restore us to the good.
This is the God who wants to share his life with us. Let us then leave the old world and go with him into the promised land.