March 28, 2025
The Prodigal Son: one of Jesus’s most important parables. What will Sunday’s Gospel lead me to reflect? Here’s a short meditation:
I remember how shocking it was. I was with my mother and my sister at the “Five and Ten Cents Store” not far from Columbus Circle. All of a sudden a message came over the speakers: “If you are missing you child, see the security officer immediately.” I looked at my mother: “How is it possible to lose a child?” Knowing how she kept a fierce eye on her children, my mother said, “Some parents don’t pay attention.”
Today I realize how easily it would be to lose a child. I see parents in the store with their kids. Parents get absorbed in some garment for sale, or some item for the household; meanwhile the children are looking at the aisle with toys or the aisle with candy. It only takes a moment to miss a child.
Most of us can easily understand the panic of a parent who is missing a child. Whatever the situation, parents start imagining the worst. Our world today is frightening when it comes to the dangers for vulnerable people. But those feelings of dread bring us close to the feeling Jesus wants his listeners to realizer: the Father, in Jesus’ story, feels the loss of his son more than anything else.
Often I try to think of Jesus’ story from the point of view of the Father. I’d like to call this parable “The Extravagant Father” or “The All-loving Father.” Because the younger son realizes that whatever let the Father give him half his possessions is the same love that would accept him back after his running away.
This is a very different kind of Father from the one that most believers have in their heads when they think of God. For most of history we thought of the Father as the one who punishes us when we do something bad; this was how the Jewish people thought of God for most of their history. But more than a God of justice and punishment, Jesus affirms for his listeners a God so attached to us that God cannot bear the loss of any one of us. The God of Jesus is one of fierce attachment to the beloved.
This is why the older son is very important for us believers. This son represents the kind of conventional righteo usness that believers have: we’ve followed the rule, so God won’t hurt us. In the face of this smugness, Jesus says that unless we have experienced the totally generous mercy God has for everyone, we have not begun to understand who God is. The older son, tragically, represents in the end resentment of God’s very love.
Lent invites us to put aside our smugness and our rather bland ideas of God. It invites us to look at our own lives through the eyes of the Father, to see the passionate love God has for everyone. Because, once we see that, then everything else in our lives can change and grow. Once we have seen that, then we know that we follow God because of God’s love for us and for all.