The Sunday of the Prodigal Son
“Then [Jesus] said: ‘A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood. And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.
“But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.’
“And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
“But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.
“Now his older son was in the field. And as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and because he has received him safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf.’
“But he was angry and would not go in. Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him. So he answered and said to his father, ‘Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.’
“And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found’” (The Gospel According to St. Luke 11-32).
This is one of my favorite parables of Christ, maybe one of my favorite stories in Scripture, besides the Prophet Jonah’s adventure being tased by God to call Nineveh back to repentance. They both contain elements that I am sure we are all familiar with as followers of the Way of Jesus Christ and non-followers, alike. These elements are particularly human: the resistance to doing what we are told, the resistance to doing what we know we need to do; simply put, the resistance to obedience.
I, for one, can relate that: living disobediently. I’m sure others can, too.
The first taste of my own disobedience was with my own drinking, knowing what would happen if I mixed this and that, drank on an empty stomach, drove home… Yet, I did it again and again. Like a dog to its own vomit. Literally. Spending everything I made working menial labor at the bar, day in and day out; financing my drinking with my savings, selling my clothes; doing spots for drinking tickets and, if I made any money from stand-up, blowing it on booze at the club.
We do not have to relate to the prodigal son’s position in society before leaving his father’s house to understand that to resist obedience and reject the value of humility we end up in a land of sin. A land of strangeness, being strangers in this land, sojourning from one swine pod to the next, joining ourselves with whomever can help us no matter what that help looks like. Those same souls in the fields we work, just as lost as we are, because we are not train kids rejecting our upbringing to busk on the sidewalk, we are sinners in deep need of repentance.
We are, most of us, enslaved to our passions; we fill ourselves with flashing sensual objects of desire, here today and gone the next, leaving us emptier the more we partake of their shallow allure. By partaking in what cannot, by its nature, sustain us nor nourish our spiritual bodies we are, like the prodigal, living in exile from our heavenly Father. The more we reject His love, the more we might find ourselves doubling down and partaking in the pods meant for swine.
We must see the prodigal as our own cold heart becoming hardened by living in exile in the world, chasing worldly things, spending our inheritance—that is: our souls on the glittery baubles that are worthless on their own. The more we partake in what is worthless, the more we might consider ourselves the same…
I wonder if there has ever been a time in your life where you felt worthless. When you felt bereft of inherent value. What was going on in your life during that period? What was surrounding you and what was within you?
For me, I remember every day, waking up hungover with the same thought: “I hate myself and I want to die,” it ran like a broken record until I started drinking again later that day. It was all I could do to muffle that voice in my head. Recently, I have been dealing with another voice, call it the voice of God, call it instinct, call it whatever you want, but that voice has been calling me back to the Orthodox Church.
I am afraid to admit this, but once some toxic voices were out of my life, it feels only right that this was the voice that was being muffled by others’ contempt. So, I stepped back into the doors of my old Orthodox parish, for vespers, feeling called to be pray to the Light of the world as the sun darkened.
A couple days later, I attended Liturgy for the first time in over a year. It was like stepping into a familiar world with new eyes. It was like seeing what I had been missing over a year ago. It was like meeting your father on the way home, him embracing you, and you knowing the weight of your decision to leave home, initially.
That feeling that pulls us out of the swine troughs, the feeling that makes us see, truly, the strange world around us is humility. No matter how many times I have been told that humility is the way or read that it only makes sense when you are being humbled. Humility only makes sense when you realize how far you’ve abandoned yourself for the world; how much you have forsaken your father’s son by being led by the passions.
This type of humility comes at a price.
This is why I love this parable so much; it is only through rejecting his father’s house and following his own desires, passions, and living extravagantly that this man was brought to his knees, finally realizing who he is and who is father is. The life that he chose to live brought him to see, clearly, what life he left. It was the only way this was going to happen.
That is why I love this story.
Not only is there hope for every sinner, but our very sins provide the raw material for this transformative experience of repentance. This is not a call to sin, by no means, but when we evaluate our lives and the sins that we have perpetrated against ourselves and each other… If we look at them with the right eye, a humble eye, we can see that they all work to our benefit, because “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
There is nothing wasted in repentance. There is nothing without value in repentance; God redeems the totality of our being.
And this is where things become challenging. The redemption of God that revitalizes our being, makes us whole, also comes at a price. That price is the same price the prodigal pays by returning home. We turn away from our passions, our desires, and let them die as strange things in the fields of swine and famine. The challenge is, humility is good, but it is not a good feeling to be humbled.
When one is humbled, it is an internal tragedy. The false self begins evaporating and there is nothing one can do to pretend it still exists. There is nothing one can do to pretend that the false self can still live. It looks altogether strange even to us. This is a common consequence of a life of prayer, becoming closer to God means drawing closer to the light of Truth, of which no untruth can go unseen.
Nor overtake the light (John 1:5).
Humility sucks, but it does not suck enough not to do it, but it does suck enough that it is a good thing no one ever tells you what it feels like before it happens. It has to be something one goes through themselves. Humility is like recovery. It is worth it. It is necessary. It is the only way forward if one does not want to die.
It feels a lot like dying.
It is dying.
The path of true Christianity is all about dying, and it sucks to die, but it the promise is that it is not the Truth that dies, but untruth. It is not we who die, but sin we believe to be us that dies.
To be concluded.
Si comprehendis, non est Deus
Witness, NM 