The parable we heard this Fourth Sunday of Lent is one of Jesus’ best. It can be interpreted from the perspective of each of the three main characters. Traditionally it is known as the parable “of the prodigal son or wasteful son”, but it can also be called the parable “of the merciful father” or even the parable “of the envious brother”. From all perspectives we can draw a lesson.
In fact, Jesus tells the parable to respond to some scribes and Pharisees who murmured against Him because He received sinners and ate with them. That is, Jesus tells the parable from the perspective of the envious brother, because he proposes it to censure the conduct of those scribes and Pharisees who criticized Jesus as, in the parable, the envious brother criticized his father. The parable explains to us what God is like and how we place ourselves before Him.
The envious sibling: slave in the father’s house
The scribes and Pharisees, who criticize Jesus because he welcomes and approaches sinners to invite them to conversion, were acting like the envious brother
and ungrateful son who criticizes his father because he welcomes his profligate brother who has come to his senses and returns home repentant and humble. The envious brother represents all those who live their relationship with God as a regime of slavery and not as a regime of freedom. “I obey you because you are powerful and I fear your punishment.”
The envious brother, who stayed at home and never disobeyed a single order from the father, claims in the end that his father never gave him even a kid to feast with his friends. The father is surprised that the envious son lived as a guest in his own house and never felt free to enjoy the family property. So the father replies with astonishment:
“Son, you are always with me and everything of mine is yours.”
The envious son never really felt like a son, he felt like a slave, a servant of his own father, completely ignoring that this was not the father’s attitude towards him.
Let us ask ourselvesIs God for us a father or a patron? Is God for us the powerful sovereign who only knows how to demand, or do we know Him as one whose power is mercy and whose judgment is clement? Is God for us a creator of gratuitousness or a collector? Do we know how to rejoice with God or do we prefer to live far from Him?
The wasteful son: misunderstood freedom
The profligate son raises other questions. He abuses and takes advantage of his father’s kindness. He asks for the inheritance before the father offers it to him or before the father dies. It is as if he were saying to him:
“Look, you are already too old, you take too long to die, I need the part of my inheritance now, give it to me now.”
That son, at the beginning, did not need his father either, but his father’s money. The son receives the inheritance, leaves home and squanders what he received in tastes and whims, in luxuries and a frivolous and superficial life. The wasteful son represents those whom God really hinders, and is only useful when he can bring us some temporary benefit. He understands freedom as licentiousness.
But money, like all material goods, runs out. And so did the spendthrift son. And he knew destitution and the meaninglessness of life. He had to start working. And what he found was most humiliating: taking care of pigs, in circumstances that made him think that the pigs lived better than he did, because they had good and safe food, which he did not enjoy.
And in the depths of his abjection he had a luminous thought: “How many workers in my father’s house have bread to spare, and here I am starving to death. After all, life in that father’s house, from which he fled in search of an imaginary freedom and a desired debauchery, was now palatable. The workers in that house lived better than he did now.
I will arise and return to my father and say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son. Receive me as one of your workers”.
The memory of his father and the way he treated his workers opens the door for the young man to return. For that is how God is with us. It is not our repentance that arouses in God the will to forgive; on the contrary, it is his mercy and his forgiveness offered beforehand that enlighten in us the will to repent in order to return to him.
The profligate son fulfills his purpose. When he arrives, not only does his father not let him finish the speech he had prepared, nor does he receive him as a laborer, but he honors him as a son who was lost and has been found again. So is God also with us.
The father: icon of divine mercy
And what about the father in the story, who represents God? First of all, he does not seem to be offended because the younger son asks for the inheritance before his time. He distributes the inheritance to both of them -this must be emphasized-: one asks for the inheritance, but the two sons receive it, and each in his own way wasted it.
What is this inheritance? In real life, it is God’s gift: our freedom, our dignity, our ability to shape our lives, even if we make mistakes. We can use our freedom for debauchery, like the prodigal son, or we can be afraid to use it and become slaves, like the envious son.
Of the two sons, the one who learned to use his freedom was the prodigal, through suffering and pain, through the experiences that struck his life. Until he learned to make the right decision. In terms of Jesus’ proposal of life: until he learned that the full life is lived together with God the Father.
The father in the parable never forgot his son. I imagine that every day he looked out the window of his house to see if he was coming, for the story says that he immediately spotted him in the distance as he approached his house. That is God, who is always waiting for the son who wants to return to Him to come out to receive him.
The father in the story also goes out to meet the envious son who does not want to enter the house, where there is a feast for the son who has returned. For God also does not reject those who protest against him because he is merciful and good, but invites them to change their attitude and learn to forgive and rejoice with those who are converted.
Reconciled with God
Many more things can be said about this parable. St. Paul gives us a summary of the main teaching of the story:
“In Christ, God reconciled the world to himself and renounced taking account of the sins of men. And to us,” it is Paul who speaks, “he entrusted the message of reconciliation. Through us, it is God himself who exhorts you. In the name of Christ we ask you to be reconciled to God.”.
If they are far away, He waits for them.
If they feel enslaved, He sets them free.
In his house there is grace and forgiveness for all who acknowledge their destitution and lay down their haughtiness and self-sufficiency.