The Return of the Prodigal Son

Unconditional Love (Mothering Sunday, Lent IV)

“This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Luke 15.2

It’s a typical family scene. The mother is knocking on her son’s door: “Come on Jimmy. Time to get up. It’s Sunday and time for church.”

“I don’t wanna get up. Church is boring. And I don’t like the people; and they don’t like me!”

“Come on son. Time to get up.”

“Give me three reasons why I should get up”

“Well. It’s 10 o’clock. You’re 43 years old and you’re the Vicar”

I know it’s an old one. But suitable for Mothering Sunday and for opening up today’s Gospel about love in a rather dysfunctional family.

Remember what we have often said of a parable – there is usually only one main point, although there can be other aspects of the parable that often explore the same point in a deeper way.

One of the reasons Jesus used these stories as a teaching tool was because the meaning of a parable is rarely exhausted. We’re still preaching about them 2,000 years later.

So what is the primary point of the parable of the Prodigal Son?

Well it is unconditional love. As we have just sung in Faber’s great hymn:

For the love of God is broader

than the measure of man's mind

and the heart of the Eternal

is most wonderfully kind.

But we make his love too narrow

by false limits of our own;

and we magnify his strictness

with a zeal he will not own.

[Frederick Faber was the first Superior of the Brompton Oratory along the road here, from its formation in 1849 until his death at the age of 49 in 1863.]

The religious authorities were scandalised by this unconditional love of Jesus: ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’

It reminds me of that other little verse I’ve often quoted by Edwin Markham:

They drew a circle that shut me out;

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But love and I had the wit to win

We drew a circle that took them in.

The Pharisees wanted Jesus to condemn the sinners and praise the religious. Instead he partied with the sinners and called the religious ‘whitewashed sepulchres’.

But of course there is more to it than that.

Today’s parable is a tale of three men: two sons and a father. It is only as we look at all three that we begin to get an understanding of God’s unconditional love; his outrageous grace.

Henri Nouwen was a great spiritual writer who died in 1996 and one of his short and profound works is entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son (1992). It was based on Rembrandt’s painting of the same name. [Look it up here or visit the Hermitage in St Petersburg – painted in 1662, shortly before the artist's death; the year of the Book of Common Prayer.]

Henri Nouwen explores each son’s response to the all-loving father.

The younger son is the Prodigal one, or the Lost Son – the verses we missed out of today’s Gospel were the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin.

[I guess like many of you I was well into my teens before I realised that prodigal didn’t mean ‘wicked’ or ‘immoral’ – the parable is best called the Lost Son.]

One of Nouwen’s themes is ‘belovedness’ – being forgiven, accepted and loved by God.

The younger son's life shows how the beloved lives a life of misery – eating the pigswill - because he thinks he can only earn the Father’s love; he can only truly be the beloved by living up to the qualifications laid down by his lover.

Some of us are caught in this trap in our family life, our relationships, and usually therefore, in our spiritual life as well.

It may start with a pushy mother or father who have plans for our life. And we become only too aware that we disappoint them and don’t live up to their expectations, and so whatever the reality, we feel unloved.

And continuing in the pattern of learned behaviour, we often choose partners who also make demands on us, and struggle again to live up to them so we can somehow deserve their respect and love.

It’s hardly surprising then that we listen to the wonderful love story of the Gospel of Christ, and interpret it as another set of demands about the way we live. Only by living an exemplary Christian life will we be worthy of the love of God.

It’s all so wrong and so debilitating.

On the other hand, the elder son's actions show how the beloved can be miserable and depressed, unable to enjoy the party, because he thinks he deserves more. He’s kept the rules and struggled all his life to please his father.

And yet he feels unable to enjoy the father’s love, because it only springs from what he thinks he deserves.

Henri Nouwen suffered from great depression at times and put himself in this category of the elder brother. A life of obedience as a Catholic priest and dedication to the church, and yet he felt an inability to enjoy the love of others or of God. Rather he felt anger – why can’t I have intimate relationships with others; why does God let all this happen to me?!

Needless to say, neither of these two responses represent the Christian response, although we all too often follow them at different times in our lives.

The Father in this parable, he alone understands how to give unconditional love and to forgive, and so is able to rejoice and be truly happy that the lost son has returned.

He is our model for both giving unconditional love and receiving it. This is at the heart of living in fulfilled relationships and in enjoying our Christian discipleship.

And then our obedience to God, our ‘wanting to please’, stems from a realisation of how much he has done for us and how much he loves us. When we come to worship, we do not go away and want to lead better lives for fear of punishment – we are justified by faith in Christ. ‘There is now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus’. This is the message of Paul’s words to the Corinthians in today’s epistle.

No, we want to lead better lives because we love God and know the comfort and assurance of being forgiven, accepted and loved by him.

This was the experience of the godly priest-poet George Herbert. He felt all unworthy to come to the altar, to the Table of the Lord, and had to be reminded of the Love of Christ, Love himself, who had born the blame and justified him through faith, and who welcomed him unconditionally to the Table.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.

So I did sit and eat.