I have a confession to make: the story of the prodigal son has long been one of those tales that has been a little lost in translation for me. A young son asks his dad for some money, squanders the money in disreputable company, then goes home. His dad embraces him with open arms and has a feast, but his older brother is sulky about the arrangement. Sure, it’s an interesting story, but not particularly gripping. I never really wanted to say this out loud for fear that I would be taken for one of those types of people who can’t quite grasp the original context of a passage. So, I lived for years without the passage ever actually genuinely impacting me.
Recently that changed.
At the suggestion of a spiritual leader in my community, I’ve been spending some time with my nose in books on restorative justice. The good thing about it is that I knew very little going in, which means that I was an open minded reader who didn’t have to fight against pre-existing assumptions and opinions that could detract from my ability to actually learn. So far, I’ve found the writers to be hopeful yet humble, optimistic yet objective, and most of all – strategic in the way they honor the stories of both victims and persons who have caused harm. The experience has been expansive both intellectually and spiritually.
One of the books, Compassionate Justice by Christopher D. Marshall, explores our approach to victims and persons who have caused harm through the lens of two parables: the good Samaritan and the prodigal son. Because I’ve been so exposed to these stories, they’ve lost a little of their scandal. Which is unfortunate, because this was exactly the effect Jesus was going for when he originally told them.
Marshall was speaking to me exactly when he says,
Modern readers are inclined to view the offending of the younger son [in the prodigal son] as a relatively trifling episode of self-indulgent hedonism by a hormonally charged adolescent acting as though he were bullet proof in a cruel and unyielding world. Understood this way, the father’s response to his son is much like what any enlightened parent would show to their misguided teenagers in such circumstances. But such a reading is far removed from how Jesus’ first century hearers would have interpreted events. They would have shared the prodigal’s own assessment of his behaviour as a case of sinning gravely against heaven and against his loving father.
In other words, Marshall puts this story back into the context of scandal. The prodigal son is a scandalizing story. Here’s why. Some scholars suggest that, in context, the young son asking his father for his share of the inheritance is tantamount to expressing a death wish towards his father. The son is not taking a summer vacation, or some time to “discover himself.” He says he does not belong, nor does he wish to belong. The son is deliberately and permanently disconnecting himself from his family and community ties. In fact, he is asking for the money that would normally be spent, in part, on caring for his father in old age. Therefore, he is exposing the father to the possibility of destitution, and thereby opening his father up to severe criticism from his neighbors.
The son renounces relationship. He violates community. He rejects the notion of interconnection.
But then something wonderful happens.
After wasting the money and experiencing humiliation at the hands of a cruel hearted employer who refuses to adequately feed him, the son reaches rock bottom and longingly looks at pig slop. And then – and here’s the beautiful part – he “comes to himself.” He commits in his heart to go to his father, not his hometown or his family or even his house, but to his father.
Marshall highlights that the passage deliberately uses phrasing which emphasizes relationships. To come to ourselves, he says, is to remember ourselves in the context of our community. The son’s return to himself is deeply connected with his recollection of to whom he once belonged: “what caused the offender to confront his need for moral change, then, was the recollection that he is inescapably connected to the person of his father.”
Belonging is everything. Without it, we seldom come to ourselves.
Marshall repeats Miroslav Volf’s telling statement, “there is no coming to oneself without the memory of belonging. The self is constructed in relation to others, and it can come to itself only through relationship to others, the first link with the other in a distant country of broken relationships is memory.”
But while the father has harboured love for the youngest son, the elder son has harboured the reality of what his younger sibling has done. The eldest is not being merely petty or resentful: his response is actually pretty understandable. His younger brother dumped all responsibility of the family onto his shoulders; the eldest has been the one bearing the burden since the youngest left. The eldest wants to respond to his brother’s butchering of relationship with his own death blow, but his father begs him not to. The father asks him to join the feast, to celebrate reunited relationships, to acknowledge interconnection and belonging. In a way, it is now the eldest who must choose whether or not to come to himself: to act in a way consistent with relationship.
In the end, I am left in suspense about how the eldest choses to respond. The story concludes with the father interceding with the eldest to come and join the celebration, but I am not told what the final result is. This literary device is often deliberately used to help readers contemplate either who they identify with in the story or what they themselves might do in a similar situation.
Am I the youngest? Given to burning relational bridges, but able to come to myself in terms of hoping in the strength of relationships? Am I the eldest? Given to carrying responsibility, but maybe less willing to extend mercy? Am I the father? The type of person who makes someone feel such a sense of belonging, that thinking of me might actually help them come to themselves and rejoin the larger community?
How I respond to these questions is indicative of my relationship with God.
George MacDonald has a fitting passage:
We shall never be able, I say, to rest in the bosom of the Father, till the fatherhood is fully revealed to us in the love of the brothers. For he cannot be our father save as he is their father; and if we do not see him and feel him as their father, we cannot know him as ours. Never shall we know him aright until we rejoice and exult for our race that he is the father. . . To rest, I say, at last, even in those hands into which the Lord commended his spirit, we must have learned already to love our neighbour as ourselves.
So how will I love my neighbour as myself? I might begin by trying to include them into my community. To remind them that they belong, that when they leave they are missed, and when they are present they are appreciated. I might remember that to grow in my relationship with God requires that I grow in my relationship with others. And, I will remember that if I am ever to fully come to myself, it will be done in the context of community, of remembering to whom I belong.
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