HOMILY: Sunday of the Prodigal Son

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  God is One! Amen

So we enter into the second Sunday of the triodion, the second week in our period of preparation for the Lenten fast soon upon us.  Last week we heard the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee, laying down the cornerstone of our Lenten journey: Humility and Repentance. Then we have today, the Sunday of The Prodigal Son, perhaps the most well known of parables, the image and trope of the prodigal being used widely across literature, movies, novels, and even video games. In this parable we see the image and archetype of God’s forgiveness in the prodigal son, who had abandoned his father for the world and its pleasures, and returned home to his father’s house where he was received with open arms as a son, and not as a servant as the prodigal son had intended.

The Gospel reading for today embodies the entirety of God’s message to the world. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son we are shown the longing of God for the repentance of his children.  It is said by the Fathers of the Church that the entirety of the Gospel can be found in The Parable of the Prodigal Son, and if for some reason the scriptures were lost to us, keeping this parable, it would be possible to for us to recreate a concise summation of Christian teachings, and also to emphasize the love of God for all mankind.

Reading through fathers, past and present, there are many themes that can be extracted from this single, simple parable.  Today we are going to focus on one of them, that which is most relevant to us in preparing for this Lenten season as we move Godward in the course of our Orthodox Christian lives.

When reading Holy Scriptures, we must always learn to see ourselves in the least of these characters, the lowliest of people, and in this case we see ourselves in the Prodigal Son. The Prodigal Son is a symbol of all of us, the entirety of fallen man, of every individual sinner.  Saint John of Kronstadt shares this notion as regards the Prodigal Son, saying: “We all see ourselves in it as in a mirror. In a few words the Lord, the knower of hearts, has shown in the person of one man how the deceptive sweetness of sin separates us from the truly sweet life according to God.”

The Prodigal son asks his father for his portion of goods that falls to him.  Perhaps he did not understand the gravity of the request, and the weight of the insult that unwittingly fell behind it, essentially telling his father in not so many words: I do not want to wait for you to die, so please give me my inheritance now.  Now, the father had every right to refuse him, and even correct him amidst his request, but rather he allowed his silence and subsequent actions to express his love for his son, leaving him free to do as he wished.  He understood the mystery of fatherhood and of sonship, which is to give to the other the possibility of returning home freely. And so the Father lets his son go.

The portion we receive from our Father in heaven is our gifts, our talents with which we must work and multiply.  Also, according to Bishop Ignatius Branchininov, our gifts consist of “…the mind and heart, and especially the grace of the Holy Spirit, given to each Christian. The demand made of the father for the portion of goods falling to the son in order to use it arbitrarily is the striving of man to throw off from himself submissiveness to God and to follow his own thoughts and desires. In the father’s consent to hand over the property there is depicted the absolute authority with which God has honored man in the use of God’s gifts.” So, we spit in the face of God, turning away from Him in choosing the pleasures of this world.  Like the Prodigal Son we are impatient, telling God by our actions that we choose earthly riches and goods over those treasures in heaven to which we have been promised.  We choose earthly pleasures over that of eternal peace. We choose this world over the kingdom to which we have been made heirs as sons and daughters of the living God.

So the Prodigal Son departs from his father and goes to a far away land, much as we do in the pursuit of worldly living, to borrow the words from the Prophet Isaiah, “dwelling in a region of the shadow of death.” But the world cannot sustain us.  The world is fickle and shifts with time like the vagaries of the sand.  The Prodigal Son was in want of food, a famine of the body, but ours is a famine of the soul. As Saint Ambrose explains: “It was not a famine of fasts but of good works and virtues. What hunger is more wretched? Certainly whoever departs from the Word of God hungers, because “man lives not by bread alone but by every word of God.” Whoever leaves treasure lacks. Whoever departs from wisdom is stupefied. Whoever departs from virtue is destroyed.” 

From physical hunger to destitution, and in our case, from a departure of virtue into depravity.  At first the Prodigal Son was not aware of the depths of despair into which he had fallen, and neither are we aware of how depraved we have allowed ourselves to become in our fallen sinfulness.  Yet, eventually the Prodigal Son finally came to himself, as we ourselves often do.  He remembered whose son he was, and despite all his failings never ceased being the son of his father. Yes, he was still a sinner. Yes, he had sinned to such an extent that he had squandered the entire inheritance he had been given. He knew who his Father was, and by our same calling we know we have not lost our sonship, nor the grace of the Holy Spirit, for it is by the authority of the Holy Spirit alone that we are permitted to call God our Father.

Remembering his father, he arose and turned away from the world he once embraced with his riotous living.  The beginning of his repentance, metanoia (μετάνοια) in Greek, meaning to change one’s mind, or in another sense understood as “a turning away from the world.”  What courage it took for the prodigal son to set aside his shame in the knowledge of his familial disgrace, understanding the gravity of his offense against his father, and the weight of his transgressions and misdeeds in the face of a loving father.  

Oh, what spiritual calamity it is for us to not see ourselves as we really are, blinded by the veil of pride much like the Pharisee was in the Parable Of the Publican and the Pharisee that we heard last week; to not see ourselves as the sinners we really are.  Yet, as John Climacus exhorts us in the 28th step of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, “Let your prayer be completely simple. For both the publican and the prodigal son were reconciled to God by a single phrase.”  Likewise, we begin to come to the knowledge of  ourselves in the utterance of this simplest of prayers: “My Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner!”  In this knowledge, we can find the strength, much like the prodigal son did, to turn away from the world and begin our repentance as we return to the father seeking his forgiveness and our reconciliation with God.

The Father never ceases looking for his son, and neither does God cease seeking his lost sheep, but it must be our choice that we return to Him.  It must be by that same free will we chose to abandon our father, that we must choose to be reconciled with him.  Seeing his son from afar off the Father “had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”   The son, seeking reconciliation with his father, confesses before him: “I have sinned against heaven, and before you, and I am no more worthy to be called your son.” His father did not reproach him.  He did not demand repayment for what was lost.  He did not scold him, but with the same silence that he watched him leave, he received him once again with love.  As Saint Ambrose tells us, “The power of love overlooked the transgressions. The father redeemed the sins of his son by his kiss, and covered them by his embrace.”

The Prodigal Son returned to his father in great humility, that he might only be allowed back into his father’s household once more, if only as a servant.  But the father gave him a robe, just as our heavenly father restores our baptismal garment unto us by confession; a ring is placed upon his finger, just as our father in heaven does as much to as by the restoration of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and that particular seal of sonship; and the Prodigal Son’s feet are girded with sandals, as much as our Father has given us sure footing upon the foundation of Truth, the Church to which we have been restored, and no longer slaves to sin.  The Father of the Prodigal Son slaughtered the fatted calf, of which nearly all the fathers have agreed is a symbol of the Eucharist, in which we receive the body and blood of Christ, the spotless lamb sacrificed for the sake of the whole world. The music and dancing is the joyous celebration of the saints, martyrs, and the angels in heaven over the one that repented.

We as sinners, endure and repeat this cycle of falling into the depths of sin, the rise of shame from self knowledge of our sin, humility born in our recognition of our unworthiness before God, confession and reconciliation with our Father in heaven, and the restoration of our sonship and status as a part of the body of Christ.  As the Monks on Athos have confessed about their daily lives, we all fall, and we rise.  We fall, and we rise. So it is likewise with all of us in the Church. The Gospel reading for today teaches us of one who has returned from the greatest depths of sin and depravity, which should give us all great hope, that no matter the weight of our failures, the grace of God is greater, the love of God is brighter, and the forgiveness of God runs deeper the greatest depths of sin to which we could ever fall.  Let us always remember that we have a loving father waiting for us to return to him into his open arms.

Oh Lord Jesus Christ our God, by the prayers of thy most Pure Mother, the holy and God bearing fathers, all the Saints and the Martyrs and the Angels, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.