Puzzles of the Prodigal Son

Don: On one level, the parable of the prodigal son is about the relationship between god and man, about god’s graciousness, and about the open arms of god. Without undermining this face-value meaning of the story, at a deeper level we may see it as a story about Wo/man’s relationship with herself and himself. It shows the turmoil that occurs within us as we live out our lives as sinful human beings. And yet, I think that we see that our original and proper standing before god is that we are god’s sons and daughters. We are created in his likeness, we are in his image. We have, as it were, god’s DNA within us.

One of the central themes of the parable is that the younger son is really making a statement that he no longer wishes to be his father’s son. This is unspoken, but a very clear message in the story. Strictly speaking, the inheritance should only come to him after his father had died, so in demanding it while his father was still alive was, in a way, saying to the father: “You are dead to me and I do not desire any longer to be your son.”

A second key theme is that of re-connection. The word “religion” means to reconnect, to re-establish a connection with the source of origin. So the reconnection which occurs as the parable unfolds may be what religion is really all about.

Third, there seem to be illustrative parallels between this parable and the story of the Fall of Man. Adam and Eve are driven from the garden of Eden, but the prodigal son leaves it of his own volition, after making the willful decision that he no longer wishes to be his father’s son. He leaves furthermore, with his father’s inheritance. It is not simply a monetary inheritance: It is a spiritual inheritance as well. His father gave him a sense of spiritual wealth; spiritual capital that was of great value to him. It seems to have served him well for a long time, but because he was disconnected from his father this capital could not be replenished and could not be expected to last forever. It is a lesson about our own spiritual capital: That there needs to be some connectedness to god in order for our spiritual capital to be replenished. It is dependent upon being in the father’s house or in some way connected to it.

In the parable, the spiritual as well as the monetary capital is spent in a distant land, “a far country.” The spiritual significance of this is that it emphasizes the aspect and the degree of alienation from his spiritual roots, his spiritual moorings. His spiritual identity was established at his father’s house, but he becomes estranged, alienated, lost in the far country. He has a spiritual loneliness. Nonetheless, as the story unfolds it is clear that god—the father—is closer to him than he was to himself. The kingdom of god, Jesus said, is within us. So despite the fact of being in a far country, despite having separated himself spiritually, his father had never actually left him.

When the prodigal returned home, his father saw him when he was still afar off. It’s as if the story implies that the father could see him in the far country; that no matter how far away he was, he was still in the view of the father. It does not say so specifically, but the statement that his father saw him from afar suggests that the father’s vision was extremely long.

So no matter how far one strays, the inner light still flickers within one. Despite his geographic distance, the son was still functioning within the context of the spiritual mooring that his father gave him before he left home. In that sense, the son was not on a journey. There is no distance between him and his father. This is what leads me to conclude that this is as much a story about man’s struggle with himself as it is about man’s struggle with god. From God’s point of view, his son has really not gone anywhere. God is still within him. His father still loves him and reaches out to him and indeed can still see him, however far he journeys.

In that sense, we never really left the garden of Eden. This willful distancing of ourselves from god is really an illusion, a self-delusion, a self-deceit. It is an egocentric betrayal of reality. What we think has happened—whether we think that we have left god, or whether we think that he has forsaken us—is just not true. We remain his sons and daughters, we are still made in his image, still in his DNA, we are still one with him.

The original sin therefore seems to be that we either forgot or suppressed who and what we were originally, which is who we still are. The sin of the prodigal was not that he took his father’s wealth, not that he left for a far country, but that he forsook, forgot, or suppressed who and what he was originally. He represents none other than the false self that causes us to feel alienated from god. It is our own betrayal of our own identity before god. We are god’s sons and daughters, but in our self-delusion we remove our son/daughter-ship and our need for the spiritual moorings that are so important to us, and we leave. This deviating from the mark, from being what we should be, deluding ourselves that we are something we are not, is literally what sin means: It is a term from archery meaning to miss the mark.

So the paradox is that to god, there is no journey, no far-off destination, and no alienation; but in our minds there is, because we have put ourselves there. We have lost our core identity and fallen into the disillusion that we have lost or squandered our spiritual heritage.

In the first part of the parable, the son receives the wealth from his father. In the second part, he journeys into the far country and squanders the wealth. In part 3, he confronts his sense of want, or need, or lack. The context is the famine in the land. It is more than just a physical famine. He is spiritually famished, spiritually devastated. He recognizes, for the first time, what he has done: Separated himself from his roots, from his father, and from who he is. That is why the very next phrase about “coming to himself” is so significant: It signifies a re-awakening, a recollection of who he is and what is his true source and his true nature. This is what Jesus talked about in John  8:28: It was “the truth that set him free” from a gaol of self-delusion and doubt, of trying to satisfy his hunger by eating pigswill.

As he came to himself, he realized how far he had deviated from his roots and from himself. So in the final part of the parable, he came home to take his rightful place in his father’s home, the kingdom of heaven. The first words in the parable that occur after he comes back are that his father could see him from far off. He was restored to his true state. He was no longer suffering any kind of want or privation or loss. He was fully restored.

So this is a parable about what true religion is all about: Reconnecting with god. It shows that God’s grace is everlasting, ubiquitous, and free, and the authentic message is that we should forsake our self delusions, our egocentric misperceptions of who we are, and sacrifice our egos so that we see that the recollection of oneself is a realistic return to wholeness because god is right here, within us, right now.

To what extent is this the condition of mankind everywhere and at all times? And how far can we stray before the “light that lighteth every man” (John 1) dies? Is the unpardonable sin when somehow the light is extinguished and reconnection is impossible, that the truth that sets us free (the truth that we are sons and daughters of god, that we are made in his image, that we have a heritage and a core identity back in the father’s house) is denied? How does the law and free will factor into this “greatest story that has ever been told”?

David: It seems to me that what the parable is saying is that we don’t need to bother about grace and reconnection unless and until the chips are really down. In the meantime, we can do whatever we like, stray as far as we like. It seems that god is interested in us only when we have reached the end of our rope. The prodigal father did nothing to stop his son, or go to rescue him. He passively acquiesced in his son’s departure by giving him the money. So the message I get is that while reconnection is indeed the central feature of the parable, it becomes central only at a certain point. Yes, god is always there and will keep an eye on us so that he can help when we really, really need him.

What if the prodigal had not fallen on hard times? What if there had been no famine and he grew rich from investing his inheritance in a drug racket? Would he have gone home to live a respectable life with his dad? From what we know of his character, there is not a chance! But it seems that god would not mind that in the least. He would only mind, as he minded in the parable, if and when the prodigal was really at the end of his rope.

Alice: It seems that every story in the bible has two possible interpretations: spiritual or physical. Since they are in the bible, we can assume they are spiritual. Does the story mean that every wanderer will come back? Everyone who abandons his roots will eventually come to himself and go back? Is that a universal rule?

Jay: Every wanderer is certainly welcome back, but whether he will come back is another story.

To add another variation to David’s: What if the prodigal had died of starvation before he could decide to go home?

Don: Is it true that god places the inner light, the “eternity,” his DNA, in every man’s and woman’s heart? Why? Surely it is in order that reconnection can occur. It’s the transceiver we talked about last week. In the story of the weeding feast (Matthew 22) , the servants are told to go out and round up everybody and anybody, good or evil, as guests. But only one person is rejected, so it seems that statistically it is very uncommon for the light to go out. The point is that most of the time, the light stays lit. The switch for god or not-god is pre-wired with god as the default. It takes a pretty willful and active act of rejection by the human to not get back to the garden.

Jay: At creation it was not possible for man or woman to deviate from the default, but the awakening—the exercise of free will that resulted in knowledge of good and evil—meant that man could now turn off the light. It requires a massive or a persistent effort.

Alice: So our free will is not a good thing. It is not from god.

Jay: Some religionists say it is the greatest gift from god. To me, it is a curse. The moment of eating the fruit is the moment we chose free will over god. And that was the beginning of the end.

Alice: So we determined at that moment that we did not want to be saved. It seems as though it was god’s design, his plan, that we would leave the garden, like the prodigal, then return to our senses, then return to him. But we developed our own plan instead, we and in so doing, we committed the unpardonable sin.

Kieran: It is not easy to commit the unpardonable sin because it is not easy to go against the will of god. As Jason said, it would take tremendous persistence to overcome God’s persistence! In It would take a lifelong rejection of the god, the truth, the light that is inside me, to do so, and that is not easy.

Jay: We think of ignorance as being a bad thing. But ignorance is what children have. My three year old doesn’t know much, but he knows he really wants to be with me, that he is happy when he is with me, and he has no burning desire to do his own thing, to exercise his free will.

Robin: The prodigal son knows he is his father’s son but thinks people are having more fun in the far country. But then he comes to himself. This to me is repentance. The wedding guest wanted his own way, and distrusted god’s way.

Alice: How can we be sure that the wedding guest refused the robe? He was dragged in off the street and might not have had a chance to get a robe.

Kieran: But he was expected to have a robe.

Don: When confronted, the man was speechless.

Alice: It seems that he got in anyway, even without the robe. He was already inside before he was challenged, then thrown out.

Kieran: It seems there are three elements to this parable: 1. You have to have an invitation. 2. You have to have the robe. 3. You can then enjoy the feast.

Jay: His speechlessness suggests to me that he knew he should have a robe, and he knew it was easy to get one, so he had no explanation when challenged. He was caught red-handed.

Regarding persistence: The older brother seemed in much more danger of  committing the unpardonable sin than the younger son was. It’s not about persistently pushing yourself away from god. It’s the older son’s persistent questioning of who deserves god’s grace.

Alice: The older son was OK until the younger son came back. And the father did not pass any judgment in the older son, so maybe the older son was not doing anything bad in his father’s eyes.

Don: That is another indicator of the lavishness of God’s grace. The father even leaves the party to go outside and encourage the older son to come back in. What we don’t know, is what does the older son then do? Does he go in? It is the genius of this and other parables to leave questions.

Robin: The father spoke in the present tense. If the elder brother’s attitude was serious enough, he would have said “Everything I have was yours.” I think if the parable intended to show that the elder brother was in more danger, that it would have been more explicit about that.

Michael: The older son does not really understand the concept his father held. It’s like the three laborers who got the same pay for different hours worked. We cannot understand that concept either.

Jay:The intended audience for the parables were the scribes and Pharisees, who thought they got to decide who deserved God’s grace.

Alice: The point behind the three parables is to tell people that god cares for them. The ending of the prodigal son parable, as of the whole three laborers paragraph, is to tell us that it is not for us to judge. So we should not be trying to judge the elder son, but we cannot avoid making judgments in order to get through life!

David: It seems to me that free will is a fundamental property of the universe. If it is evil, one wonders why god would propagate it by creating Adam, knowing that evil would inevitably be manifested through him.

It is only when we can no longer exercise our free will—for the simple reason that we have run out of options to choose from, when we are at the end of our rope—that we accept that “god’s will be done.” The prodigal son reached this point. Maybe it’s possible that some people might think, “Well, I do have one other option: I can reject—even in this direst of straits—that God’s will be done.” But that would be a rarity, at best. So the unpardonable sin is when your last exercise of your own free will is to reject that god’s will be done. If the prodigal father’s farm is a metaphor for paradise, how come there is so much unhappiness in it? the youngest son was unhappy enough to want out, and the elder son shows signs of not being exactly in a state of bliss. As Don says, the bible seems to pose more questions than answers!

Don: We’ll return to these questions next week.