If someone asked you what Jesus’s story of the prodigal son was all about, you’d probably say that it was about forgiveness, that it’s about God’s willingness to welcome almost anyone back to his heart no matter how far they had left God behind. And of course if you gave that answer you wouldn’t be at all wrong. If we take anything away from this story it’s that image of a son on the way home from far away, and the father running out to welcome him before he even got there. That is the way God is, always more eager to embrace us than we have any reason to imagine, the past wiped away and everything begun fresh.
But today let’s realize there is a little more to this story, and it’s an image for all of us about how to live. It gives us a reality check on how we all have a tendency to lose our way in the same way these two sons in their different ways lost their ways. Because in addition to being a story about forgiveness, this is a story about humility.
It’s hard to give a homily about humility. I even found myself thinking that if I was going to preach about humility it had better be really, really good. But all kidding aside, humility has gotten kind of a bad name. To us humility can sound like we are always supposed to be putting ourselves down, that we always need to be thinking that we aren’t good enough or don’t know enough. And it’s true that telling people they should be humble has often been used over the centuries by those in authority as a way to stay in authority without people asking too many questions about why things work the way they do.
But that kind of humility, just assuming that you should just always defer to other people, that is not Christian humility, which based on the gospel today I would call the gift seeing your real position in relation to everyone else. Real humility is a gift from God that wakes us up and helps us understand where we really are and who we are connected with.
If you want to see a moment of humility in action, it’s that moment of waking up that the younger son has in this gospel. Here is someone who totally lost his moorings. He wanted his rights without responsibility. He wanted freedom without relationships. He wanted his future without waiting for it. The translation we use says that when he hit rock bottom, he “came to his senses.” But what it really says in the original is something that helps us see it even better, it says he “came to himself.” Suddenly he realized who and where he really was, not that he was worse than everyone else, but that he was connected to other people in a family that he had not placed any value on. Suddenly, he realizes that he has been wandering lost and wants to be found again.
The older brother in this story is really in the same position. He also has to embrace some humility. Because here he is, thinking that the fact that his brother got everything so wrong means that he is entitled to a position of resentment and superiority. He doesn’t want to have the relationship with his brother restored. He doesn’t want to see someone else’s debts forgiven, because he thinks that diminishes him. Just like the younger son, he needs to rediscover who he is, and that he is connected to others, whether he wants to be or not.
So what is the humility that Jesus is trying to show us here? The word humility comes from the word for ground, so it means being grounded; it means realizing that you belong somewhere, that you are part of a family, that you have connections and obligations to a larger group, that you are a beloved child but there are other beloved children as well. So why did Jesus tell this story, with so much detail about these two sons and the mistakes they made? It’s to show the father’s love, of course, but it’s also to show us what real humility can save us from. It is more than just a polite way to act. Real humility, a sense of who we are in the family, is what keeps us from harsh judgment of others, because we know that we all fail too often to entitle us to sit in judgment. Humility helps hold us back from any form of prejudice, because we see that everyone is beloved by the same father who loves us. Humility helps us see reality without our anger and resentments and jealousy and destructive desires. We embrace the large human family God has placed us in, where no one outranks anyone else, and we also embrace our place in it.
Because what Jesus taught us in this story is that we live in a world of grace where everyone is beloved, and we serve God best when we acknowledge how we are connected to others, despite how difficult it is for human beings to do that. Yet with God’s help sometimes we are able to come to our senses and see it, and when that happens, that is when the banquet in this gospel becomes a reality, and people sit down together having realized exactly who they are.