This gospel comes at the end of a sequence of three stories Jesus tells about how we are supposed to feel about those who are lost. First it’s a lost sheep, where the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep who aren’t lost to find the one that is; then a lost coin, where a woman sweeps the house until she finds the one she lost, even though she has nine others; and now finally a much longer and more complicated story of a lost son, or maybe, given the end of the story, it should be the story of two lost sons, since it turns out that there are different ways to be lost.
We’ve all heard this story so many times that in a way it is almost too familiar. It’s also, frankly, hard to imagine that there was once an era long ago when parents were eager to have their grown children return home and move back in. But these parables Jesus tells always invite us become one of the characters in the story, and today, our job is harder than usual, because both sons, the lost one and the not so obviously lost one, we are all, at least at times, we’re all both of them.
Let’s look at the younger one first. Most of us have not gone off the rails spectacularly enough to be called a prodigal son or daughter. Our lives are much quieter and wouldn’t make for a great story like this. But it may be that we can see something of ourselves here anyway. Because we all have an inheritance just as the younger son did, an inheritance from a rich father, an inheritance of love and talent, a life that is given to us to live, and work that is ours to do.
Sometimes we are attentive enough to be aware of this inheritance, other times we forget. But either way, we find ways to neglect it and even squander it, without even trying to. We make bad decisions and stick with them even when they’re not working, we withdraw from the part of the world and the people where we are most needed and wanted, just the way this younger son did, we live and work according to rules that we don’t really in our heart believe in. It all becomes so familiar that we don’t really notice, but over time we may have ended up living in a distant country, far from home, living a life that isn’t quite ours. So perhaps on some days, we see this younger son in the mirror, people who have thrown something away that we think we can’t get back.
But the older son, the good one, is also us. Because it turns out that following the rules, working hard so that you never make a mistake, almost inevitably leads us to a skewed view of the rest of the world, all those people who aren’t as good as we are. We might not be superstars, we think, but at least we’re not screw-ups like other people. And yet we’re resentful at how little reward there is for being so upright, other people seem to get things in life that we don’t, people who break the rules don’t seem to get punished the way we think they should. This older brother says he worked like a slave. In fact, he’s right, he is a slave, a slave to his own sense of resentment and anger. In his own way, he is also lost.
If this sounds harsh, remember how easy it is to see older brothers in real life. Maybe especially in an election year where so much talk seems based on tapping into people’s resentment, the idea that someone else is getting something you’re not, and that that’s why life isn’t working. It’s not so hard to tap into the older brother in all of us.
But there is a solution for the younger brother and the older one. It’s that wonderful cinematic moment at the real turning point in this story when we’re told that the prodigal son suddenly came to his senses. Came to his senses, a great phrase, as if he finally began to use his senses, after years of just indulging them. He opened his eyes and ears and noticed the unhappy world that he had surrounded himself with and in a moment, it looked different, and he realized how wrong it was for him, and what needed to change.
But what the words in the original language really say, apparently, is that he came to himself. And that is in a way an even better phrase to remember, because what he saw when he opened his eyes and ears and mind was: his real self. He saw that the life he had been living in a distant country was not his life. And he realized that his own life, the one God had given him and not the one he had mistakenly chosen, that was the life he wanted, and that he could reach out and get it back. When he reaches that moment, he is on the way to great happiness. We can only hope that the older brother ultimately had a similar moment of coming to himself. We leave him today standing there angry outside the party his father forgot to invite him to, but we hope he’ll realize that he was loved all along, that he didn’t earn it and couldn’t have earned it, and that all that resentment he built up over the years is a huge weight that he needs to slip off his shoulders and be put down on the ground.
All of us need to come to our senses, and see ourselves the way God sees all of us. He sees all of us the same, as beloved children, the ones who have made terrible mistakes right alongside those who haven’t made any, but it hasn’t helped them to love. Whichever of those two places we have wandered off to, God is eager for us to come to ourselves, he is running towards us before we have even had a chance to put our desires into words or plans.
That experience of shedding our old life and putting on our real one can be as exciting as putting on a royal robe like the younger son, as refreshing as a snake shedding an old skin. There is music and dancing in the distance for those who come back from terrible mistakes, and also for those who can put aside their superiority, relax for once, to go to a party with a whole lot of people who don’t deserve to be there, people whose story you don’t quite believe, whose repentance may or may not be real. If you go to that party with everyone else who was once lost, you’ll finally be where God is. Because all these stories tell us that God is with the lost, loving them more than anyone else.