12.02 The departure from home
II. THE DEPARTURE FROM HOME The younger son “said to his father, ’Father, give me the portion of thy substance that falleth to me.’ “ It was the craving of a false independence. He already possessed in the life of the home the full enjoyment of all his father’s substance.
Speaking later to the elder son, the father expressed the abundant generosity of that home life in the words “all that is mine is thine.” The son would have been right to use and enjoy that substance to the full. But he was weary of the sense of dependence: he wished to be his own master. That was the beginning of his fall. And for us “God is our Home”; and in that home life all His gifts are freely bestowed upon us.
We can use and enjoy them; nay, we ought. The marvellous endowments of our human nature of the mind and of the senses, of love, and of beauty; all the marvels of this universe in which we live, which man half receives and half creates; these we are meant to know, to use, to enjoy. It is the very privilege of man to be able in some degree to “share God’s rapture” in His creation, to see and know that it is “very good.” “All that is mine is thine.” We are meant to “taste the joys of life,” to live in every thought and sense vividly and eagerly. “Vivens homo gloria Dei” a living man, living to the utmost point of intensity, is the glory of God. But the life is to be realized in the home in union with God the Father; conscious ever of His Presence, sharing His mind, and submissive to His Will. It is when we wish to take life with all its gifts and opportunities into our own hands, and use them apart from God, when we wish to be our own masters, that we go wrong. “Give me the portion of thy substance that falleth to me” the making of this claim, whether in the history of the race or of the individual man, is the Fall. Jesus in this parable only repeats and vindicates in simple and homely language the truth of an older “parable” the story of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. When in the “fretful stir” of youth, aware of new and clamorous desires and impatient of restraints, we say in our heart, “I will enjoy life and have a good time in my own way; I will be my own master,” we think that we are uttering the voice of our true and emancipated manhood; but, alas! we are only echoing the voice of the oldest delusion in the world. Some time or other we have all made that claim; perhaps somewhere in our lives we are making it still. Every time we make it we lose our Eden. We leave “God, who is our Home.”
“And he divided unto them his living.” The claim is allowed. The son can take his life and use it as he pleases, if he will.
God will always acknowledge His own mysterious gift of freedom. It is needless, for it is useless, to ask, why? God chose to make among His other creatures sons beings “made in His own image”; only so from His creation could come the free love and praise and obedience which alone could satisfy that Love which is His very Life. For this great end to use human modes of speech He chose the risk of man’s freedom. Only when we can say, “We would rather have been stones or trees or beasts than sons of God” is there any place for our complaints, and may we not add that this is something which no one who has kept any spark of his true manhood alight within would ever dare to say. “He divided unto them his living.” It is the consequence of the greatness of God’s Love and of man’s destiny.
TAGS: [Parables]