21 - Chapter 21
CHAPTER XXI THE PRODIGAL SON
WE gather then that citizenship in the Kingdom means not obedience to a code of laws, but living in a certain spirit; and that the first step towards the acquisition of that spirit is to realise our utter need of it. Jesus elaborates this in one of the longest of the parables, that commonly and not very happily styled ’ The Prodigal Son.” The young man in this parable is typical of a far wider class than the gaol-birds, drunkards and sensualists, with whom he is commonly identified. If we were asked for an analysis of the greatest disruptive force in society to-day, could we answer better than by saying that, in some shape or other, we are all, individuals, classes, nations and races, making the demand made by this youth: * Give me my share of the property.” At this stage the favourite verb is ’ give,” in the imperative; the young man has no such
1 This section is an abridgement, made by permission of the publishers, from the authors article on “ The Prodigal Son “ in “ The Speaker’s Bible: the Gospel according to St. Luke.” use for the verb “ take.” His favourite pronoun is that of the first person: ’ Give me my share.”
Material goods are the height of his ambition, property that may be turned into money and from money into pleasure. Having got what he wanted, the young man went abroad; and it is clear that his departure was his verdict on his home; life as he conceived it could not be lived in that atmosphere. The routine of his father’s house meant work, discipline, and the Ten Commandments, all of which he felt to be unsuited to a man of his soaring temperament. Sometimes, for good as well as for evil, a new way of life requires a new stage. If Abraham is to become the Father of the Faithful, he must first leave his country and his kindred and his father’s house. But the far country of the parable is one to reach which needs no travelling. We are all in the far country in so far as we are rebels in our Father’s world, demanding that it shall minister to our wants, our pleasures or our glory, refusing to keep the terms on which alone we hold our inheritance as sons terms of work and duty and thoughtful consideration for others.
We must not assume that there was nothing to be said for the young man. The sound of music and dancing issuing from the house was sufficiently rare to attract attention and demand explanation; and the elder son told his father, if we can believe him, that no feast, on however moderate a scale, had been made for him. But that is a side-issue and Jesus goes on with the story. When he had gone through all his money with reckless prodigality, ’ there was a terrible famine in that country, and he began to feel the pinch.” The world was no longer a pleasure garden; the holiday was finished; getting a job as a swine-herd, hungry enough to eat the pigs’ diet of carob-pods, he was at last compelled to face the realities of life.
Then the youth made an astonishing discovery; he ’ came to himself,” awaking as from a bad dream. He had supposed that he was the one sane member of his family, that life was a far bigger, freer, more joyous thing than his straitlaced father and sour-faced brother supposed it to be. After some experience of life according to his own description, he felt like one awaking from a nightmare. He had fled from the dignified work of a son on his father’s farm; he had to beg for the most loathsome work a Jew could be given to do, on the farm of a stranger and a foreigner. His father and his brother had shown far too much interest in his doings; in the far country no one took any interest in him, not even in his elementary bodily needs. Hunger and loneliness and shame had burned it into his mind that when he made the choice, he had made it blindfold, seeing neither of the alternatives in their true light; for, whatever course of life we decide to follow, we have to take it with all its consequences. It had seemed the choice lay between a dull routine of work and duty on the one hand, and on the other a vivacious sampling of the best that life has to give, a career of selfrealisation or self-expression as we call it to-day. But with the home life went affection and honour, self-respect and the sense that one was justifying one’s existence; the undisciplined life, “ having a good time “ in the modern phrase, had as its sequel famine and the swine-trough. We are living in a moral world; we may disregard its laws, but they will find us out and compel us to reckon with them. It is a story of the eternal prodigal, of no race or language or age, because he is of all races and languages and ages, who leaves his home and goes abroad, lives in strange ways and finds what a fool he is; and his repentance means that he comes home. In the youth’s first speech to his father, there is no note but that of demand (Mat 15:12); the speech he now rehearses is all confession and petition (Mat 15:18 f.). The word ’ father ’ in Mat 15:12 is but a name for one who was to him only a source of supplies; the same word in Mat 15:18 is wrung from him by the remembrance of the treasure of love he had flung away; he became a son indeed when he knew he had no longer the right to use the name. The test of the sincerity of his repentance is in Mat 15:19, “ Treat me like one of your hired men.” At the beginning of the story, his thought was all of his claims: what had life to give him? When he returned, humbled and with eyes opened, there was no more talk of his rights. ’ Let me be a member of the home circle on any terms, even on condition of menial service; only let me be within the house.” The work he had scorned as a duty he now begged as a boon; he had learned that service is the law of life. When more of us have learned this, the world will be a better place to live in. We live in perpetual strife or fear of strife because we are all fond of airing our grievances and claiming our dues, of saying: ’ Give me my portion of the goods.” We are not so insistent on men receiving from us our contribution of service.
We do not often hear of workmen returning part of their wages because they know they have not earned it, of merchants lying awake at night wondering if they are giving a fair equivalent for the profits they take, of professional men blushing as they charge fees whose only justification is the privileged position of those who charge them, of stockholders consulting the economists to discover just why they are entitled to make such large demands on the fruit of other men’s toil. Would these experiences be quite so rare if the world had laid to heart the story of the prodigal? This father was of the noble army of runners.
There are those who run in their eagerness to do mischief; but there is a running of earnest purpose, like that of the ruler who came to ask Jesus the way of eternal life; and there is the running of affection which cannot wait to walk.
All through this part of the story there are signs of eager haste. The father interrupts his son’s, penitential speech; he rejoices to see the repentant spirit; but who wants to hear apologies, especially from his child? His first word is “Quick”!’ “Quick! Bring out the best robe.” His hospitable orders are short and sharp; the preparations have been completed, the household is feasting, and the musicians and dancers have been summoned and are plying their art before the elder son comes in from his work on the farm. Rags, shame, and hunger all forgotten, the petitioner for a hireling’s place is welcomed with all the honour, and far more than the affection, given to a prince.
It is a simple story, perhaps drawn from the life, of a father welcoming home a wandering child; but it is more than that. It is the testimony of one who saw the truth of things as no one else has ever seen it, saw that, behind all that is, there is a great heart of love and goodness, One who waits with eager longing till his children have learned the spirit of the family and have taken their place as members of the home, asking no question but “ What wilt thou have me to do? ’ In words whose compelling beauty have moved the hearts of men throughout the ages as hardly any other words have done, our Lord assures us that the whole spiritual force of the universe thrills with joy as each potential son and daughter abandons the barren, selfcentred, loveless life; learns to say ’ Father,” and asks to be enrolled as a member of the family of those who do God’s will.
We wrong ourselves if we allow this gospel to be restricted to thieves and drunkards; it is good news for all of us whose aim in life has been to make a series of as good bargains as we could for ourselves, and then have come to realize that God and our neighbour have claims on us, and that we justify our existence only as we live for the Family. There is joy in the presence of God’s angels over a single sinner that repents. The son had been reconciled to the father; a more difficult problem remained, to reconcile brother to brother. Influenced by Luke’s introduction to the chapter, expositors have assumed that, as the younger brother stands for the outcast, the elder brother represents the Pharisee, and have heaped on him ugly names. Certainly he is not presented in a lovable light, and it may be that he deserves many of the hard things that have been said of him. Yet if we are to find infinite significance in the father’s reception of the prodigal, must we not take seriously the father’s assurance to the elder son: ’ Son, you are with me all the time, and all that is mine is yours “? It was not so that Jesus was wont to speak of the Pharisees. We are sometimes told that the elder son is the type of legalistic piety that reckons its services and expects its rewards. But there is no suggestion in the story that he had worked with his eye on the clock or expected recognition of his service, until he found his scapegrace brother so handsomely treated for no reason that he could see. Such men are industrious and upright, but for them religion has no redemptive mission. They believe that the idler and the scamp should be punished, not embraced, decked out and feasted. The limitations of forgiveness, even of the forgiveness of God, are apt to be forgotten, unless we contrast the new lot of the younger son, as Jesus implicitly contrasts it, with that of the elder. He comes back, indeed; but he does not begin again where he left off. The wearing of the best robe does not obliterate the fact that he came home in rags, nor does the fingerring of honour make him or others forget that he was once a swine-herd. Only after a long struggle, if ever, will he regain the esteem and self-esteem that he has lost. But the elder son’s inheritance, material and spiritual, is intact.
’ We had to make merry and be glad. Your brother has lost all else, but he has saved his life.” Here surely, as much as anywhere, we vividly realize the contrast between the two ideals of life as they seemed to Jesus. To accept the Father-will that rules the world, to be a member of the household of love and service, though we creep in shame-faced, famine-stricken and naked, is life from the dead.
Each son was now doing the father’s will, but that gave them no common bond. The ill-will, so far as the story goes, was all on the side of the elder brother. He thought the prodigal should be treated as he deserved; he would not call him brother, but “ this, thy son.” Is not this, also, a diagnosis of the unrest of our time? Our grievances, we feel sure, are wellfounded; we want our superiority to be recognized; we ask for simple justice; and we forget that in the course of justice, none of us would see salvation. If the strife of sects and classes and nations is ever to be stilled, we must find some motive power strong enough to produce mutual regard and mutual service. We know of none save that which our Lord teaches in this parable. We are all children of one common Father; we have to learn to feel towards each other as brothers and as sisters, to stretch out towards each other a forgiving, helping hand; so shall we all be members of the great family of God.