RETURNING TO OUR FATHER

Jesus addressed this parable to the Pharisees:
“A man had two sons, and the younger son said to his father,
‘Father give me the share of your estate that should come to me.’
So the father divided the property between them.
After a few days, the younger son collected all his belongings
and set off to a distant country
where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation. . . . Luke 15:11-32

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This reflection by Bishop Robert Barron is taken from the Word on Fire Bible: The Gospels, pages 392-400. Barron introduces this as a story about “who the father/God/Jesus is and how he brings to himself an Israel that had, in a double sense, wandered into exile.”

I see in this story that these two sons lack an awareness of, and appreciation for, their father’s never-ending, ever-flowing gift of love, and that makes me think, “How could they be right there and not be experiencing that love, not treasuring it? And then I look at how often we, myself included, go for hours, not sensing our Father’s never-ending, ever-flowing gift of love as we go about our days!

Is today the day of my heart’s return to the Father?

Sister Loretta

“The parable opens with the  declaration of a clear break in the communion and coinherence that one would expect to hold between a father and his son. And if we attend closely to the language of the parable, we will sense further dimensions of this rupture. . . . By definition, a gift cannot be demanded; it can only be received graciously and as a sort of surprise. In making his demand, therefore, the younger son is precluding the possibility of a gifted relationship between himself and his father; he is cutting off the flow of grace.

“Second, in asking for property that is coming to him, he emphatically confirms the gracelessness of the exchange. Property is what is proper to a person, what is uniquely his, what he can claim in at least a quasi-legal sense. In common usage, the word indicates what is to be held on to and defended against counter-claimants. . . . The younger son is asking emphatically for something to have and hold as his own, free of any merely accidental link to either the source or the pocanassible destination of his possession. He expects the gift (in a substantive sense) apart from giving, and that is precisely what he receives when” his father divided his property between them.”

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As in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve interrupted the “walking with God in the cool of the evening as friends, giving and receiving in a circle of grace,” and committed the original sin, the prodgal son “ruptures” this relationship with his father “through the desire to possess property. The true God can only be ‘had’ when one disposes oneself to receive the divine life as a grace and to give that life away in turn as a gift. Grace is ‘possessed’ only in measure that it is received and offered and never held on to.”

“The younger son wandering in a distant land is evocative of the human race, all the descendants of Adam and Eve, who have lost contact with the flow of divine great life. Living in the land of hiring, taking, paying, and possessing, they starve spiritually. They are like the sad guests at the wedding feast of Cana who have run out of wine; they are like Israel in the land of exile, pining for Zion; or they are like the psalmist’s deer yearning for flowing streams. How appropriate, by the way, is that last image. The divine life flows because it is a process of giving and receiving; sin is substantive and fixed, hard currency. The only solution is a return to a graced mode of being.”

Word on Fire Bible: The Gospels, Bishop Robert Barron, pages 392-400.