THIS PASSAGE from Mary McGlone's weekly commentary on the Sunday lectionary readings really struck me:
What’s the message of the story of the prodigal son? Is it repentance? If so, we would have to admit that the young man’s repentance was motivated almost entirely by his own self-interest. He was dying to eat pig slop. Just about anything would look better than that! Such repentance sets a pretty low bar.
Is it forgiveness? The father never said a word about forgiveness or absolution or “I’m glad you learned your lesson.” Even when the older brother whined, the father said nothing to excuse the younger one’s behavior. He simply pointed out that everything he had belonged to the elder as well.
And he threw a party.
During ordinary time, the first reading and Gospel are related while the second reading gives us a continuous look at New Testament letters. In the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, the three readings work together to draw us into the mystery of the day. Therefore, to know what the liturgy wants us to take from this Gospel, we can find clues in the other two readings and the psalm.
Mercy is bigger than forgiveness and forgiveness is bigger than the judicial concept of justice, sometimes both involve things that seem outrageously unjust to us, as the dutiful son's understandable anger at his jerk of a brother being taken back and given a welcome home party while he's hard at work and no one asked him what he thought about it. That would seem to be the message behind this parable which isn't exactly announced as being how the Kingdom of God will be but I think given the general goal of the parables, we could be forgiven for taking that unannounced message from it.
It struck me, reading this analysis of the parable how everything in our human understanding of repentance, forgiveness, and everything we can conceive of is tied to and tied down to our experience of the limits of material resources and the artificial categories of ownership and possession and thrift and waste. The story is all about the younger son asking his father for his eventual share in his material wealth and his squandering of it and, when he's hit bottom, him going back home to work as a servant because his father treats his servants better than he's going to be treated in the place he squandered his inheritance on. But the father takes him back as a son, not as a servant and is overjoyed that he's returned to his family. He doesn't make demands, as Mary McGlone points out, the brat doesn't even express repentance or even having really learned his lesson. That wouldn't seem to be the theme of the story which Jesus tells in response to the religious hard-asses condemning him, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
They were accusing him of having cooties because of the company he kept. Something religious law seems to be continually in danger of becoming in application, the civil law, lower to start with, is often even worse in that regard.
What I got from reading this fresh take on the story was that the forgiveness of God is bound to surpass any of our understanding of forgiveness which is bound up with material wealth and resources, their "ownership" and the kind of justice we imagine in our human concerns with material wealth and "ownership" and who we are bound in "justice" to pass it on to or give it to. We are clued into the father in the story being a generous man because the prodigal, profligate son knows that he treats his servants better than the government and societal power he's placed himself under in a foreign land (the pig herding is a sure clue that it's among gentiles) will treat him - which is, in fact, the way poor people are generally treated under secular and too many allegedly Christian laws and practices right now, right here in the United States under our current Constitutional regime and elsewhere.
It shouldn't be a surprise to us if God's mercy surpasses our conceptions of justice and what's due to those with a "just" ownership over the material goods of even their father EVEN WHEN THOSE WHO FEEL WRONGED HAVE, IN FACT KEPT FAITH WITH THEIR FATHER as their profligate brother was clearly in the wrong. But I suspect our understanding of that will have to wait until we aren't bound by the bonds of our thinking, conditioned as that is by material resources and possessions and the kind of human "justice" we imagine in terms of human terms of just desserts. It surpasses our understanding.
McGlone's take and her title, The God of Parties, reminds me of Sr. Elizabeth A. Johnson's Chapter in The Quest For The Living God, The God of Fiesta.
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