4th Sunday of Lent The Dysfunctional God The story of the Prodigal Son is one of the most popular in the Gospels. It tells of a son who rejects his father, demands his inheritance, squanders it on a life of debauchery and then returns home expecting to be taken in and looked after. It also tells of another son consumed by envy and disgust at his father because he welcomes back the prodigal. Not an unfamiliar story in our own day, nor at any other time for that matter. Towards both sons, the father goes out in love, passionately and totally. What is significant in the story is that, in the culture of that time, a father would never act like this father. For a son to ask for his share of the property is to tell his father he wished he were dead, but the father complied in dividing the property! When the son returned it was for him to run to his father, not the father to the son – that it went against his parental dignity. When the father said to the older son “All I have is yours,” he was saying, in the culture of the time, you are an intimate friend. But a father, in that culture, would never call his son, a friend. This father did not act correctly as a parent – setting up appropriate boundaries. The point of the story is not for parents to act extravagantly and dysfunctionally. Elsewhere Jesus uses the example of parents treating their children properly when they demand things that aren’t good for them. Rather the point is that God’s mercy towards us is so extraordinary, so strong, so real that no matter what we have done we came come close to God, even with our sins, and know that the divine love will embrace us.
Sr Kym Harris OSB |