Lost, Found, and Forgiven: The Prodigal Son’s Powerful Message for Us All

Daniel McInnes explores the parable of the Prodigal Son and its deep lessons on repentance, mercy, and reconciliation. As we enter Great Lent, this story challenges us to examine ourselves honestly and turn back to the Father. What can we learn from the prodigal, the elder brother, and the loving father? Watch this sermon to reflect on how this parable calls us to live.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today, we have the very well-known story of The Prodigal Son. I guess most people would know it. Even in our culture, people know about the prodigal son, even if they're not Christians or they've never been anywhere near a church. It's the kind of thing you've kind of heard about somewhere. You know, you talk about it in the way of someone's coming back from having, you know, gone away in a general kind of sense. But this story has a lot in it that we can get, especially as we're moving into Lent, but our whole approach to the way that we deal with life and our own spiritual growth. And I want to today focus on the three characters and what they can show us about what's, you know, what's good and what's not so good. Each of them shows us something we can learn from each three: from the son, the prodigal son, from the father, and from the elder son as well.

But just to remind you of the story, the basic outline: the youngest son goes to his father and says, "I want my part of the inheritance now." The father gives it to him, and he goes off into a far country and basically wastes everything. In that state of extreme poverty, he then becomes a slave, essentially, to one of the local people and ends up wishing that he could eat the food that the pigs were eating. So he falls to basically as low as he could fall. At that point, he says, "You know what? It was much better in my own father's house. I'd be better to be a slave in his house than to be a slave here. I'll go back to him and I'll ask him to be a slave in his house." When he goes back, his father receives him with joy. Not only receives him with joy, he clothes him in the best robes, puts the ring on his finger, kills the fatted calf, and basically throws a big feast because his son has come back.

But the elder son is not so happy. The elder son sees him and he thinks, "Why is this guy back?" and he's really upset. Then the father has to come and say to him, "Hey, I might just take it off easier." So his father has to—oh, that's better—his father comes to him and says, "You know, why are you like this? This son who is dead is now alive. You should be rejoicing with us." So that's the basic outline of the story.

Now, each one of them has a lot to show us, kind of the good actions and the kind of responses and things like that. Now, the prodigal son, everything he does on every level is wrong. The first thing he does is he goes to his father and he says, "I want my inheritance now," which is like saying, "I really can't wait for you to die. I don't really care about you, so just give me what's coming to me and I'll be off," right? I mean, that's essentially what he's doing. And in that culture, not burying your own father is—in the Jewish culture, not burying your own father, not being there to bury your own father is a disgrace. In fact, it's in the Torah. You're supposed to bury your own parents, right? It's kind of there. And what he's saying is, "I'm not going to wait for you to die. Give me what I want. I'm going off to do what I want. I don't want nothing to do with you ever." All right? It's a complete abandonment of everything that he has been up until that point to go and do what he wants.

So, sounds really terrible, right? How does it apply to us? We have been given everything, especially we who are in the church. We've been given everything. God has given us everything that we need for our own salvation. Not only has He given us everything we need for our own salvation, He gives us everything we need for life in this world as it's appropriate for us. And we don't think so. We often think, "Oh, we're doing all right," but we always—we, or not always, we often turn away. We often turn away to do our own thing, maybe in little ways, maybe in big ways, maybe not as extreme as the prodigal son. I mean, that's kind of extreme. But in little ways, we turn away. We say, "You know what? All this is great, but, you know, I really just want to do my own thing." And that could just be small things, but the small things add up. The small things are a turn in the wrong direction. The small things are a turn to a direction that will take us away from true life. And so we might think it's only a tiny thing. Those little things, those little things, they add up. They turn us away. They put us on a path in which we don't want to go toward, we don't want to go down.

So this prodigal son followed that path in an extreme way. But the good thing we see with him is that when he realizes what he's done, when the gravity of it all hits him, he has the courage to say, "You know what? I was completely wrong. Everything that I did was wrong, and I'm going to go back to my father and I'm going to say to him, 'Let me be a slave in your house.'" It takes courage. It takes courage to do that, you know, especially something big like he's taken his whole inheritance, he's gone to a far country, he's blown it all, right? That's a big deal. It takes a lot of courage to come back from that and say to your own father, "Hey, I know I did all this and it was completely wrong. Just let me be a slave in your house." St. John Chrysostom says something in the context, I think it's of confession. He says, "Be ashamed when you sin, not when you confess or not when you repent." And here's an example of that. We should be ashamed when we sin because sinning takes us away from the life that we have in Christ. But when we realize what we've done wrong, when we know that it's time to own up to it and to make right whatever we've done which is wrong and return, at that point we shouldn't be ashamed. We should be rushing back because that's the response that God is waiting for with us, right? So we see this in the prodigal son in a great way. He turns around completely and goes back.

So that's the prodigal son. Then we have the father. Now, the father is a great example of—he doesn't really do anything wrong here. In the very first instance, when his son comes to him and says, "I want my inheritance," he doesn't say, "Are you crazy?" Right? We don't get that from the story. He doesn't say to his older brother, "Hey, take the younger one, lock him in the woodshed for a while until he kind of smartens up." We don't get—I mean, it's a parable, so we don't get a fleshed-out story, but presumably the father said to the son, "Hey, you know, do you really want to do this? Do you really want to take your inheritance and go off somewhere? Is that really—this is not really a good idea," right? But at the point where he's decided to really go ahead and do what he wants to do, the father in love says, "Peace be with you." This is hard. It's really hard. There are people in our lives we know are doing the wrong thing or we can see they might be on the wrong path, and at a certain point, when they're determined to do it, we have to be prepared to say, "You know what? I love you. Go in peace," and be always there like the father, waiting for the return. In some cases, it doesn't come, but in many cases, it does. And when that person does return, what they're going to remember is that you, the people who they left behind, weren't there bashing them. They know that they've got a home to come to. The prodigal son knew he had a home to come to because his father didn't reject him when he left. His father was loving and kind. He gave him what he wanted, but he left the door open, right? We should always be like that with everyone in our lives. We have to leave the door open for people. We have to have the courage to let them go when they're determined to go, but also we need to leave that door open for them to come and be there for them when they do come back and love them.

He's also—well, I'll talk about the oldest son first because he's a tricky one. The older son, he actually does a lot right. His life is lived in service to his father. You know, he does everything right. He's a good boy, does all the right things. So he naturally feels a little bit upset when his younger brother comes back, who's wasted everything, and then suddenly he's got, you know, a robe and a ring and he's got the fatted calf and the whole merry-making thing going on. He feels really upset, right? We could see that come, you know, from a worldly kind of human point of view. A lot of people would be really upset if that happened, right? They'd be like, "This waster, this wastrel, this guy who's just gone and done all this stuff to my father, what's he doing? He's just coming back and just receiving him like nothing's happened." From an earthly point of view, this is totally understandable. But the father says to him, and it's really amazing what he says, when the older son is talking to the father, he doesn't even call the younger son his brother. He says, "This your son has done all these things and you're receiving him back." He won't even recognize him as his own brother, and that's the problem. The problem is that, yes, he lives his life, he's in service to his father, he does all the right things, he does all that, but when it comes down to it, he doesn't have the mercy or the love or the open heart towards his brother who has come back from the dead, basically. He's come back into their life. He doesn't have that openness, that love, that mercy for him. And his father essentially says to him, "You've got everything. Everything I have is yours," right? When the father passes away, everything will go to him. "Everything I have is yours. You're always with me, but the main thing you're missing, the main thing you're missing, you're not loving your brother. Where's the mercy? Where's the joy that he's come back from, you know, from as far as they're concerned, the dead?" That's the important thing.

And so what the father shows us is that—well, the oldest son, firstly, the oldest son shows us it's good to be faithful, it's good to do all the right things, all the stuff that we are supposed to do. It's great to do all that, but as St. Paul says, if you do all that stuff but if you don't have love, you're like a clanging cymbal, right? You're just like an empty vessel. Love, mercy, accepting the other when they've come back, that's important. So the oldest son needs to hear that. He needs to hear, "You're missing this."

Now, the father, in the center at all times, his job is reconciliation. He's waiting for his younger son to come back, right, so that he can be reconciled to the family again. But when the older son is rejecting the younger son, he goes to him and he says, "Hey, you know, come on, you've got to be joyful. He's come back from the dead." Again, reconciliation. We as Christians, we as Christians stand in this world as ministers of reconciliation. Reconciliation to each other, but to all the people out there and even to the whole of creation because the divine energies come through us to all of creation. So we stand as ministers of reconciliation in this world, and we always have to have that attitude, that idea that in everything that we do as Christians, we are trying to bring reconciliation to the world around us through Christ.

So as we're going into Great Lent, we've got great opportunities now to kind of put all this into practice because Great Lent is like—people talk about Great Lent in lots of different ways, but it's like a pressure test, you know, it's like a stress test. You know, when we go for a loan with the bank or something and they say, "Well, what's going to happen if the interest rates go up 2%? Can you still pay?" Right? What happens with us in Great Lent is that a little bit of pressure gets put on, you know, we eat a bit less, giving more, praying more, all those kind of things. It all puts extra pressure on us, and the idea is not to see how great we can be but to see where all of the junk starts to pop out or all the garbage starts to come out, 'cause it will, right? As you begin to put a little bit more pressure on yourself through Great Lent, you'll find that things will come up, things that you haven't dealt with, right? The idea is that we begin to see ourselves honestly, to see ourselves clearly, to see ourselves without lies. When we can do that, we can start to reject those lies, and when we start to do that, we need that reconciliation. We need to be able to come back in confession. We need to have the love and the acceptance of the others around us. We need people to say, "Hey, you know, he needs help, let's bring him back in." But Lent is a time of pressure for that purpose, not so that we can show off how great we are at fasting or anything like that. It's so that we can begin to see ourselves as we truly are, right? Doesn't matter if we're broken, doesn't matter if we're sinful, everyone's broken and sinful, but we can be honest about that so when we come to Pascha, we can stand before Christ and we can say, "This is who I am truly. This is who I am. I'm broken, sinful, I'm all these things." But Christ, like the good father, says, "I know, but there's this great feast. Let's feast. Let's feast. Let's work on that other stuff, but let's feast." Christ will accept us back. We come back in repentance. There's nothing that we cannot be repented of in this life while we have breath.

So may the Lord help us. Amen.