Voyage of the Prodigal:
from Solitary Confinement
to the Father's House
Repentance is not individualism
The Lenten call to repentance is often mistaken for an urge to descend into subjectivity, where the awareness of sin is confined to the indefinite reaches of the self and the psychic potential for an endless discovery of sinfulness.
But repentance in the Bible is not “navel-gazing.” It is not limited to introspection or what turns out to be “psychic self-prosecution.” Morality is both personal and social.
The righteousness of the Kingdom of God is not individualism -- despite the often popular urge to do so. Such individualized and subjectivized introspection turns out to be complicit in avoiding the obligations of "religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world" (James 1.27).
The Prodigal Son is too often narrated as the descent into the disconnected soul, looking for a "nous" that is an island unto itself. But nature abhors not a vacuum but rather isolation -- and human nature is no different. “No man is an island,” so says the great English poet John Donne, “entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
It is impossible to “find yourself” as a disconnected, independent being. The sin of the Prodigal Son is not only his acts of excess – “there he squandered his property in loose living.” When the Prodigal Son “took his journey into a far country,” the real far country is precisely the ego descending into total self-centeredness. It was a rejection of the Father’s beautiful Creation, a turning away from the community of the Father’s House, and getting utterly lost and hopeless in the darkness of self-alienation.
The Father’s gifts of restoration
When the Prodigal finally “came to his senses” in the pig pen (Luke 15.17), he was changing from being self-absorbed (which always tends toward psychotic pathology) to waking up to reality – which is the divine community of his Father’s house.
The Prodigal Son is better told -- following the original Narrator's script -- as a restoration to the community of Eden – that is, humanity as it was created to be. After having squandered the inheritance of human nature, the restored prodigal regains the marks of communion with humanity and all Creation.
The Father clothes His returning child with a robe that hearkens back to the innocence and openness, the transparency and lissomeness of Adam and Eve before the Fall. It is the baptismal robe of holiness regained.
The shoes that were put on the feet of the Prodigal are tokens of being firmly established in the Father’s house: “having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6.15).
And the ring is the sign of sonship and daughterhood, of having been brought back into the household of the Father not as a hired hand, but as a son or daughter fully restored. The ring is a badge of primordial human royalty. Humanity – the image of the Son of the Father – was always the center and meaning of Creation.
All three of these graces, these undeserved and utterly surprising festival gifts, speak emphatically of a repentant sinner being welcomed back and repositioned at the head of Creation, once again occupying the divine call in Eden:
“Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion … Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1.26,28). This is a “happy dominion,” a husbandry over Creation that mediates divine grace through man to all other creatures. This central role was abdicated by the First Adam at the Fall: this role is taken up again by the Second Adam, and in Him every prodigal is “re-invested” with royalty restored.
False way of salvation
Obviously, these gifts of the Father – the ring, the shoes, the robe – are NOT tokens of a hermeticized individual, separated from the rest of humanity and the world. Such individualism -- even dressed in Pharisaical complacency -- is a false way of theosis, i.e., salvation. Righteousness is only community: it cannot be egotistical.
Jesus warns against the temptations of false theosis, of a Pharisaical individualism that calls attention to itself:
“And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6.16-18).
The dangers of show religion
The Lord says many withering things about making a show of austere religion and publicized penance. Orthodox Christians should not be identified by what they wear, how they look, especially by how miserable they act.
The early Christians readily adopted this ethic. This can be seen in the Letter to Diognetus, written in 130 AD by an anonymous author: “Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.”
The selfish older son
Nothing demonstrates the peril of “individualized false theosis” than the character of the Older Brother of the Prodigal Son. His is the self-isolating religiosity of the separated individual, offended that the undeserving is welcomed back home.
Who is the Older Son? Anyone who would rather eat mutton with just a few other miserable colleagues (like Job's “friends” who blamed Job’s suffering on God) than join in with the angelic assembly who all rejoice over one sinner who repents:
“ … yet you never gave me a kid goat that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15.29).
The Lord points to this theme in the verse that immediately precedes the Parable of the Prodigal Son:
“Just so, I tell you that there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15.10).
True Lent cannot be undertaken without a clear idea of the destination. The Father's House with "bread enough and to spare" is the House of the Greening of Spring. It is the community of Eden that is the descending New Jerusalem. It is the Upper Room of God washing human feet.
One wonders whether the Lenten journey can go anywhere if one starts out with the notion that heaven is sparse, peopled by only a few mutton-eaters. It is a terrible thing to claim – as some have done – that only a few people will end up in heaven. To say so is to misrepresent the Father, Who is “prodigal” in His desire that “no one should perish” (2 Peter 3.9 and 1 Timothy 2.4), that His marriage feast at the Last Day should be completely full (Luke 14.23).
The destination of Lent: the way home
Lent wends its way, of course, to the Edenic Tree of the Fatted Calf, the place where God pours out His life to become the Eucharist in the House of Bread, Bread broken for the Life of the World. In which life there is no individuality, only personhood and the beloved community.
The Older Son then is the one who is offended at the “music and dancing” (Luke 15.25) of homecoming, who thinks it unfair that he is paid the same after working a whole day as the one who worked only one hour. He is the one who cannot tolerate the possibility, let alone the likelihood (Matthew 21.31), that the unshriven and unclean might end up saved, just because the Father will wait as long as it takes.
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