Three quotes about the Prodigal Son

  • (Did a lit­tle research into quotes about the para­ble of the Prodi­gal Son back in 2007, and I thought it was worth a rerun.)

    * * *

    As I said back here, I tend to won­der who I would be in a para­ble. Tomor­row we will all hear the para­ble of the Prodi­gal Son as we count down the Sun­days to Lent, and at some point I’m bound to won­der whether I’m more like the wan­der­ing son or his stead­fast but envi­ous brother. I sup­pose the answer for this one — and ulti­mately for all the para­bles — is that at dif­fer­ent times I’ve been dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters. I am the prodi­gal son when I sin and repent; I’m his brother when I judge oth­ers and am envi­ous and self-righteous.

    There is a lot to con­sider in this para­ble, so I went on a short inven­tory. Here are some of the words of wis­dom I found about it.

    The For­giv­ing Father

    “Then he shall get up, come to his father and con­fess to him, ‘I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer wor­thy to be called your son. Treat me like one of your hired servants.”When he con­fesses like that, he will be con­sid­ered wor­thy of more than that for which he prayed. His father nei­ther takes him in like a hired ser­vant nor treats him like a stranger. Oh no, he kisses him a a son. He accepts him as a dead man come back to life again. He counts him wor­thy of the divine feast and gives him the pre­cious gar­ment he once wore.

    “Now there is singing and joy in the father’s home. What hap­pened is the rsult of the Father’s grace and lov­ing kind­ness. Not only does he bring his son back from death, but also through the Spirit he clearly shows his grace. To replace cor­rup­tion, he clothes him with an incor­rupt­ible robe. To sat­isfy hunger, he kills the fat­ted calf. The Father pro­vides shoes for his feet so that he will not travel far away again. Most won­der­ful of all, he puts a divine signet ring upon his hand. By all these things, he begets him anew in the image of the glory of Christ.

    – St. Athana­sius, Fes­tal Let­ter VII

     

    Return from Exile

    “On the third Sun­day of prepa­ra­tion for Lent, we hear the para­ble of the Prodi­gal Son (lk. 15–11-32). Together with the hymns of this day, the para­ble reveals to us the time of repen­tance as man’s return from exile. The prodi­gal son, we are told, went to a far coun­try and there spent all that he had. A far coun­try! It is this unique def­i­n­i­tion of our human con­di­tion that we must assume and make ours as we begin our approach to God. A man who has never felt that he is exiled from God and from real life will never under­stand what Chris­tian­ity is about. And the one who is per­fectly “at home” in this world and its life, who has never been wounded by the nos­tal­gic desire for another Real­ity, will not under­stand what repen­tance is. …

    “It is easy to con­fess that I have not fasted on pre­scribed days, or that I’ve missed my prayers, or become angry. It is quite a dif­fer­ent thing, how­ever, to real­ize sud­denly that I have defiled and lost my spir­i­tual beauty, that I am far away from my real home, my real life, and that some­thing pre­cious and pure and beau­ti­ful has been hope­lessly bro­ken in the very tex­ture of my exis­tence. Yet this, and only this, is repen­tance, and there­fore it is also a deep desire to return, to go back, to recover that lost home. I received from God won­der­ful riches … I received the knowl­edge of God and in Him the knowl­edge of every­thing else and the power to be a son of God. And all this I have lost, all this I am los­ing all the time, not only in par­tic­u­lar sins and trans­gres­sions, but in the sin of all sins: the devi­a­tion of my love from God, pre­fer­ring the “far coun­try” to the beau­ti­ful home of the Father.”

    – Fr. Alexan­der Schme­mann, Great Lent

     

    Where to go at the end of the road?

    “The prodi­gal son, hav­ing claimed his own share of the inher­i­tance, lost every­thing in this world and was deprived of all the joys of life: he lost his father­land, his family’s sup­port; he did not have a piece of bread left and was entirely alone: all the roads of this world were closed to him. ‘Tribu­la­tion and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil’ (Rom. ii. 9). And it is at this very point that the divine mir­a­cle is per­formed — in the very con­fine­ment there is lib­er­a­tion; in the very grief, salvation.

    “Among us too there are peo­ple who have reached the lim­its of grief. it seems to them that destruc­tion is all around them — let them be com­forted. When man reaches this point when all roads are closed to him hor­i­zon­tally, then the road upwards opens before him. If com­pressed on all sides, water rises; so the soul, com­pressed, impris­oned, walled in by grief, rises to heaven.

    “We are for­tu­nate if we detach our­selves inwardly, in time and on our own ini­tia­tive, from the broad way of world­li­ness, if nei­ther the com­forts of life, nor riches, nor suc­cess, fill our hearts and lead us away from that which is essential.”

    – Fr. Alexan­der Elchani­nov, The Diary of a Russ­ian Priest


    Related posts:

    1. Other quotes
    2. Three quotes
    3. As we set out
    4. Lent and Bright Week and feel­ing bad and feel­ing good
    5. Some quotes

    February 3rd, 2007 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Erica 02.03.2007

    The Prodi­gal Son is my favorite bible story. I will be blog­ging about it this week. It can make me cry…especially if Dn. Tom Braun is read­ing it…I lose it.

  • Grace

    Parable-blogging: Excel­lent!

    The way that peo­ple read a pas­sage can make a last­ing impres­sion (even though we’re not sup­posed to get all tied up in indi­vid­u­al­i­ties and all that). Years ago, Dn. Tom read the pas­sage in Hebrews 11 about our fore­fa­thers and what they went through (“they went about in sheep­skins, in goatskins, being des­ti­tute, afflicted, ill-treated — men of whom the world was not wor­thy …”) and he got all choked up for just a moment. When­ever I hear that pas­sage, I think of it being read that way.

    Sim­i­larly, in another church, one of our dea­cons was from a work­ing class back­ground and not highly edu­cated. When he got up to the podium on Pascha to do St. John Chrysostom’s homily, he looked at all of us and started speak­ing in words that came straight from his heart — with­out read­ing any notes. He had mem­o­rized it word-perfect from begin­ning to end. As much as I’ve always loved that homily, I think I love it more hav­ing heard it that way once.

  • Mimi

    Inter­est­ing com­ments on how the reader affects our per­cep­tion of the para­ble, as well.

    Thank you.

    I do like the Prodi­gal Son a lot, and, I do rec­og­nize myself as the Prodi­gal more than I’d like to admit, like the Phar­isee. I also think the Prodigal’s brother is an inter­est­ing fig­ure, and I have ten­dan­cies towards act­ing like him as well.

  • Grace

    I’ve been think­ing about the brother since I wrote the entry, because the more I think about it, the more I real­ize that his wrong­do­ing is much more nuanced than the prodigal’s. It’s espe­cially inter­est­ing to think that Christ told this para­ble to the Phar­isees at the same time He was basi­cally telling them that the Gen­tiles were about to be asked to the party and that they (the Phar­isees) weren’t going to like it. But also giv­ing the divine point-of-view, in a way that’s both touch­ing and wonderful.

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