The Prodigal Son Story: Two Homilies

© Davidson Loehr 2001

There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the share of property that falls to me." And he divided his living between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country, and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, "How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants." And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son." But the father said to his servants, "Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." And they began to make merry. (Luke 15: 11-24, RSV)

My father has spoken of justice and of love, and claims to have played the one off against the other, letting love win out. He makes it all sound so easy, as though anyone with a warm heart would have done the same. But his justice is too weak, his love too soft, and he betrays them both, as he also betrays me.

He says he is a gatekeeper, and his task is to choose life and let it come through the gate and not shut it out. And so are we all gatekeepers, and so are we all charged with choosing life and letting it through. But first we must recognize it; and we must recognize it in its largest form, not its smallest; and in its most responsible incarnation, not its cheapest.

To choose life means to be able to make some distinctions: some distinctions which are necessary even to recognize life. And this my father has not done. This is where his big and soft heart has done long-term harm for the sake of short-term good.

It is true that both justice and love are needed in order to be a proper gatekeeper, but they are not as my father has understood them. For justice to survive, there must be fairness, there must be balance, and when necessary retribution. It is harsh but true that our decisions and our actions determine the quality of our lives, and the worth of our lives both to ourselves and to others. It is also harsh but true that lives can be squandered, even wasted. It happens every day, you see it all around you. And though it may be a cruel fact of life, it is still a fact of life, and there is a terribly important kind of justice in that.

For if our decisions do not matter, if our actions do not matter, if anything we do can simply be forgiven, then what good are ethics? Why teach our children to do good at all? Why not simply teach them how to play upon the soft hearts of others for forgiveness? Why care about education and religion and laws to help people become responsible and generous citizens if it does not really matter? If it is always an option simply to slough off the very responsibility on which we all depend and follow our own selfish whims, knowing that all will be forgiven anyway, then why even have words for goodness, justice and truth?

Words like duty and responsibility may seem cold and hard words, but they are not. They are deeply caring words, for without them neither fairness nor justice could exist. And one charged with being a gatekeeper of life cannot shrug off these notions with impunity, for without fairness and justice it is not life that is being served, but the special privilege of a select few.

Justice requires doing our part. Unless we do our part, there will be no whole, for the whole is made up of all of us doing our part to keep it together and make it work for ourselves, for others, and for those who will come after us. This is what is at stake in justice, and justice is what my father has betrayed.

But he betrays love too, even though he thinks he acts in its behalf. For his heart is too soft and mushy, and he confuses love with mere sentimentality. He loses the distinctions which real love demands. And there must be distinctions. No one can love everything and everyone, for that is not love at all, but only an insipid kind of indifference which permits everything because nothing is sacred to it. A parent who endorses everything is as irresponsible and as destructive as a physician who can not tell a nose from a boil or an arm from a deadly tumor and so lets them all grow together until the sick parts have at last killed the healthy ones because those who were charged to protect life did not make the needed distinctions.

This is why not all things can be forgiven, and why we must let even those we love pay the cost of their mistakes. Real love must know what is to be loved and what is not to be loved, and to make that difference important. That is a gatekeeper’s job. That is what is involved in choosing life rather than death, health rather than sickness. And that is what my father did not do.

Listen: to choose life is to choose the most responsible forms of it, not the least, and not to let your fondness for a part be the cause of your harming the whole. You cannot isolate one life from all the rest and act only on its behalf without regard for the implications of your act. For human life is not an individual thing: it is communal, collective. It is like a giant tapestry, in which we are all parts of the fragile weave. We may each be but a thread; but without that thread the whole fabric is weakened. Gatekeepers must keep the fabric from being weakened, lest it tear and be ruined.

Life is like music. But it is not like singing a solo, it is like being part of a whole ensemble. We must all play part of the melody, the harmony, or the rhythm, or the whole piece will suffer, and all will suffer who might otherwise have enjoyed it. You cannot simply sit out and refuse to play your part, or you hurt all of the others who have come in good faith and generosity to play their parts. And to reward the one who refuses to weave or to play is to harm the entire tapestry, the entire piece of music, because of your short-sighted preference for one non-player for whom your heart had a soft spot.

We have a supreme worth, but our worth consists in our participation, not our withdrawal. Our worth consists in our being a part of the whole, not being apart from it. And the truth which both justice and love must acknowledge is that some lives are more worthy than others. Some lives are more deserving of respect, and some deserve only our criticism, our correction, or our censure.

It is not easy to be the gatekeeper my father thinks himself to be. It means loving the whole more than loving the parts, and when necessary protecting the whole from one or more indifferent parts, no matter the cost. For where all is forgiven, nothing is holy. And to do disservice to the holy, as my father has done, is not only irresponsible and uncaring, but blasphemous as well. This was my father’s sin, this was his betrayal.

Now hear my story, and see if you do not agree.

I have worked here all of my life, and have been a faithful son and a faithful worker since I can remember. Since my brother left, it has been harder, with only the two of us to share the work, but we have done it. We have each worked harder in order to carry the weight which my brother dropped at our feet, but that is what life is like, and that is what we must do. Still, it has not been painful drudgery. There is a kind of joy in earning your bread, and contributing to the lives of others. Our wheat feeds many people, just as we are protected by the clothing some of them have made, made comfortable by the furniture others have made, and kept dry by the house which still others have built for us. We are part of a community, and there is a fullness in that.

And there is an end of the work to look forward to, at the coming harvest. That is why we have been fattening the calf for these many months, as a reward for those who have earned it.

Now what would you feel if you had returned home today as I did, tired and hungry, to find the makings of a great feast? "What is happening here?" I asked a servant, and it was then and in that way that I learned that my wastrel of a brother had finally returned home, his money squandered and his honor gone, and that my father had been so blinded by this shameful return that he had killed our fatted calf. Our fatted calf, the one we had raised to be our reward at the harvest festival — that is the calf which was killed. There will be no fatted calf for the harvest festival this year. Those who have earned a feast will go without while it is spent instead on the one who did nothing, earned nothing, and made life harder for those of us who stayed behind. And to see that calf slaughtered for this feast to honor that brother who did those things — it is something I will not abide.

Don't tell me that you would not be outraged if this had happened to you, for you would be. And I was outraged, and flew into a fit. "Come in," the servant had the gall to say to me, "your father has bid me welcome you in too."

"Never!" I screamed back at him. "I will not come in through that door. It is unclean. It has been made unholy and unwelcoming by my brother and by my father, and by this whole offensive feast. If I cannot stop this sacrilege, I can at least refuse to endorse it. I can at least preserve my integrity. My father may do this to me, but he cannot make me participate in it.

Well, that is my story, those are the things I have been repeating to myself as I sit out here on this hill, looking across at my house where my brother parades around in his robe and his ring and my father sanctions the whole unjust mess in the name of a cheap and misguided kind of love. And I know that of all the people who hear this story, most will take my side in it.

Ah, but now the finale: for here comes my father. He has come out of that cursed door. He has seen me, sitting here on the hill in my grand pout, and now he comes to fetch me. Well, there will be no surprises. I know him well, and know well what he will say.

"Come," he will say, "to the feast." "I will not," I will answer, "for it is an unjust feast."

"It is a feast of forgiveness and gratitude," he will say, "not of justice." "I will not," I will say. "I do not care if it is a feast of forgiveness and gratitude, it is an unjust feast of forgiveness and gratitude, and I’ll have no part in it."

And then, after a few more exchanges like this, my father will look at me in that look of his that I know so well, and he’ll kiss me on the cheek. He'll look me in the eyes, and he will say: "the door is open, my son, and it can be no more than open. It is open for you and for your brother, as it has always been. There is a feast of life going on, to which you are invited. If you refuse, it will be only your own pettiness and anger which keep you out, and only your own bitterness which you shall taste. And so: come into the feast, or sit alone on this hillside in your self-righteous pout. But the door is open, you too are welcome, and you too are loved."

He’ll turn, after that, and walk back to the house.

And then, I shall have to decide.

A fatted calf doesn’t have a lot of choices. The end is pretty much known from the very beginning. Our life will be sacrificed for something, and we do not get to choose what it will be. Our whole life gets its meaning from the celebration at the end of it, a celebration we never see. We have no story of our own, you hear about us only through the story told about the feast we are given to.

I was meant for a harvest feast. Many months ahead they began to fatten me for it. I didn’t mind: in fact, I liked it, because I ate so much better than all the other calves. I thought I must be exceptional; I suppose I was, in a way. Still, it was just a harvest feast they had in mind. They do it every year. Every year there is a harvest, and every year a calf is fattened for the occasion. It is always the same, I was just this year’s offering. Nothing special, just part of the annual cycle, as regular and as indifferent as the seasons.

You may not be very interested in my story, since it sounds so foreign to your own. And you are different from fatted calves. But we are much alike, too. For your life is also given for something. Your days and years, your energies and allegiances — they are given over to something, and you serve it mostly without thinking about it, perhaps without even being aware of it. You serve a job, a career, an army, a country, another person, even a set of beliefs. So much of your life is defined by the things you give it for, your whole life is in part a form of sacrifice offered to your gods large and small, to your values good and bad, even to your lusts, your greeds, your weaknesses and whims.

And you are fattened, too. You don't call it that, but you are fed differently according to what you serve: you are fattened. They feed you money, power, popularity, success, recognition, a sense of purpose, a sense of place, a kind of peace — that is the food you get for serving the things you serve with your lives.

And much of your story, like mine, will be measured by the things you have served. Here, we are more alike than you might wish. As one of your poets said, you love well, even when you do not love wisely. But in the end, how often it is that the things you serve do not serve you in return, but only take from you until at last they have absorbed your whole life. And then when the story is told, you are just left out, forgotten. You were just a little part in some kind of a giant operation, or a play (whether comedy or tragedy), like the sacrifice of a fatted calf at an annual harvest.

So in some ways you are really not so different from me as you think. You may chatter about being the master of your fate: but did you choose your sex and race, your family, your gifts and handicaps, your social and economic station, your country, or the times into which you were born? No, much of the script had already been written for you, and you have for the most part acted out your assigned role, just as I did.

A soldier commits his service, even his life, to the commands of his country. But he does not get to choose his war, whether it will be a popular or unpopular one, whether his sacrifices will be respected or reviled. His life hangs from threads controlled by others like a puppet. The soldier does not choose what his life will be given to, though he knows it may be given to something. And the meaning of the soldier's life and his sacrifice won't even be clear until after he has died.

Or a woman may serve a business, playing in good faith the small part assigned to her, only learning at the end that it was an evil business after all, all of her good works were part of an evil story, and she shall be known by that story for the rest of her days. You are as innocent as I, and often as powerless. So my fellow travelers, you are more like the fatted calf than you may like to think.

And now perhaps you will be able to hear my story.

I was born anonymous, I lived anonymously, and I was scheduled to die the same way, as an extra, just another calf being used as calves have always been used, serving an end of no great or lasting importance to anyone. I went along as we always have, because a fatted calf doesn't have many choices. The meaning of my life was defined by the things that were chosen for me, by the larger play in which I was assigned my small part. I was chosen to serve routine and anonymous things, things which never acknowledged or cherished me but only used me up.

And, if everything had happened as it had been planned, you would never have heard of me. My life would have been given to a routine harvest feast on a small farm in an obscure country, and I would never have had a story to be told, for there is not much in that that is worth retelling.

And so the surprise, you see, is that I have a story. That is the wonder and the miracle of it: that I have a story at all.

And it happened because someone came alive. A younger brother broke from the routine. He could not find himself in it. His heart, his soul — something could not find a home in the routine he was expected to live. And in a burst of young courage he broke free. He failed. He wasted all of his money and all of his inheritance, it is true. But he was searching, however awkwardly, for something with more life in it, for something to serve that might know his name, that might give him something more real and more enduring than the security brought by just doing your duty.

He failed miserably. But in his failure there was a great awakening, and it made all the difference. First he awoke, and came back home. And then his father awoke, and reached out to him not with justice but with understanding, and with love. And with that, a new world was born, a world with a gentleness and a wholeness that offend the workaday mind, as they have offended the older brother. But it is a world with more space to live, for those who are imperfect, who do not find their true path on the first try, who must first fail before they can succeed. It is a world with room for those who need another chance.

In that moment of his father's forgiveness, a new son was born, and with him a new world was born as well, for all who can listen to this story and hear its message. And then, you see, suddenly there was something more important and urgent than a harvest feast. For something sacred had broken into ordinary life, something with the power to transform it. And the moment of its entry, the moment of the birth of a new son and a new world, must not be allowed to pass by without giving thanks, without making all of life stop and look and hear and celebrate.

And so in place of a harvest feast there was a sacred feast; a holy meal; a communion. A meal not of food to be gulped down and forgotten, but of food consecrated to a holy purpose, food to be cherished and savored and never to disappear from memory. That is how this feast took place, and this story which has changed everyone who has ever truly understood it.

And I was a part of it! My life was changed by the choices others made. For now instead of being consumed by life and then forgotten, I have become a part of something precious, something transcendent. And I will never be forgotten as long as this story is told. Find me another calf like that! There isn't one!

If a miracle is a gift of life beyond understanding, then a miracle happened here. And I was a passive recipient of this miracle, as the meaning of my life was changed forever because of the choices and the decisions made by others.

It is ironic, but I could not tell my story to other fatted calves, for we have no choices, and could not change what we shall serve with our lives even if we wanted to.