Fourth Sunday in Lent
- Admin
- Apr 2
- 5 min read
Saint Margaret’s
Anglican Church
Budapest, Hungary
Fourth Sunday in Lent
30 March 2025
Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians
5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
There was a man who had two sons.
Scripture is replete with metaphors and stories of journey from the epic passage of
Abraham from Ur to ancient Israel to Paul’s journeys around the Mediterranean
world centuries later spreading the Good News of the Gospel. It would almost
seem that God’s people, ancient Israelites and even contemporary Christians like
us, are never quite at home, never entirely at ease where they are, but always on
the move. Sometimes even those who never leave home find themselves far away
from those they love.
And while the idea of spiritual journey this Lenten season must, I suspect, conjure
for most of us thoughts and images of places we might want to visit, even if they are
only places of the spirit, our Lord tells us this morning a story of two lands and two
brothers separated not only by topography but by the geography of the heart as
well. The younger brother’s journey “to a distant country,” becomes fraught with
regret and remorse and ends in his older brother’s recrimination and unresolved
resentment, a spiritual journey none of us would want to book but a journey most of
us have traveled.
It is of course the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the longest of all Jesus’ parables and
found only in the Gospel of Luke. It is a tale which spans the spiritual expanse
between these two brothers, unnamed in the Parable, but known to all of us just
the same. They remind us in fact at some level of their Hebrew forebearers: Adam
and Cain, Jacob and Esau, Ishmael and Isaac. Theirs is a story which in some
sense has become so familiar to all of us that we may even now be tempted to think
that there is nothing new there for us. I know all about that story: how it begins and
how it ends. But do you…?
It begins of course with the famed Prodigal Son. With the benefit of a hefty
inheritance, the gift of a generous father, good old dad, he sets off on his own for a
land far away no doubt filled with dreams of becoming a successful social media
influencer with millions of Instagram followers. And a life filled with adventure.
Except it does not work out that way. In a remarkable understatement, Jesus tells
us that “he squandered his property in dissolute living.”Now, if I have to spell it out for you, it means that he spent all he had on, as we used
to say in the 1970s, drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll. In other words, he had a
wonderful time. Until the money ran out, and the hard times came. But being no
dummy, the Prodigal Son returns to his father. "Father,” he says, “I have sinned
against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”
Whether his remorse was genuine or feigned seems to play no role in his father’s
reaction. His father accepts him with open arms, no questions asked.
But the story does not end there, as we might expect it to. It continues with the
Prodigal’s stay-at-home older brother, the perfect little boy. Call him the Prodigy
Son, as I once heard a preacher refer to him. Not for him the orgies and riotous
living of his brother. He has never wasted a penny of his father’s vast wealth. But
tragically and ironically, as it turns out, he is even more alienated from his father
than is his good-for-nothing brother. For, he labours under the false notion that he
must work, and work exceedingly hard, to win his father’s approval and love. He
must, in other words, become a prodigy of industry and energy to prove himself
worthy of being loved, worthy of love itself.
But the father’s love is not, as today’s economists might say, a zero-sum game. The
one brother does not have to lose for the other to win. And so it is for all of us as
well. Our worth as a person is determined neither by what we do nor by what
people think of what we do. The Prodigy Son was apparently doing just fine, it
seems, until he came in from the fields and saw the preparations for his brother’s
banquet. This is not how it should be, he seems to think. His false sense of justice
is outraged. Sometimes perception becomes reality.
The difficulty with the Prodigy Son is that he too is alienated from his father, in spite
of the fact that he has never left home, never left his father’s side. He too, like his
brother, has traveled to a “distant country.” He loves his father less than he loves
the image of himself he wishes his father to have. He has not laboured all these
years out of love for his father, but only in order to win his father’s love. It must
come as a shock to him to learn that his father would have loved him just the same
if he had never lifted a finger, if he had remained home all day and played video
games.
But this is how things are in God’s upside-down and topsy-turvy total-sum
economy. It is neither his younger brother’s sin and contrition nor their father’s
loving and generous heart which cause his bitter resentment and anger. It is rather
his failure to comprehend the very nature of human life and love, the very nature of
the divine. And as laudable and commendable as his, or our, efforts may be, and
they are that, they do not make God love us any more or any less than he loves the
beggar you shall pass on the way home from church this morning, and for that
matter, not any more or less than God loves the richest man or woman on earth.
A difficult lesson, to be sure. Notice that our Lord’s story of these two brothers
remains unresolved as the parable draws to a close. Did the older brother at long
last accept and love his wayward younger brother as did their father...? Or not…?
Did they and their father reconcile and overcome their differences…? Or not…?
Good questions. Jesus does not tell us. For, the answer is as much ours to make
as it was that of the older brother. In truth, both brothers are each of us. Brother,
sister. Mother, father. They are our Christian ying and yang, as the Chinesephilosophers might call it. So, Father Frank, what happened next…? Hmm, I do not
know…
Why don’t you tell me…?
The Rev. Dr. Frank Hegedűs
Image
The Prodigal Son
Italian, Sixteenth Century
Comments