NOTES for Luk 15:1-32

"This son of yours," says the elder son. The younger son renounced his sonship when he demanded his share of the estate as though his father were already dead, and lived as though his father did not exist, as though he were not the son of one who knows how to love. The elder son did not do this: he lived with his father and did everything his father asked of him. Perhaps he even truly loved his father. But, as a priest once said in a sermon on the prodigal son, by rejecting his brother and refusing to call him brother, the elder son also rejects his father; he deprives himself of sonship just as the younger son did before him. For if the younger is now a son—"this son of yours"—while he does not consider him a brother, he thereby ceases to be a son himself. It follows that only a lack of love for our neighbors deprives us of the possibility of being children of God. It is precisely love that makes us His children, because love is a family trait of the saints. A saint is one who belongs to God, and God is love.