NOTES for Luk 15:31

In the parable of the prodigal son, the reader's attention is usually focused on the younger son, which is not surprising: he really is the main character of the story, around him the plot unfolds and with him the meaning of the parable is connected. The elder son remains in the background; at first glance he only forms the backdrop on which the action unfolds. Meanwhile, in reality the elder son plays no smaller a role in the parable than the younger. He simply appears on the stage at the very end, after the resolution, when the younger is already home and his father joyfully welcomes him. Readers and listeners often pay almost no attention to the short epilogue involving the elder son, and if they do pay attention, they perceive it as a kind of marginal note shading the main story.

Meanwhile, the elder son in reality does not differ from the younger all that essentially. In essence, neither one nor the other knows what shared life with the father is. The younger son does not want to live one life with the father; he takes what is his and leaves. But the elder remains in the house only out of obligation, from a sense of duty, while deep in his soul he too, like the younger, wants a life of his own, separate and special; he wants a celebration for himself, with friends and apart from the father.

And the father says to him: all that is mine is also yours; the whole meaning of our life under one roof consists only in its truly becoming common, one. Otherwise, your staying in the same house with me will change nothing for you: I will only be a burden to you, and deep in your soul you will still strive to get rid of me, like your younger brother. This is how it turns out, and the difference consists only in this: the younger demands his share and leaves, while the elder tries to make an arrangement with the father, so to speak, amicably, to set things up so that he can live with him and at the same time live his own separate life.

The father tells the son directly that this will not work: life can either be one and shared, or separate, and then it is more honest to leave than to pretend that one is remaining in the father's house. In the parable, as is evident, there is no contrast between the bad younger son and the good and obedient elder. There is only a description of one and the same spiritual problem, manifested differently in the lives of the two sons. What appeared openly and with complete clarity in the younger son's life does not appear so brightly and openly in the elder's life; and it is not yet known what is better and what is worse.

One of the central Gospel parables, one of those passages of Scripture in which its essence is concentrated to the utmost. However much we reflect on the parable, we cannot exhaust all its shades of meaning.

Here we see the journey of every human being. Even if not all of us have committed deeds comparable to those of the prodigal son, let us admit to ourselves that we were ready to do so. And even if we have not all told the Father that we no longer need him and will manage his creation ourselves, have we not tried to live and act in precisely that way, without formally declaring a break? Then, after adventures great or small, we remember the Father again...

Repentance is not a formal apology; it also includes readiness to answer for the consequences of what we have done. That is why the son, returning home, does not expect a generous welcome at all. He is ready to become a hired worker precisely because he understands that he himself renounced his sonship.

The Father forgave him and welcomed him with immeasurably more mercy than the son had expected, and now we know that we too can count on forgiveness. But knowing that the Father’s mercy is boundless, let us not abuse it by behaving disgracefully in the hope of easy forgiveness. Taking forgiveness lightly is one extreme, but there is another: rejecting the Father’s mercy on the basis of human notions of justice, which his mercy exceeds. Such is the reaction of the elder brother, who rebelled against the Father for reasons that seem “lofty” to him. Nothing more is said of the elder brother in the parable, and we may hope that he remained with the Father. Yet how often have “elder brothers” like him begun by treating recent sinners, who have only just come to repentance, with arrogance, and gone on to depart from the Church!

Someone called this the parable of the two brothers, and rightly so: each of us risks repeating both the prodigal son’s deeds and his elder brother’s behaviour...

The younger son asks for the share of the estate due to him, thereby as much as saying to his father: "You know, I am tired of waiting for you to die" (for children receive their inheritance only after their parents' death). His brother feels sorry for their father, but is probably also resentful that he will be the one left to care for the old man and "earn" his share of the inheritance. Later, when the elder son returns home and learns that his younger brother has come back, he refuses to accept and forgive him, even though he does not know how he returned or what he and their father discussed. The father, against whom the younger son sinned, has already forgiven him; he receives him without uttering a word of reproach. He does not question his son about where he has been or what he has done, his caring hand pushing aside all the shame and pain of realizing his own baseness. Only in this way can reconciliation and reunion take place while the wound is fresh and still hurts. Moreover, the father does not let his son say aloud all the words he had prepared. The son who has returned remains a son and cannot be anyone else.

In the parable of the prodigal son, Christ uses an understandable metaphor to tell us the story of election. The older son is the people of Israel, who are "always with me," as Christ says. The younger son, who asks his father to take him as a hired worker, is the rest of the world. Christ came to preach the Gospel to everyone. And the older son, dissatisfied that, in his opinion, he had never received anything, is an image of the people of Israel, who lived and waited for the Savior who would be King for the world.

In the parable, the father's words, "this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found," are words addressed to Israel. They are words saying that the coming of Christ made every person part of the chosen people wherever the Gospel and repentance for the healing of sins have been preached. The Kingdom of God is with us from the day of Christ's coming until the end of time. The whole world, every person, can come to Him through repentance.

In repentance of heart, it is impossible to imagine oneself as a son before Christ. In repentance, a person gains humility and strives to do works for the glory of God, fully acknowledging his own smallness. But Christ is looking not for slaves and not for hired workers, but for beloved and loving children. And Christ accepts everyone who comes to Him in repentance and despair as a son, and rejoices and cares for him when he returns to his father's house.

Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century called the parable of the prodigal son Evangelium Evangeliorum - "the Gospel of Gospels," or "the heart of the Gospel" (as we can learn from Fr. Georgy Chistyakov's book "Above the Lines of the New Testament"). Why? Let us think about this. Yes, it is a parable about our sin; yes, it is a parable about the fact that God always awaits our repentance; yes, about the fact that righteousness is often unable to forgive unrighteousness. All this is true. But many Gospel parables speak about this... Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh always emphasizes that the younger son's act is terrible not because he squandered the money. Not because of how he squandered it, living dissolutely. Then why? Because he treated his father as though his father were already dead. That is the most terrible thing. Wanting to receive his part of the inheritance, he as if said to his father: die; for me you are dead. What does this remind us of now? We remember the man who said, "God is dead." We think it was Nietzsche. In part this is true, but it is not the whole truth. Millions of other people said this; no, they did not say it, but worse still, they thought it. We have a modest name for them: atheists. There is a funny story. In the middle of the last century, an inscription appeared on the wall of a European university: God is dead. Nietzsche. Soon someone added: Nietzsche is dead. God. This is funny, but from a spiritual point of view it is wrong. For God, everyone is alive, everyone is desired. This is what this parable is about, and this is why it is the heart of the Gospel.

After all, it is good to be the prodigal son returned to his father. Everyone is glad to see you, except the older brother, of course, and the father arranges a festive banquet in honor of your return, one that at another time you would never have seen. The older brother is not upset by accident, and he complains: such merriment has never once fallen to him in his whole life, even though he was always faithful to his father and devoted to the house.

But really, why is that? Why not let the older son rejoice? Is the calf too precious? The calf is not the issue. It is simply the time - one could say wartime. After all, this is about our times, the times when the Kingdom is only just entering the world, and the triumph still lies ahead: that real triumph when the Kingdom will unfold in all its fullness. That fullness will surely be the feast of all feasts, and the triumph will be for the whole world. But for now, it is too early.

The younger son is another matter: he "was lost and is found," and here the joy is not about the triumph of the Kingdom but about the salvation of one particular soul. And such salvation is worth the triumph of the Kingdom. At least because every saved soul brings that triumph closer. But here too everyone in the household can take part. Only desire is needed. And if you are not the main person at the feast, in the Kingdom that is not so important.

Few Gospel passages speak about our life with such striking clarity as the parable of the prodigal son. Each of us, in fact, uses his own life and the created world as though the Creator had died and we had received an inheritance after Him. And the Father waits for each of us as for His beloved son.

The problem is that it often appears to us as if the cruel pigsty into which we drive ourselves is the best possible lot. Out of some absurd naivete we think that peace and beauty, joy and mercy are properties of the world that has fallen to us, while falsehood, cruelty, betrayal, and hatred are accidental temporary difficulties. Alas, everything is the other way around.

And if the choice between life and death, between good and evil, is almost obvious to us, then it is impossible not to think about the utter love for humanity with which the Almighty endows us despite all our betrayals. Everything good in life comes only from Him, and without His intervention we will be left with nothing. Therefore, at the beginning of Great Lent we read this parable in order to say to ourselves the words: "I will arise and go to my father..."

Today’s reading offers us several more parables about the Kingdom, including the parable of the prodigal son, familiar to every reader of the Gospel (vv. 11–32). Their meaning becomes clear in the context of the traditional religious ideas characteristic of Pharisaic circles in Gospel times. This concerns the way devout Jews of that era viewed repentance and the possibility of forgiveness of sins. At that time, as in the preceding centuries, it was believed that one could be cleansed only of a sin committed involuntarily—for example, through weakness, ignorance or compulsion. If a sin was committed willingly and knowingly, however, it was thought impossible to be cleansed of it.

Of course, one could repent of any sin, but repentance alone was not enough: one also had to be cleansed of the defilement caused by sin, and this was impossible if the sin was deliberate and voluntary. The consequences of sin—what was usually associated with the notion of ‘defilement’—continued to weigh upon the sinner until the end of their days, and often even fell upon their family, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Jesus, however, said that now that the Kingdom had drawn near, anyone who repented of their sins could begin spiritual life with a clean slate, completely renewing their relationship with God and with other people.

This is the meaning of Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin (vv. 3–10). The possibility of a new beginning for everyone is expressed still more clearly in the parable of the prodigal son. Here we find everything that, by the standards of traditional ideas about sin, closes the sinner’s way back once and for all: fully deliberate disobedience to his father—and therefore a direct and open violation of the fifth commandment (v. 12)—and the ‘dissolute’ life, in the Evangelist’s words (v. 13), which evidently involved numerous other violations of the Torah, undoubtedly entirely conscious and hardly forced upon him. It is no wonder that, having repented of what he has done, the son prepares a penitential speech in advance, expressing his readiness to accept any consequences of his sins (vv. 17–19): as a man of his time, he understands perfectly well that he can now count on nothing and can never regain his former position in his father’s house. But when he returns home, something entirely unexpected happens: his father, without listening to his prepared penitential speech, receives him as though nothing had happened (vv. 20–24), much to the displeasure of the elder son, who evidently considered it unjust that his younger brother’s sins should have no consequences (vv. 25–32). Clearly, it is not easy for the religious mind to grasp that its familiar arithmetic of merits and transgressions does not work in the Kingdom. Yet this is precisely why the Kingdom becomes accessible to everyone—not to everyone who has earned it, but to everyone who seeks it.

Today we usually associate the parable of the prodigal son with various negative human qualities: presumption, ingratitude, disrespect for one's father and the home in which one grew up. In this reading, the prodigal son's return becomes a kind of life lesson: life itself has taught the wayward son what he refused to learn in his own home from his own father. The next step is to understand the parable as an allegory of our own relationship with God, our heavenly Father. There is an enormous field here for moralising sermons, and it certainly cannot be called untilled.

Preachers, meanwhile, often leave the elder son in the shadows. His question to his father—why do you welcome this squanderer of the household's wealth as a long-awaited guest, while you seem none too glad to have me here?—essentially remains unanswered. Yet Jesus' parable is not about our relationship with God, though of course it is about that too: how could it not be? It is about the Kingdom, about the movement of its life. About how people live in it, lose it and return to it. It is not about two sons, one good and one bad. It is about decisiveness and indecision. About choice and its consequences. About what a wrong decision can cost and how to overcome its consequences. And about the fact that no one is guaranteed immunity from anything.

For, in essence, the elder son's wish to celebrate his own special feast devoted to himself, apart from the whole household—in his own circle, with his own friends, and without his father too—differs only in scale from the demand to divide the property: give me what is due to me, and I will leave. Only the elder son is ready to leave without leaving: he wants to separate himself as though not separating at all, to live his own life for a little while and yet remain in his father's house. The younger is more decisive: when he leaves, he really leaves. And unlike the elder, he learns from his own bitter experience what it means to leave, to abandon the home, to lose the Kingdom. He leaves decisively—and returns just as decisively, in sincere repentance. He wants to come home, and now he does not care what his position there will be: everything is in his father's hands.

The elder son does care. He compares himself with the younger. He asks himself: whom does our father love more? He has not yet fully understood that the feast his father has arranged for his younger brother is an expression of paternal love, taking this form precisely because there has been a return. A reunion. A restoration of the Kingdom's fullness. The elder son is always within that fullness. He did not leave. But... he could have left, had he not been the elder and therefore the heir. It is not the life of the Kingdom that holds him there, but his place within that life.

This is a dangerous situation, and the father warns his elder son. Is not everything I have yours? Do you not share the fullness of my life? Is all that matters to you being the eldest in the household and the heir? The younger has returned, renouncing all self-assertion. And you? The parable ends with this question addressed to the elder son. A question addressed not to those who left and returned, but to those who pride themselves on never having left. A question that makes us think. And demands an answer. From each of us.

These three parables are usually called parables about repentance, but repentance is shown in them from a completely unusual side. What is described here is not so much the experience of the repentant person, his feelings, pain, and so on. Jesus speaks about how God and His angels rejoice when a person finds the road home. This is repentance "from God's point of view."

This is apparently not accidental. When a person reasons about his conversion, about seeking God, about faith, he is always inclined to think about himself: about his motives, about his spiritual path. God here is imagined as an impersonal "goal" that one has to reach, as an abstract "meaning of life" that one has to find. But it turns out that for God our conversion is far more important than we realize. He rejoices like a shepherd who lost a beloved sheep and found it again, like a poor woman who gathers her neighbors for a festive treat out of joy over a found coin, like a father who saw a son who had been lost forever. "God is not indifferent to your fate," Jesus seems to say. "Let this support you on the way."

"This son of yours," says the older son. The younger son renounced sonship by demanding his share of the estate as if his father were already dead, and by living as if there were no father, as if he were not the son of one who knows how to love. The older son did not do this; he lived with his father and did everything his father asked him to do. He may even have truly loved his father. But, as one priest said in a sermon on the prodigal son, by refusing his brother, by not wishing to call him brother, the older son also refuses the father; he deprives himself of sonship just as the younger one did before. For if the younger one is now a son, "this son of yours," and he does not consider him a brother, then by that very fact he ceases to be a son.

It follows that only lack of love for our neighbors deprives us of the possibility of being children of God. And it is precisely love that makes us His children, because love is the family trait of the saints. A saint is one who belongs to God, and God is love.

The parable of the prodigal son is built on a contrast. On one side is the son's despair; on the other, the father's joy. It is easy to see that these are two very important aspects of repentance. The Lord says that repentance cannot be a bargain (as if God forgives me and I promise to be good from now on). The son's break with his father looks more like a bargain: you give me my inheritance, and I will have no further claims on you. Nor is repentance like “turning oneself in” (as if repenting deserves praise and means getting off with a severe reprimand). It has nothing in common with indifference or any form of calculation. The son's thought that his father might take him on as a hired servant seems blasphemous—and he never actually voiced it.

What, then, is repentance like? One word occurs six times in this chapter: joy. God is overjoyed that we have come. What can we do but rejoice with Him?