As a teenager, I worked as a farmhand in Vermont, and, later, in Upstate New York when I went to college. In winter, you get up in your unheated room. It's dark. It's cold right down to your bones. You build the fire, start the coffee, and then you sit in the almost-frozen mudroom. You pull on your frozen boots, still with permafrost and mud caked on them. The chores, of course, never end. They just go round and round.
In mud season, the sky is gray every day for months sometimes. You begin to feel as if you're turning gray: first on the inside and then on the out. And there's the smell of mud and manure, and then the black flies come. Now, they don't just land like mosquitoes or midges and take a sip; they're on a search-and-destroy mission.
In autumn, it's mostly the same. But on an Indian Summer day — with its soft air, its blue skies, and its pleasant warmth — there's an intimation of something more. Some beauty and grace that's both in and beyond daily life.
The older brother takes them to be tokens of God's grace and stands in the warmth of the sun feeling a divine blessing laid on his head. He surveys the fields and is filled with wonder. How can the soil give birth to so much life? And he sees that he is surrounded by the nurture of Providence: the merciful waters streaming down from the heavens, the invisible life-giving rays of the sun. Why even the manure endows each growing thing with robust size and health! And he sees blowing around him myriad seeds. Why it's just raining life!
Capturing one in his hand, he looks at it asks, "Who could have made this? Each seed decides the leaf, every color, every limb and stem and all the parts of the working engine of a living, breathing plant. And each plant will produce hundreds and thousands of still more seed! Who could have done this?! .... and with all compacted in a tiny kernel."
Then he thought of all the smells and tastes of all manner of food. And in that moment, he gave thanks to the Lord for giving him everything his family needs: the sun, the rain, and all that seed.
To the younger brother, on that warm day, the blue skies and those white clouds could only remind him of the powder blue Thunderbird with white bucket seats he saw from time to time barreling through the farm on the county highway — the top down and the radio blasting. Sometimes, there'd be a girl sitting in the passenger seat. But they never noticed him.
"If I could only get my hands on a car like that," he thought. "I'd just drive away from all this mud. I'd drive clear through to summer .... to endless summer. And I'd never come back. Never come back to all this mud and all these bugs! Oh, why was I given a life like this?"
The younger brother couldn't shake off these thoughts. They haunted him every day and dogged him every night. He became bitter .... resentful. In the cold seasons, he complained and groused at everyone around him. The warm seasons only served to remind him that a brighter and better summer lay elsewhere.
Finally, at the end of a work-week, he asked if he might talk with his father. When they were alone, he said, "Father, you always told me that someday all of this would be mine, mine and my brother's. Well, I want my half now!"
His father had been expecting something like this. He had watched his son over the past year. He also knew what his son could hear just now, and what he couldn't hear. So he said, "Consider carefully what you've asked of me. Pray over it with care. And when you know with all your mind and soul what God's will is, then approach me."
The next week the younger son returned with same request. "I want my half now!" So the father sat down and wrote him a large check, the largest check the young man had ever seen. And he left, in a hurry, without goodbyes, and headed out.
When he came to the city, he bought new clothes and a new car and met people who all drove new cars. This world was entirely new to him. He never had to be anywhere. He never had to do anything. And the people be met had nowhere to go and nothing to do.
One day, in the middle of the day, and nursing a hangover, he sat at his kitchen table sifting absently through the pile of mail that accumulated. He noticed that one letter that appeared over and over again. In fact, there were many of that same letter. He opened one. It was an overdraft notice. There were several of them and still other letters from the bank asking him to cover his checks. His money was all gone.
And as a fast-moving storm suddenly changes a sunny day, his whole disposition turned to panic, and he began opening other pieces of mail. There were angry creditors, notices from the court summoning him to appear. He didn't know what to do, so he gathered up his clothes, threw them in the backseat of his car, and drove fast. Where would he go? What what he do? How would he eat? His mind raced with questions.
He drove out into the Central Valley and decided he's find work. Fruit pickers were hired with no questions asked. They directed him to a bunkhouse at the edge of a crop-field where he saw men who weren't interested in introductions or making small-talk. He went to a nearby town where he managed to sell his car. But without ID, he had nowhere to deposit his money. Soon it was stolen.
After weeks of picking, bent over in the heat, and without adequate food and water, he wore down becoming sick and exhausted. Going off by himself, he just threw himself into his bunk and tried to fall asleep before the other men returned. He napped and then lay staring at the bunk above, watching insects crawl back and forth.
He remembered one night a party he'd been to. The lights were low and twinkling. The music was gentle as if coming from the very air. He remembered the laughter of a girl he danced with .... like soft, distant chimes. He seemed to float as on a summer breeze. Her fragrance. Her touch. He was vanishing into a sweet dream.
But the next thing he knew, he woke up under a buffet table, aching and sick. The air stunk of cigarette butts and spilled liquor. The room was now plastered with a harsh light. He looked around and saw other people who had passed out — animals lying in their own filth.
Where did the magic go? It was here, in this very room, only a short while ago. It was so real. Where could it have gone? And in that bunk he realized in one, crushing moment of certainty — a cold, immovable fact: he had traded his very life and all of his future for .... thin tissues of nothing. And he wept. He remembered the kindness and patience of his father and brother, their goodness, their fairness, their rock-solid steadiness, and he looked around him to see what had become of his life — his cruel, unscrupulous boss who cheated him; the hard people he lived and worked with; the filth that now invaded and controlled his living and his life. Even the lowliest hired hand on his father's farm was treated with dignity and was far better off than this! And he thought: I will go and beg for one of those jobs. At least I would live in cleanliness and decency.
So he began the long trip hitchhiking back to his father's farm. And when he glimpsed his father standing out front, watching for him, he saw in a brilliant instant his father's love ... constant and long-suffering. And he ran to him. He ran with all his might. And he fell to his knees and begged his father for forgiveness.
The father's blessing was swift, and he declared that there would be a party to honor his son who was lost, but now was found. The older brother, who had watched his father grieve these many months, resented what his brother had done. But his father's response showed him another way, a higher way .... to love and to be loved.
The younger son. The older son. The father. "Which one are you?" I hear Jesus asking us. "Which one?" For the decision to follow and keep following Jesus usually involves our becoming all three, in sequence — three stages on a sacred journey — a journey of transformation, of theosis.
The first stage of discipleship involves surrendering ourselves to the Lord — having to admit that we are over our heads — that we are helpless, but He is able; that we are weak, but He is strong. Many of us begin our journey with a dramatic conversion experience: say, a brush with death or a profound reversal of fortunes or a realization that we have defiled our own, holy lives, hitting bottom. However we begin, the lesson is the same for each: it is God on whom we must completely rely.
In time, we advance to the pilgrim-phase of the older son. We see a world filled with God's wonders and learn that prayer is not just obligatory; it is a natural outcome of faith — a steady conversation with a God who listens and cares and, mysteriously, puts great store in our praise and gratitude.
The older child is fully cognizant of God's reality, presence, and love. The temptation, therefore, is to resent the many who are blind to the most urgent thing in the world: the unrequited love of their God. The older child must relearn humility again and again and be ever mindful of the years spent as the younger child, when they were foolish, prideful, and desperately in need of patience and love. Can the older child live up to that deep patience? Can he give that love? Certainly, sacrificial and self-giving love is beyond the reach of many.
And this brings us to the figure of the father. He is wise but will meet you where you are. He has the right answers but will patiently listen to all the wrong ones; he will not correct you when he knows his words will fall on deaf ears. He seems to be able to read your mind. After all, he was once a younger son and then an older one. He is prepared to make great sacrifices if it is possible they will redound to your welfare. He is love itself.
The link between the father of this parable and God the Father is inevitable. Jesus invited us to call God "Abba," "Πάτερ / Pater," "Father." Understanding God, not as a distant figure but as an actual Father, in the sense of real and intimate relationship, was unique to Jesus. Before the Incarnation, such familiarity was unthinkable. Certainly, it was revolutionary. You do remember God's holy mountain in Deuteronomy .... to touch it meant death.
For many of us who strive in the life of faith, perhaps no insight has been more important in understanding God's ways or more valuable in finding our way toward relationship with God. Indeed, it is the only explanation that makes sense of a relationship between a faithful God and his unsteady people — that is, the relationship between the parents and the child. Think of your own journey toward God through the Church. It repeats the experience of the Twelve Disciples: we were washed; we were fed; we were healed with forgiveness; we were taught; and we were loved. We were and are loved with a love so great that nothing, not in heaven nor on earth, can separate us from the love of God.
Let us meditate on this from the perspective of our own, ordinary lives. Who is it that washed us and fed us and nursed us when we were sick and loved us with a love that could not fail? Who loved us with a constancy that rained down on our heads when we slept and crowned us in the morning when we arose .... though we never paid it any mind? Is not this the love of a mother and father?
How often I have asked the question, but how could God forgive me? How how could God, Who is so perfect and Self-sufficient stoop to love one so imperfect, dependent, and unworthy? It is only through my experience as a child, who had a mother and a father, that I might have a precedent for a love like this. Not an understanding, mind you, but a precedent.
But when I became a father, and raised two beautiful little girls, I understood. We begin to understand a Self-denying, Self-sacrificing God, Whose love never ends when we have children. This is God's lesson plan.
The great Anglican theologian F. D. Maurice wrote that God made us to love family so that we might understand Him. It is through the sacred and miraculous experience of family — as children, as young adults, and finally as parents — that reveals, however dimly, God's mind and His sacrificial, constant, and forgiving love. Indeed, we learn in Genesis 1:27 that God made us in his image: "...in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them." It is the union of these opposites that renews on earth the image of the Living God. And it is this union conceived in love, that enables God's love — unfailing, self-giving, and holy — to become vocation for all of His people.
Wherever we are in that family
—
the younger son,
the older son,
or
the father
—
we strive onward secure in the knowledge that our journey is sacred,
that our roles are as sound as Heaven,
and
that our Guide cannot fail.
For His Name is Wonderful, Counselor, Almighty God, the Everlasting Father.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.