Prodigal God
Lent 4C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
“The younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant region, and there he squandered his wealth in dissolute living.” (Luke 15:13). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Nothing can be done.
As if on cue, today’s gospel offers the antidote. In the parable of the Prodigal Father Luke’s gospel portrays a God who runs to meet us in a healing embrace as we return from our self-imposed exiles. Who else but God can welcome us back from our most devastating screw-ups, who is so happy that, as [the psalmist today] proclaims, “you surround me with shouts of deliverance.” (Psalm 32:7) (Michaela Bruzzese, Sojourner’s Magazine).
The young son is so full of himself he cannot see how his desires will inevitably lead to his ruin. Management consultant and author Peter Drucker once wrote, “There is nothing so useless as the answer to a question we haven’t asked yet” (Peter Drucker). Sadly, there are some lessons we can learn only through personal experience and failure.
Listening to this story through the ears of Jesus’ ancient Jewish audience, we realize how the young son’s choices have landed him in unimaginably obscene and defiling circumstances, desiring even to eat the food fed to pigs. If anyone is unworthy and beyond redemption it would be this guy!
I wonder. Do you think the father should have cut him off? Should he have told his son, ‘No’? Why did he put up with being humiliated before the entire village? Why did he let him take half the estate? Should he have run after him? Should he have tried to rescue him?
Notice, the father in Jesus’ parable does not chase his son. Neither does he disown him. Instead, he waits, he watches, he scans the horizon. He runs to meet him on the road. “Bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet” (Luke 15:22). A robe, a ring, and some sandals were not for fashion or comfort or even for hygiene—although they imply all these things. More important, these gifts restored status, ownership, and authority. The wayward son is welcomed home with more than a lavish party. The Father awarded him a new share in the estate he squandered by half. The older brother has reason to be angry.
Yes. This father is a prodigal. That is, he is foolish, wasteful, extravagant with his love. The young son is also a prodigal. He has been immoderately callous and careless. He is an outright failure, when finally, he realized the error of his ways. On the long road home, he rehearses what he will say to his father again and again, but he doesn’t have time even to say it before his father, runs to meet him, and restores him to full belonging.
What are we to say about this story? Do we recoil or celebrate? I suspect there are many times we find ourselves in the heart-space of the older brother. God sets a higher priority on forgiveness than on being right. God places a higher value on reconciliation than on saving face. Better to be humiliated than estranged God shows us. God has done what many of us would not.
Family is family. All people are created in the image of God. Therefore, regardless of past actions, religious or political beliefs, none of us have the right to treat any one differently. We have no excuse to exclude or condemn a person whom God does not view with unkindness or condemnation. This is the great good news that can also be a tough pill for us to swallow. This is strong gospel medicine to cure the sin of bothbrothers—an antidote for hard heartedness and for selfish foolishness.
We urgently need this medicine. The contagion of sin has so multiplied and taken root it seems the whole country is hell-bent on squandering our American inheritance propelled by the selfish fever dream of making things great for themselves at the expense of others. Our Christian siblings have exchanged the gospel for the anti-gospel called Christian nationalism. Like our forebears who first heard Jesus’ parable, we are astonished and mortified at how deep and wide human sinfulness can go. We need gospel medicine.
“After all our religion, higher education, reformations, and revolutions, it seems we’re still quite capable of full complicity in deeds of death. Religions, governments, corporations, and organizations are all highly capable of evil while not recognizing it as such, because it profits us for them to be immoral. Evil finds its almost perfect camouflage in the silent agreements of the group when it appears personally advantageous.” (Adapted from Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with Evil? (CAC Publishing, 2019), 46–47, 48.) People are being disappeared from our streets by secret police for their political activism. Migrants are being deported to for-profit prisons in a foreign country without due process of the law. Christian Zionism roots for war, not peace, in Israel and Palestine. Lawyers are targeted for advocating for the wrong political party. In the birth of autocracy, it’s not where deportations and unlawfulness begin, but where it ends that matters most.
“Such deadness continues to show itself in every age. This is what the multifaceted word “sin” is trying to reveal. If we don’t see the shape of evil or recognize how we are fully complicit in it, it will fully control us, while not looking the least like sin. Would “agreed-upon delusion” be a better description? We cannot recognize it or overcome it as isolated individuals, [we cannot fight such stupidity by ourselves] mostly because it’s held together by group consensus. We need to be in solidarity with alternative communities and minority groups to see it. The dominant group normally cannot see its lies—in any country or context. It’s the air we’re breathing, reaffirmed at every gathering of like-minded people.” (Rohr)
“When even two or three of us gather in the name of truth, honesty, and love, in the name of courage, compassion, and kindness, we find ourselves feeling joined by another presence—the presence of Christ, the way, the truth, and the life. We listen to one another with compassion and curiosity. We speak to one another with wisdom and wonder. We turn together toward the light. And that helps us create islands of sanity in a world that is losing its mind.” (Brian D. McLaren, “Islands of Sanity,” ONEING 13, no. 1, Loving in a Time of Exile (2025): 9, 10.) We can be confident that this same Spirit fights with us now in the hearts and minds of all people bending toward justice, greater love, and understanding.
In the face of such collective stupidity Dietrich Bonhoeffer advised friends to find delight in their private lives: throwing dinner parties and writing letters to friends; turning away from the newspapers and radios (today we might add social media) to read more books and engage with art. Resistance, he advised, looks more like finding our way back to stillness and silence — practices of contemplation.
We need gospel medicine to renew our strength and give wings to hope. As Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth, ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.’ Like the prodigal father, let us welcome all for the sake of reconciliation and renewal after the fever dream of sin has broken. “So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! We have become ambassadors for Christ. Be reconciled to God. Be reconciled to one another. Then we shall be a living sanctuary of hope and grace. A living sign on the roadway that will lead all people to the Beloved community.
