'Father, give me the share of your estate that should come to me.'
We want the good gifts of the Father but without him nearby to see how we use them. The gifts are our priority. The giver represents a hassle and an obligation. It seems to us that he would limit our fun, impair our ability to indulge ourselves. We believe that we can get more out of his gifts if we take them to a distant country in which we imagine ourselves to be far from his concern. It is a subset of the temptation that made Adam and Eve wish to be like God. We believe that God is holding out on us, and that they only way to get everything we desire is to put distance between him and us, to vainly attempt to hide from his gaze. Yet, fearfully, he often allows us to get what we want. He will let us try our hand it using his gifts apart from him. He will allow us to become spiritually distant, not as though he no longer sees or cares about us, but such that he is no longer impinging on our conscience. But he allows us to get what we think we want only as discipline, in order that we might learn what we truly need to satisfy us.
When he had freely spent everything,
a severe famine struck that country,
and he found himself in dire need.
Without proximity to the Father we quickly exhaust the ability of mere created things to satisfy us. We can spend everything without him and finally discover that we even that was not enough. Nor is there anyone around us aside from God to whom we can turn. It is not just that no one offers us anything. It is that they do not possess what we truly need. When we hit rock bottom in that way it is then that we are most likely to remember the abundance that we left behind in the Father's house. We realize that by every human measure we have disqualified ourselves from being in the house and enjoying it. But we know that the Father has so much that even his hired workers have enough food to eat. We thus return, not expecting the way things to be as the were before we betrayed him, but still hoping for better than the famine of the distant land.
While he was still a long way off,
his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion.
The son didn't even finish has act of contrition before the father had embraced him, restored him, and even elevated him. He had his own finest robe placed on him and had a ring put on his finger. Sandals that the son had no doubt worn through were replaced with new ones, a fresh start. The father was not waiting to punish him, did not hold him to account for his every mistake. He had clearly been hoping and longing for his return. He not only went out to meet him, but ran to him. This was what he had desired all along.
He became angry,
and when he refused to enter the house,
his father came out and pleaded with him.
We tend to have a little of the aspect of the older brother in us as well. We don't easily accept a lack of strict justice in the case of the mistakes of others. We tend to think that if they aren't properly punished that they can't really learn. We don't always recognize the ways in which life apart from God is its own punishment and lesson. On top of that we prefer to see ourselves as innocent, not having sinned in the egregious fashion of the younger son. Yet there is something of his own misshapen desire within us, the same desire to have the fathers gifts without the father. As the older brother complained, "you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends". We ourselves have rejected the abundance of the father, failing to earn it through our effort and service, too scandalized to receive it as freely given gift. The return of the younger son represents a challenge on multiple levels. It shows us how good it is to celebrate in the father's house, rather than apart from him. It reveals that this is never something we earn, but is always a gift. It's hard, because we must acknowledge all the wasted time when we failed to hear the Father saying, "My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours". Yet it is so good to finally hear that, to finally allow ourselves to be won over, and to enter the feast, to join the celebration, and to share in the rejoicing. This joy reaches its apex when we share the Father's heart, his concern for the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. Jesus himself summarized his mission thus: "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost" (see Luke 19:10).
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