THE PRODIGAL SON

"The younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living"

PARABLES:

In the Parable of the Lost Sheep  (Luke 15: 1) we have the stupid, bewildered sinner.

In the Parable of the Lost Drachma (Luke 15:8) we have the sinner "stamped" with  God's image, but lying lost, useless and ignorant of his own worth.

In the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11)  we have the conscious and willing sinner. Drawn from the simplest elements of daily experience, this parable illustrated in a rising climax of tenderness the deepest misteries of the Divine compassion  - the joy that there is in heaven over one sinner that repents. Where, in the entire range of human literature, can anything be found so tense, so luminous, so full of infinite tenderness - so faithful in the picture it furnishes of the consequences of sin, yet so merciful in the hope which it affords to amendment and penitence - as this little story?  How does it summarise the consolations of religion and the suffering of life!  All sin and punishment, all penitence and forgiveness, find their best deliniation in these brief words.

"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him - My son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found". And since no strain could rise into diviner tenderness - since death itself could reveal no lovelier or more consolatory lesson than it conveys  to sinful man - to us it might seem that this is the true climax of the parable, and  there it should end with the music of angel harps.

And here it would have ended that, the mystery of human malice been other than it is. The angry murmur of the Pharisees and Scribes had shown how ignorant they were, in their hardness and pride of heart, that , in the sight of God, the tear of one truly repentant sinner is immeasurably dearer than the loveless formalism of a thousand Pharisees. The elder son was indignant and angry at that  ready forgiveness, and reproached the tender heart of his father, and dragged up again in their worst form the forgiven sins of this brother, and  showed all the narrow  malignity of a heart which had mistaken external rectitude for holy love. Such self- righteous malice, such pitiless and repulsive respectability, is an evil more inveterate - a sore more difficult to probe, and more hard to cure - than open disobedience and passionate sin. ( Dean Farrar)

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