Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year C

Who Did Jesus Address The Parable Of The Prodigal Son To?

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year C

St. Bridget Catholic Church, Minneapolis, MN

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Nearly all sermons on the parable of the Prodigal Son have concentrated on the flight and return of the younger son, the resentment of the older son and the lavished mercy of the father. But to really understand this story, we must take a serious look at the historical setting that prompts Jesus to narrate the parable. Luke says that there are two groups of people who came to listen to Jesus. The first group are the “tax collectors and sinners. These men and women are compatible with the younger son. They are like the younger son. They don’t observe the moral law of the Bible nor keep the traditions of the elders. Simply put, they are not religious people. They engaged in wild living. Like the younger son in the parable, they too have “left home” by leaving the traditional morality of their families and the society. The second group of people are the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law.” They are like the older son. They adhere to the traditional morality of their families; they study and obey the Scripture. They worship and pray constantly. 

How did each group respond to Jesus and his message? With the use of a progressive tense, Luke says, “Tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to Jesus.” By that he communicates that the attraction to Jesus by religious outsiders was an ongoing pattern in Jesus’ ministry. Sinners flocked to him frequently. It is this phenomenon that baffled and angered the moral and the religious people. So, they complained, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” In the first century Judaism, to sit down and eat with someone is a sign of acceptance. The Pharisees and scribes were upset that people who never came to their Jewish religious services were all flocking to Jesus. Why would they be drawn to Jesus’ teaching? If he were teaching them the truth as we do, they would not go to him. He must be telling them what they want to hear, the Pharisees and scribes may have thought. 

So, who is this parable addressed to? It is primarily addressed to the second group, the Pharisees and scribes. The parable is Jesus’ response to their attitude and questions. Over the years, whenever this parable is read in church or in religious education classes, the focus has always been on the younger son’s flight and prodigality, on the resentment of the older son, and the boundless mercy of the father. The focus is on how God will always love and welcome sinners no matter what we have done. And I don’t totally disagree with this approach. In my previous sermons, I have done such too. But when we do this, we miss the original target of the parable; and then sentimentalize the parable. The targets of this story are not “wayward sinners” but religious people who try to follow the requirements and dictates of the Bible. Jesus is addressing the moral insiders, not the immoral outsiders. He wants to show them their blindness, shortsightedness, and self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them. You may think the hearts of the first hearers of this parable melted into tears, but that’s not so. Actually, they were shellshocked, upset and infuriated. Jesus did not tell this story to warm anyone’s heart but to shatter our definitions, our classifications, our conclusions and calculations. Jesus is revealing the danger of self-centeredness, which is the sin of the younger son. He is also highlighting the danger inherent in self-righteousness, which is sin of the Pharisees and scribes. But there is something else he is doing. He is shinning a spotlight and at the same time condemning the older son’s notion of the moral life. He sees obedience to his father as servitude, that is slavery. In this account, the Lord is saying that both the religious and the irreligious, that both the younger son and older son are spiritually lost. Jesus is not on the side of any of them because none of them is on his side. 

Today, we still have the younger son and the older son. I can see myself in both sons. Sometime ago, in an interview, I was asked to describe myself, and my simple answer was, “I am the lost sheep found by the Good Shepherd.” By the way, my being lost and being found by the Lord is an ongoing thing. It has not stopped. I am still a sinner. Like a sheep, I still stray. But thanks be to God for his grace searches me out and brings me home. Thanks be to God for the gift of the Sacrament of Penance that restores me to God’s friendship. To most of us, Christianity is religion and moralism. But it was not so from the beginning. From the beginning, it was seen as something else entirely. The early followers of Christ were called Christians in a disparaging and insulting way by the Roman authorities at Antioch. Why? Because they were living like the Christos. 

One important point that should not be forgotten is that while the religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, those estranged from religious and moral observances were beguiled and attracted to him. We see this throughout the ministry and life of Jesus. In Luke 7, a Pharisee named Simon had invited Jesus for dinner. But there was one uninvited guest, a sinful woman in the city. In the end, who accepted Jesus? The sinful woman! In the story of the Samaritan woman (John 4), it was the sinful Samaritan woman who accepted Jesus’s message and not the Pharisees. In Luke 19, it was the excluded tax collector, Zacchaeus, who accepted Jesus and not the religious people of his day. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus’s teaching attracted the irreligious and offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. Today, the sad news is that the kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches. We tend to draw diehard moralists, self-righteous people, people who think they can earn their salvation by keeping the rules. Don’t get me wrong, it is good to keep God’s commandments. However, our salvation is purely a gift. Divine life is God’s free gift that nothing we do can earn. If our preaching and the practice of our Christianity are not drawing people to Jesus, then we may not be preaching the same message in words and deeds. If our church is not appealing to the younger sons in our society, then it must be full of the older sons. For us to get the attention of people who flocked to Jesus during his day, we have to look at our message and mode of spreading it.