Story of the Prodigal Son

Covid Sunday story: For such a time as this, living with curiosity, creativity and courage - full video.

Story of the Prodigal Son (excerpt at 2:12 min)

There was a man who had two sons, and just to refamiliarize yourself with the story, the younger son asks for the father to hand over his share of the inheritance. He heads off, and he blows the whole lot: wine, woman, song, booze, gambling, you name it. In the meantime, the older brother is hard at work on the farm. The younger brother, hitting a wall, recognizing that he's gone through all of his money and has nowhere to go, decides that maybe Dad will at least give him a job in his mercy, and so decides to head home. And the father, we are told in this parable, seeing him coming from a distance, runs toward him, grabs him, embraces him, and directs the servants to throw a party for this son who had been lost from him. The party is well underway, and the older brother is nowhere in sight. And so the father goes and seeks out the older brother who is in the fields working, and the older brother is livid. Those of us who can relate to the older brother character can completely understand that. Like, what the heck, man? This younger son shows up, he's a good-for-nothing, he's gone through so much money, and you're throwing him a party? And look, I've been working for you all of these years! Like, since when did you ever throw me a party? And the father is kind of beside himself and says, "But everything I have is yours." And that has always been the case. And Amy Joe Levine challenges us, suggesting, "Don't allegorize this parable." You know, the father is God, and the older brother... don't do that. She said it's much more basic than that. And at the end, she suggests that this is a parable about families, and this big light bulb went off in my head when she said that, and I went, "Uh, yeah, I get that". I have two sons, and they're so remarkably different, and they were not very close growing up, just like I wasn't very close to my sister growing up. It's only really in adulthood that we've really nurtured and invested in our relationship with one another. I trust that the same will be true as my two sons grow further into adulthood. And then I thought, at the same time it's about family, it's bigger than family, right? So we have these two brothers, and I can't help but thinking of what's unfolding in the country below us. So we have these two brothers, really we have Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and then we have these two communities that he represents. And then you think to yourself, "Wow, how many situations around the world, how many are close to us where two people in the same family are constantly at one another, sabotaging one another, demonizing one another?" In the same family, how much more challenging, suggests Amy Jo Levine, is it for those of us in the human family to be restored to one another? And so the prayer of the father, and those of us who are parents, we understand this more than anything else: we just want our children to be reconciled to one another and reconciled to us.