The Return Of The Prodigal Son: The Prodigal Son Leaves

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The tale of the eponymous character of the parable of the Prodigal Son - the Prodigal Son - is so well known that it exists not only in Christian circles, but has been undoubtedly reworked into more than one feel-good Holiday Christmas movies:  A younger son gets tired of life at home on the farm, takes his share of the estate by making his still-living father divide it, leaves and goes out to live the "good life", runs out of money and takes a job which is beneath him.  Starving and poor, he realizes that things were better back home and decides to return home.

Nouwen quotes an author who spent years in traditional cultures of the Second and Third World what the implications would be of a son asking his father for his share of the estate while his father was still living.  The response are almost universal:  No-one would ask such a question, for to ask it would be for the son to wish the father to die.  And leaving home then becomes a double rejection, not just of his family but of his home and the values that it represents:  "Leaving home is, then, much more than a historical event bound to time and place.  It is a denial of the spiritual reality that I belong to God with every part of my being, that God holds me safe in an internal embrace, that I am indeed carved in the palms of God's hands and hidden in the shadows....Leaving home is living as though I do not yet have a home and must look far and wide for one."  Leaving home - the home of God's presence, of God's voice - is a rejection of God himself, even as God continues to speak his words of love to us:  "Jesus has made it clear to me that the same voice that he heard at the River Jordan and on Mount Tabor can also be heard by me....These words reveal my true dwelling place, my true abode, my true home."

And yet we go: 

"Yet over and over again I have left home.  I have fled the hands of blessing and run off to faraway places to search for love!  This is the great tragedy of my life and the lives of so many I meet on my journey.  Somehow I have become deaf to the voice that calls me Beloved, have left the only place where I can hear that voice, and have gone off desperately hoping that I would find somewhere else what I could no longer find at home." 

We leave, suggests Nouwen, because "...I realize that the true voice of love is a very soft and gentle voice speaking to me in the most hidden places of my being...It is a voice that can only be heard by those who allow themselves to be touched."

The world is fully of voices, says Nouwen, voices that say "Go out and prove that you are worth something".  Christians my recognized that voice in the testing of Christ in the Wilderness, where three times the Devil tempted Him to perform a miracle or worship Satan.  Christ was able to resist, but not so much us:  "I leave home every time I lose faith in the voice that calls me the Beloved and follow the voices that offer a great variety of ways to win the love I so much desire."

How do we know when we have left home and have entered that distant country?  "Anger, resentment, jealousy, desire for revenge, lust, greed, antagonisms, and rivalries are obvious signs that I have left home.  And that happens quite easily".  Easily for himself, says Nouwen; even more easily for me.

The core question we ask, says Nouwen, is whom do we belong to:  God or the World? "All the time and energy I spend in keeping some kind of balance and preventing myself from being tipped over and drowning shows my life is mostly a struggle; not a holy struggle, but an anxious struggle resulting in the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me."

Nouwen argues that we are frenetic in our lives and actions because at all times we continue to ask the world "Do you love me?  Do you love me?"  The world is filled with conditional love: "if" you do this, then the world will love us, although too often we do not realize that:  "The world's love is and always will be conditional."

We become addicted to the world:

"Addiction might be the best word to explain the lostness that so deeply permeates contemporary society (Ed. note:  This book was published in 1992).  Our addictions make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment:  accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink; and sexual gratification without distinguishing between love and lust...The addicted life can be aptly designated a life lived in "a distant country."

"I", states Nouwen, "am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found....I am constantly surprised at how I keep taking the gifts God has given me - my health, my intellectual and emotional gifts - and keep using them to impress people, receive affirmation and praise, and compete for rewards, instead of developing them for the glory of God."  The Prodigal Son is merely replaying the Original sin and Adam and Eve's definitive rejection of God's love and provision:  like them, he has chosen to seek in foreign lands the love and fulfillment he seeks on his terms, casting aside the offer of God.

To Nouwen's mind, the painting "The Return of The Prodigal Son" has the message of salvation embedded in it:  the son, have left his father's provision and taken his money and lived his life to the fullest, found himself bound the conditional love the world, the "ifs" that said with the money, he was loved.  Likewise, how often have I left my Father's provision, taken the good things He has given me and gone to a distant country where there is love and acceptance so long as I continue to spend God's provision on myself.  

The problem, of course, is that it always runs out.  Eventually the conditional "ifs" will become the definitive "no":  we will no longer measures up to what the world requires for its love and so, seemingly suddenly, we find ourselves alone in that distant country, bereft of all that we had taken out with us and bereft of the "Love" that we thought we had. 

God loves us too much to make us stay.  Nouwen suggests - and I have never heard this thought expressed before - that God even loved His Son so much that He could not keep Him in Heaven but watched as He came to earth, never withdraw His blessing or His love from His Son.   God knew what it would cost Christ even as Christ knew what it would cost Himself - but God never said "Stay here".

Instead He stood with open arms, waiting for His Son to come home - and not just alone, but bringing with Him all who had believed in Him.  The same Father stands there still, arms wide open, waiting for us as well to come to our senses in whatever distant country we find ourselves.  It is perhaps only when we have come to the end of our rope (because we are so often so foolish) that we are in a position to hear that still, small voice reminding us of The Father's love for us.

All that we seek, He says, is where we left from.  We need only come home.