The Parable of the Prodigal Son Talk 1: What is sin and why do we do it?

Introduction

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of my favourite pieces of Scripture. I must confess that sometimes I struggle to read it without welling up. There are many reasons for this: some of them deeply personal and private, but others that I am more comfortable sharing with you.

It is a passage that demands a lot of us, both spiritually and emotionally, and getting to grips with it demands an openness to being moved to tears, being moved to joy. We might be tempted to skip to the end: to focus on being embraced by the Father, being welcomed home, but to do so means that we will never fully understand the meaning of this. To fully understand the meaning of this parable, we have to be willing to descend to the depths of our very normal and very human experiences. We have to be willing to look at our own failings, our own sin, and recognise that, so often in our lives, we too have abandoned our home and gone our own way.

I am going to try to lead us into the depths. A part of me is afraid to do this because, sometimes, we fear the depths. Although I am your priest, I am every bit the human being that you all are. This journey we take together. It will not be easy but one of the things that Lent teaches us is that we have to face our own natures and our own brokenness. The depths to which we must go, the death, if you will, that we must face, end with risen life. I will lead you to the depths and, if you will travel with me, we will then step forward into the light and life of Easter.

The first two of these talks are a descent into the darkness but please do not lose heart. The descent into the darkness is part of the journey to the light. Remember that whatever depths we go to, Christ is there ahead of us and no darkness can overtake us while that light shines in the darkness.

Reading of Luke 15:11-32

¹¹ Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. ¹² The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. ¹³ A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. ¹⁴ When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵ So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. ¹⁶ He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. ¹⁷ But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! ¹⁸ I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; ¹⁹ I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” ’ ²⁰ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. ²¹ Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ ²² But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³ And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; ²⁴ for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.

²⁵ “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶ He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. ²⁷ He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ ²⁸ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. ²⁹ But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. ³⁰ But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ ³¹ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. ³² But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’ ”

Talk

The younger of the two sons said to his Father: ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me’.

Essentially, the younger son was saying to his father: ‘I want now what will come to me when you die’. In other words: ‘I want to be able to live as though you were dead’.

We could be tempted to think of amusing stories of children saying to their elderly grandparents: ‘Nanny, when you die, can I have…’

A few years ago, I visited my grandmother in South Wales—now my only surviving grandparent. On a book shelf she had a series of books, the works of Charles Dickens. I said to her, partly in jest: ‘Nan, can I have these books when you die’. It was said in jest and affection and, thankfully, she wasn’t upset by it. The next time I visited, she had boxed them up for me and said that I might as well take them now because it is one less thing to sort out. There was one of the series missing but I managed to get it online for the princely sum of £5.

Of course, I wasn’t rejecting my grandmother, my mamgu but the story of the Prodigal Son is one in which the son is completely rejecting his father, and his father’s house, and saying: ‘I want my own life, away from you. Just give me what I will get when you are dead, and I am gone.’ It is the rejection of relationship, for the illusion of freedom. Note my choice of words: ‘the illusion of freedom’. I will come back to that next week. The son was effectively saying to his father: ‘I wish you were dead’. In a society where family lines and bonds were absolutely central to the people’s identity, these words of the younger son would be completely shocking and they are meant to be. It is a dramatic image for us to ponder: the complete rejection of the person without whom you wouldn’t be alive.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son, and the two parables that immediately precede it in Luke 15, is a story of repentance: the shepherd going in search of the lost sheep, the woman searching for the lost coin, the father rejoicing over the return of his lost son. The emphasis of most preaching is naturally on the coming home, the being found. But to really get to the full meaning of this passage we must, as I said in the beginning, descend to the depths of our human nature. We don’t mind talking about repentance; we are far less comfortable talking about sin. But that is the subject of this evening’s talk.

Sin

If we reflect on what the younger son was saying to his father, and on what he went on to do, many of us would probably be reading or listening to the passage thinking: ‘but I haven’t done anything as bad as that’. This is the first mistake that we make. Our temptation is often to make comparisons, which we normally do in our favour: ‘I haven’t done anything as bad as that’ or ‘I am not as bad as that person’. We like to try to scale things to varying degrees of seriousness, usually in order to reassure ourselves that we are not as bad as we are. At its heart, all sin is the same.

When I do baptism visits, in order to talk about what baptism is, we have to talk about what sin is and I often use the story of the Garden of Eden. I make the point that not many people believe that it is a historical account of what happened; rather, it is a theological story that teaches us a moral truth about who we are and why our lives are the way they are.

What was the one thing that Adam and Eve were told not to do?
Why was it a sin?

In the story of Adam and Eve, the man and the woman that God created were placed in the Garden of Eden. It must have been the most beautiful place on the whole earth and Adam and Eve were given almost complete freedom to enjoy it all, apart from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They had a complete relationship with God: walking with him and talking with him in the garden.

The one thing they were told not to do was eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This tree would give them knowledge and understanding and, in the words of the serpent, they would become like God. Wow! We can become like the God who made us and have all knowledge and understanding! What an amazing thing!

Remember that they had a perfect relationship with God. They walked and talked with God in the garden. They were created by God. They were loved by God. Everything they needed came from God and was given to them by God. Everything they could ever want to know could be told to them by God. What an amazing relationship: rather like the relationship the younger son had with his father. He had everything he needed at home. Adam and Eve had everything that they needed to.

The reason that taking the fruit was a sin was that they were choosing to take the knowledge and understanding for themselves at the expense of their relationship with God. They were choosing a life of freedom and independence rather than being dependent on God. To use the phrase I mentioned earlier, they chose the illusion of freedom instead of the relationship that had given them life. In reaching towards the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were, in fact, turning their backs on God and saying, like the son said to his father: ‘we don’t want you anymore: we can do this by ourselves’.

This is what every single sin, whether we consider it big or small, is. It is the turning away from God and taking for ourselves. All sin is the same thing: whether it is rape, murder, the abuse of children, or a little white lie to get ourselves out of a tricky situation, the unkind word about somebody behind their back, the one glass of wine too many, or the walking past the homeless person pretending we don’t see them at all. This is both good and bad news.

The good news is that we have all sinned: we are no better or worse than anybody else. We are all in the same boat. Laypeople, priests, bishops: we are all the same boat. We are all prone to sin and we all do indeed sin. There can be some comfort in this. I once heard it said, to describe the Church, that we are all beggars looking for bread. Or, to use the words of Oscar Wilde from Lady Windermere’s Fan: ‘we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’

The mistake we sometimes make is that we use this truth to justify our sin. We say to ourselves: ‘I’m only human’. We use this to somehow justify the things that we do wrong, to make it ok. We must, however, remember that it is not ok. Sin is not ok. That is not to say that we should be walking around riddled with guilt—more on that next week—but we must recognise sin for what it is. Yes, it is part of our human condition and we all do it, but we should be aiming higher. In the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:48: ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’. Yes, we will all stumble and fall but our aim should be that perfection.

The bad news is that in sinning we are all choosing separation from God. To put it more dramatically, we are all choosing death. Romans 6:23 says: ‘the wages of sin is death’. This is what we choose when we deliberately sin. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and like the younger son in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, when we sin, we choose to turn our backs on our relationship with those who have given us life and walk away into the illusion of freedom.

What was the result for Adam and Eve of taking the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death. Through their turning away from God, Adam and Eve were denied access to the tree of life. The story teaches us that sin is what has brought pain, suffering, and death into the world.

We are all born with this separation and we are all born as heirs of this separation from God, with that distance from God, and the inclination to seize things for ourselves, and seek our own individual freedoms.

This isn’t just the problem of Adam and Eve, or of the younger son in the parable: it is the problem that all of us have. We wander away and find ourselves lost.

I hope that this has been helpful. Let us not despair of the darkness but let us remember that this is the reason Christ came into the world: to restore that relationship. Christ is the light that shines and the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. In order to remember the light, let us hear the parable again.