In one of Wendell Berry’s essays (I forget which, and my copy is many miles away), the life of the archetypal modern is drawn as the prodigal son’s but without redemption. The young man (university graduate), in his first foray into adulthood, quarrels with his father (tradesman in a deindustrialising provincial town) and leaves with his share of the inheritance (takes a skilled job in a distant but prosperous city). There, having squandered his wealth on wild living and in the extortionate rental market, he may come to his senses, but there is now no convention or expectation of return. Such a move torpedoes his career, disconnects him from his friends, invites the scorn of his university cohort. The result on a social scale is cataclysmic: gone is the family trade, the multi-generational household, the sense of place – even the oral tradition and regional accents are disappearing. Like topsoil, slow-growing local culture is being washed away by the tonne in great landslips caused by urbanisation, efficiency, and the mobility of labour.
Berry’s treatment of the shape of the parable is interesting and, as in many places, he makes a trenchant point about the troubling oversights of modern life. But in drawing one secular, ‘common-grace’ lesson from it, he loses its pathos and, substantially, its meaning. The return it depicts is not just to the ancestral seat of a family but to the kingdom of God – the prodigal has sinned, as his confession protests, not just against another man but against heaven. The response of the father – flowing robes scrunched up in an ungainly fistful at his side, arms and legs akimbo in an undignified sprint, a breathless and sweaty embrace – becomes only more moving as we realise that this father is the Ageless Lord of All Creation, the source of all goodness and the judge of all people. In Luke’s gospel this parable appears next to two others where something lost is found, and the triptych is breath-taking in its profundity. A verse from one of my favourite hymns draws a scene from one of the other two:
Perverse and foolish oft I strayed,
But still in love Thou sought me,
And on Thy shoulder gently laid,
And home, rejoicing, brought me.
I have shed tears to these words several times. I have long found moving the way it depicts the emotional journey of my own spiritual life – from a frightened and foolish wanderer to one rejoicing as I’m brought home gently on the shoulder of my Shepherd. But I realised a couple of months ago that this is not quite what the hymn says, nor its source parable. There’s a beautiful ambiguity in the participle in the last line: who is rejoicing?
The lost sheep is glad in its own way to be brought back home – so, of course, is the prodigal son. But true as that may be, it’s not what the Lord actually says. In each of the lost parables in Luke 15 we are told, however elliptically, about the joy of the Father in restoring lost sinners to Himself: the shepherd on finding his sheep, the woman her coin, and the father his son – all rejoice. When, according to the gospel, I am brought home to my Father time after time, I rejoice in that. But – and how beautiful is this! – so does He. This perverse and foolish sheep laid across His gentle shoulders, He springs down the path to His sheepfold, eyes wide with delight, lips whistling a happy tune.
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Recovering this spiritual dimension to the parable teaches me a second common-grace lesson about home. Of course we rejoice to return there, but importantly home is also where (wherever?) others rejoice to receive us. In no way does this lesson supersede what I’ve written above about the parable’s meaning (I’ll come back to this). Their joy deserves its own name – I use ‘home-rejoicing’ in the below.
The contractual smile of the hotel receptionist is not home-rejoicing. Neither is the awkward but often genuine greeting of the church welcome teamer. These things can be good, and necessary, but they are a far cry from the extravagant run-like-nobody’s-watching of the father in Luke 15. The shivering smile on the train station platform, the touches carefully tailored to my tastes and our shared histories – these have much more home-rejoicing about them. Across my different ‘homes’ in this sense, home-rejoicing is different too – my parents, my sister, my pastor, my old housemates.
In his excellent book The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen invites us to imitate the welcome of the father. If not exegetical, this is certainly appealing – do we not want to be devoted to doing good? Any human welcome will inevitably fall short of the Luke 15 standard. No house is heaven but heaven, and no host is The Host but God. But why not strain?
The parable of the prodigal son is not given to us as a bank of generic wisdom about how to make others at home or where to expect to be welcomed. But as it tells of the purest and truest home-rejoicing, it will certainly both mirror and exceed the welcome we receive even in our most precious earthly homes.
Yikeiatry 