The parable of the prodigal son begins with a request that his father would anticipate his inheritance. The anticipation was a legitimate custom, at the time of Jesus. Through it, the hereditary successor received his legal lot before the father's death.
This means that, although conceiving a plan to use the father’s assets to enjoy the pleasures of life, the younger son is not wrong in asking the anticipation. He does not fall into sin just by using or intending to use what the world offers him. "All things are lawful" (1 Cor 6:12; 10:23). Sin arises, it shows its silhouette only when man takes the next step. When he demands what is rightfully his and strays from God. When he turns away, perhaps forever.
The departure from the father's house symbolizes the abandonment of God by the man who lives with him and knows him, though not in a vital way, which is only the way of love. To describe this voluntary abandonment, the parable adds a term which does not appear in the texts of the sheep and of the silver coin, that is, death. More than once, the father says that his son was dead and lived again, got lost and was found (Luke 15:24,32).
Here we have two evils, two consequences of desertion of God by the man who knows him. The first one is death, the other is getting lost. The parables of the sheep and of the coin focus on becoming lost. That of the prodigal son describes death. Presents it as a voluntary separation from God. The son dies while leaving his father, and revives when returns to him.
In Genesis 2, God's word to man who was created to maintain a relationship with him was: "In the day you eat thereof you shall surely die" (Gen. 2:17). In fact, when sinned, Adam and Eve were separated from God's presence. The word of God was dramatically fulfilled in their experience of death as abandonment.
The parable of the prodigal son does not tell us another experience. The drama of the child is much more serious than that of the sheep or of the coin’s owner. It is the greatest tragedy, because it leads not only to deviation, but to death itself. In the parable, death is going to a distant country and adopting a dissolute living, whereby man dissipates himself. No experience deserves more disgusting names, none deserves to be placed under the emblem of death, even of Adam’s death, as much as this one. When chooses to forsake God, no matter he sees him as a living person or as a bundle of obligations, man is over for him.
The Greek word for assets, in Luke 15:12, is generally translated essence. It was a term of deep philosophical significance in the first century. The prodigal son not only squandered his property, but lost his very essence. He dissipated himself. He died the most consummate death, the death that is most up to the name, the death which is separation from God.
And it does not matter which father or God man strays from. To the prodigal son the father of the parable was not quite different from what he was to his second child. He was no sublime figure to any of them. Was rather a bundle of legal obligations, a list of rules to be observed, a dark hell like that of the Brazilian song, thinking about which the son had chills. That father could not be and was not love. So, the son looked for love as far from him as he could. He went into hell in search of the brightest light, not realizing that darkness was not around him, but in his conscience, and would follow him everywhere.
The death of the prodigal son is not only a consequence of the abandonment of the parental home, but of his dissolution. The younger son does not realize he spends himself, when spends his fortune. So famine befalls him. This is the final stage of the soul that exchanges God for delights.
Two ideas occur to the man, in that context: add up to a citizen of the distant country, and return to his father. First, he sets in motion the purpose of joining a local citizen, thus becoming a member of a typical family of the foreign land. On departing from God, the sinner is not content to live as an outsider. He feels the urgency to multiply his aversion towards his father, adding up to a system exactly contrary to the paternal home. He has to demand the interest of his blasphemies at the bank of the world.
The problem is that, despite its brilliance, all that the system can offer is slavery and swine food. In the context of the time, the work to which the son was reduced, the care of pigs, was typical of a slave. It was not paid. Worse, the only wage he received was the husks given to pigs. Incidentally, that retribution was hardly offered him. All the son had was the desire to obtain it. It was a sigh for the beans the pigs received.
If something is hell, this is it. I do not know if some representation of Tartarus, the Greek image of hell, is worse than that. Hardly think so. But in that anticlimax, the son remembers the opposite. Remembers the father's house: "How many of my father's have bread in abundance and I perish here!" (Luke 15:17). He also compares his later state with the one he enjoyed in his father’s house.
Everyone has two and only two choices in life: to embrace the world with the brilliance it has in the beginning and the slavery and pig life of the end, or to live by the word that comes from the mouth of God. Today’s overdeveloped world intoxicates people and causes them to live as if had discovered a third option. To live as if science, technology and democratic institutions had afforded them to detach themselves from God, without falling into a brutal lifestyle. But, as always, the dream of this third position will end in a frenzied longing for pigs beans.
The end of all ages of the world is to embitter. It is to become the maddening desire for swine food. It will not be different when the curtain of time falls over the stage of science, technology and democratic institutions. Blessed is he who regains his sense and realizes it. The Greek New Testament equals this awakening of the man who has got lost to the action of "getting into himself". The son entered himself, so to speak, he regained his sense after having lost it, after having become alienated. In the Bible, to get alienated from God is to get alienated from self. So, for a man to get into himself is what we call conversion. It does not mean to improve behavior. Nor is it a kind of disoriented mystical experience. It is rather the experience of man finding himself and finding God.
Blessed are those that have Moses and the prophets, and not just keep, but hear them. Blessed are those who have the New Testament and listen to it as one who recalls a distant paradise. Blessed are those who hear both the Old and the New Testaments, though in deep doubt. Only when compares his second state with the first, the son is able to reach the third.
Before fulfilling the purpose of returning home, our man conceives the words that will express his bitter regret to his progenitor: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants "(Luke 15:18-19). Rehearses this profession of faith as catechumens learn theirs. But he has learned something quite different. He has learned how to speak it in a grieved way.
And the synthesis minimum of the bitter experience of the son contained in the precarious confession sounded so maximum to his father that he did not allow it come to an end: he threw himself upon his neck, before he concluded the painful words.
The intervention of the father shows that the effectiveness of salvation lies not in formulas that the sinner pronounces, but in the hug with which he is narrowed by God. Theological reasoning tends to associate forgiveness to formulas, but love links it to the embrace. All sins and all sinful life end in the arms of the loving Father, who constantly watches over the horizon.
If there is theology in the Bible, its purpose is not to verbalize what does not fit into words. It is not to give the shape of words to what transcends them. It is only to say that God asks us to embrace him. And to deliver to all the prodigal of the world an invitation to the embrace that forgives the unforgivable debt.
