March 14, 2010 (4th Lent)
Today’s Readings (text):
- Joshua 5:9-12
- Ps 34:2-7
- 2nd Corinthians 5:17-21
- Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
The story of the prodigal son appears only in Luke’s gospel, missing from both Mark and Matthew among the synoptic gospels. We usually refer to this parable as “The Prodigal Son,” shifting all the emphasis of the story to the son who goes off and squanders his inheritance, only to return to his father, begging to be taken back into the family.
By putting the emphasis on the lost son, we lose some of the understanding of the importance of the older brother and his outburst in Luke 15:29b-30: “Look, all these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders,” he protests. “Yet you never even gave me a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him.”
We also neglect the role of the father in the parable. According to the way Jesus tells the parable, the lost son acts on his own accord. He doesn’t come back because he gets a letter from his father or something; rather, he runs out of money and would probably have died without assistance from his family.
In today’s crazy world, we have reality TV. One show in Spain, entitled “Patricia’s Diary,” specializes in reuniting people with long-lost family members. Last month, producers discovered something had gone terribly bad with one episode.
It all started in 2003, when a 38-year-old woman spotted her father on the show, telling the TV audience he had not seen his two daughters since 1966, when he and their mother split up.
The daughter first spoke with him on the telephone, and then they decided to meet at his house. The father reportedly kissed her on the lips during one of their meetings, but she returned with him afterwards to her home. He allegedly sexually abused her there, with sexual abuse continuing and even rape occurring, according to court testimony.
He has been sentenced to seven years in prison for his crimes, which he still claims were invented by his daughter as revenge for him abandoning her as a child, “because of the lack of support which she had suffered throughout her life.”
The roles are reversed a little here. It is the father in Spain who plays the prodigal son from our Lord’s parable. While his daughter apparently had every hope of behaving like the father in the parable, the long-lost father’s intentions with his daughter were apparently very different from those of the prodigal son — or maybe not so different.
What we see in the case in Spain is a man who had lost everything. Maybe he squandered away a loving relationship he once had with his daughters’ mother. Maybe he squandered away a guiding hand he once had with his daughters. He very likely felt just as empty inside as the prodigal son did before going back to the family and seeking to reconnect.
But just because the beginning of the story is the same as the prodigal son parable doesn’t mean the story happens as our Lord would have liked. When the daughter welcomed her father and, in effect, killed the fattened calf for him, he raped her.
A blogger on family.com, Beth McHugh, writes, “Sadly fathers do rape their own children and sometimes they even rape their infant children. They can even rape several daughters over a period of years.” These rapes often go unreported, because, as Ms. McHugh writes, many daughters feel that sexual assault is how their father shows them they are loved.
And while the father in Spain will spend some time in prison, we must distinguish between his actions, which occurred after his daughter welcomed him home, and those of the prodigal son in Jesus’ gem, where the only question of punishment comes from the elder son. For the father — and for heaven in this metaphor — it was enough that the son returned. He had done wrong, but as far as the father was concerned, he was home. His wrongdoing ended there, as we hear in the Old Testament lesson, “Today I have removed the reproach of Egypt from you.”
The father in Spain, on the other hand, sinned after his daughter opened her arms and her house to him. For that, you get prison. And penance. The elder son would be happy to extend the story of the parable to modern-day reality TV, thus gaining a fuller understanding of God’s sense of justice and sparing a love between a father and one of his daughters. But in Spain, things didn’t go according to God’s plan, did they? Love does not need a confession; nor does it demand restitution. Love is enough by itself. Taste and see God’s goodness, which is love.
