A Meditation for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (Detail)

When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. (Luke 15:14)

As usual, the Pharisees and the scribes are grumbling that Jesus is welcoming and eating with tax-collectors and sinners (Lk. 15:1–2).  So Jesus tells three stories about people rejoicing over finding something that was lost: a sheep, a silver coin, a son.  The three stories share a common, explicitly-stated theme: God delights in the repentance of those who wander from him (cf. vv. 7, 10).  Each story is also implicitly directed against the grumbling Pharisees and scribes, who like the elder son in the last story, are indignant (v. 28) at the welcome Jesus gives to the prodigals who come near to listen to him (v. 1).  Our Lord welcomes the tax-collectors and sinners because they come near to him, because they have felt their deathly hunger and come seeking nourishment from him, who is the bread of life.  Perhaps they are still a long way off, but he is running towards them.

Perhaps the story of the prodigal son is the paradigmatic story of conversion, metanoia.  At least it was for St. Augustine when, in his middle age, he reflected back on his life.*  He had been the prodigal son, turning away from God, becoming to himself “a region of destitution” (regio egestatis), of need, lack, poverty (Conf. 2.10.18).  As he confesses to God:

My hunger was internal, deprived of inward food, that is of you yourself, my God.  But that was not the kind of hunger I felt.  I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became.  So my soul was in rotten health.  In an ulcerous condition it thrust itself to outward things, miserably avid to be scratched by contact with the world of senses. (Conf. 3.1.1)

Apart from the Creator, he could find no life in the created order, which had become to him “the region of death” (ibid., 4.12.18).

In that region of death, Augustine, as it were, heard the voice of the Lord Jesus, the Mediator, “he who for us is life itself [and who] descended here and endured our death and slew it by his abundance of life” (Conf. 4. 12.19).  In his hunger, he hears the voice of the Lord calling to him, “‘I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me.  And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me’” (ibid., 7.10.16).  

But Augustine does not find the growth that is required, until he begins to grow in humility by embracing “the humble Jesus” (ibid., 7.23.24).  As he despairs of his own strength and falls prostrate before “the divine weakness” of the Word become flesh, he finds true nourishment and rest.  Like the tax-collectors and sinners, Augustine finds himself welcomed by the humble Jesus when he humbly comes near to feed on him.  

With them, let us become weak, prostrating ourselves before the humble Lord that we might share in his life.

* Only retrospectively, in the light of grace, could Augustine see himself in the prodigal.  Barth: “Known sin is always forgiven sin, known in the light of forgiveness and the triumph of grace...Unforgiven sin, or sin not yet known to be forgiven, is always unrecognised sin. We repent only as we have already found the God of grace and realised that we are His creatures. Any other penitence moves hopelessly in a circle. For the knowledge of sin is itself an element in the knowledge of grace.” (CD 3.2, 36)