Put people first

Today’s readings: Joshua 5, 9-12; 2 Cor. 5, 17-21; Luke 15, 1-3.11-32.

Jesus was being accused of welcoming sinners and eating with them. In response he gave the famous parable of the prodigal son. Rather than meaning to impart any ethical teaching, with this story Jesus wanted to correct something in the people’s mind that was distorted.

It is a story in which we can all figure. It is mainly a quest for freedom. As psychologist Gunduz Y H Vassaf writes in Prisoners of Ourselves, “Those who don’t create their own freedoms choose to live with things as they are, limiting themselves to what the establishment offers”.

The parable is about two characters, one who creates his own freedom and through bitter experience learns how to reconnect with himself and hence with where he belongs; the other, in his false security simply discovers himself as his own prisoner. Even religion can offer a false security and end up being a prison.

This is what emerges clearly both in the elder son who remained at home yet was totally alien to the father’s love, and in the Pharisees and scribes whose self-righteous attitude closed them in upon themselves.

We all believe democracy is about choices and that restraints in choosing are infringements of freedom. Yet we who control less and less of what goes on in our lives can easily derive a false sense of strength from choosing. This is what the younger son who chose freely to leave his father’s home went through. His strength became his weakness. It was the freedom he sought that oppressed him, rather than his staying home.

Socrates famously said the unconsidered life is not worth living. The way we at times live becomes so vulnerable to chance and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that life loses its real value. A life well lived on the other hand, is one which has goals, is lived with integrity and is directed by the one who lives it.

Unfortunately, and very misleadingly in line with the behaviour of the Pharisees and scribes at the time of Jesus, we still tend to subject the gospel message to an ethical and juridical frame of mind. This is what Jesus sought to dismantle. He was always on the road through Galilean and Judean villages. His mission was that of an itinerant philosopher, as Luke Timothy Johnson writes in Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church. As a free spirit, Jesus was never hostage to any school of thought.

Jesus’ proclamation was never meant first and foremost to distinguish between the good and the bad. God's love as proclaimed in today's parable often puts the self-righteous in our communities in a very uncomfortable position because Jesus questions those who accredit their goodness to none other than themselves.

Diarmuid O’Murchu, in Christianity's Dangerous Memory, writes: “Christian faith is much bigger, deeper, and more challenging than churches have ever acknowledged or proclaimed”. Jesus never meant to uphold any religious status quo and, if we listen with the heart, 2,000 years later his words are still challenging. He has been over-spiritualised and today we are called to reclaim what was lost along the way.

The more the Church remains trapped in its juridical frame of mind, the less we grasp the core of the gospel message. In today’s parable, the elder son argued that the father's welcome was not fair. His way of arguing was quite logical, yet it kept him from connecting with his father. The other, a perfect transgressor, distanced himself only to experience more profoundly a true home-coming which was transformative.

We may have very clear ideas about what is right or wrong. But Jesus’ proclamation is not about that and this makes his gospel destabilising, for the religious leaders of his time and for the Church in our time.

We can continue to choose ‘public order’ at the expense of genuine searchers of God. The choice is one of content and approach, rendering our faith communities similar either to the welcoming father or the angry brother. Jesus always puts people first, not order, even if it makes him a threat to the religious establishment.