Archbishop of Sydney

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time

St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Ex 32:7-11, 13-14; 1 Tim 1:12-17; Lk 15:1-32

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
12 September 2004

These three parables are placed by St. Luke on Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, when his opponents were criticising the company he was keeping and his dining companions.

This section has been called the heart of the Third Gospel; which has also been described as the “Gospel of the Outcast”.

Today we have probably the best known parable of Our Lord, the story that is known as the Prodigal Son.  It has also been called the parable of the two Sons.  However, it is not primarily a story about the prodigal son or his brother.  It should have a different title because it is a story about God, about the nature of God, what God is like.  It is the parable of the good father, and is found only in the gospel of St. Luke.

If we put the story in a contemporary setting we might say that he came from a family which had a good farm in country New South Wales, up in the North East, or a bigger place out West.  The older brother was very steady, worked at home with his father, hard worker, and had never given much trouble at all.  The younger fellow was a different type altogether, as often happens in families.  He was a wild young fellow, perhaps he had been up to Queensland for Schoolies’ Week, and he wanted to be off.  He said to his father, ‘Give me my share of the inheritance, I want to go off and make a lot of money and have a lot of fun’.  For some reason or other his father agreed, gave him the money equivalent to his share of the farm, and he headed off.

There was a famine, but, it might have been that he could not handle money, was too extravagant with the riotous life that he led; at any rate, he blew the lot.  There were no social security provisions then and as you know pigs were unclean to the Jews.  They do not touch pork.  So he sunk as low as a Jew could.  The only job he could get where he could put food in his mount was to work with the pigs.

And it was there that the conversion process began.  It was not terribly exalted or spiritual, at least initially, because he said to himself, ‘I could be home working for Dad on one of the farms and I would be much better off than I am here looking after the pigs and having to eat their food’, and it developed from there.  He was able to say ‘yes, I have sinned before God and before my father’, and he started to head for home.

The father might have done a couple of things.  When he saw him he might have said, ‘Lovely to see you son, very strange we never heard from you, not even a telephone call for all those years.  Your clearing out and disappearance killed your mother, upset all your sisters and everybody around the house terribly.  I will give you a few dollars, I will set you up, but you will have to keep moving.  There is too much hurt around here for us to have you back’.  Or he might have said, “Good to see you son.  Why didn’t we hear from you?  There is too much hurt here, I will get you a job on one of the farms at some distance, because if you came back into the family you are going to cause too much trouble.  But I will certainly look after you, I will get you a good job and you can make your own way’.

Now the father did neither of those things.  He ran out to greet the son.  They ate meat very rarely; he killed the prize calf so that they could have an enormous feast, a great welcome home party.  Few people wore shoes, he gave him sandals to show that his dignity had been restored and even more than that fewer people wore a ring and he gave him his ring back to show that he had been restored as a son of the family.  So all was marvellous, a very happy return.

Then, as in real life, something goes wrong.  The older brother turns up.  The steady fellow who had been working at home for years.  He says to the servant, ‘what is going on, what is all the fuss about?’  The servant explains that ‘the young fellow has come home, your young brother whom we have not heard of for years; everybody is absolutely delighted, we are having a marvellous party’.  And the older brother says, ‘What are you on about?  Here am I, I have been home working for years, never put my foot wrong, day in day out.  My Dad’s a typical farmer and he does not overpay his sons when they are working.  He never put on a party like this for me when I had my twenty-first.  What do you mean that we are going to have a party for this bloke?  The farm is much smaller than it was, he has blown all his money, him and his girlfriends, a life of debauchery, and here we are supposed to be putting on a big party.’

And once again the father did not come out and give him a kick in the tail and say ‘don’t be stupid, get in there and welcome your brother home.’  He said, ‘No, no.  Everything I have is yours.  The farm is going to be yours.  I am deeply grateful for everything you have done.  You have done a terrific job, but this young fellow was lost and now he is found.  He was dead and now he has come to life.’

It is a wonderful story about the nature of our God, of our loving God, and for older people like myself who were brought up in a world where the Christian teaching was more severe, it is nice balance, perhaps even a corrective, explaining what God is like.  To the young people who have grown up in an entirely different Christian sort of ethos or world, it is also a useful lesson because I am sure that the prodigal son is like a lot of young people today.  When things go really wrong and the great temptation is to think that they are absolutely worthless, there is nowhere to turn, nobody will welcome them, it is not worth the battling and the striving.  Drugs have this long-term effect.  Cannabis in particular is depressive. In other words, their self-image has been so destroyed by circumstances and their own mistakes, there is nowhere to go.  And this story of the good father reminds them that no matter how many other humans might turn them down; God will always have them back and accept them.

This is a story on continuing Divine enthusiasm, from God the Father himself, for the conversion of sinners.  We might say that Jesus is the right sort of older brother, who completely images the love of the Father.

It is not a modern secular parable, because there is an emphasis on repentance, conversion.  Baptised Christians who might never go near a Church today, or rarely, who perhaps never pray are often reluctant to be called ex-Christian or post-Christian.  Sometimes they claim to admire Christ, but do not believe in religious practice; much less that Church communities are necessary for Christianity.  They also refuse to concede that Jesus calls everyone to conversion, to repent and believe.

He certainly mixed with all sorts of people, many of them honest sinners.  He spoke his mind clearly; they killed him for it.  He mixed with all types, whether they were prepared to repent or refused to repent.  But he called them, and each of us, to sin no more.

Jesus loved sinners.  We could say he was tolerant of sinners.  But he believed that there were sins and sinners.  He did not define sins out of existence through pseudo-tolerance and He called us all to love and forgiveness, only accessed through repentance.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.