The reason the Church reads the parable of the Prodigal Son today, the second Sunday of the Triodion and two weeks away from the beginning of Great Lent, is to teach us that God is always ready to receive us back to His house. So the theme is repentance, a change of life, a return to God, or, if we have never left His home, to appreciate the good life He provides for us. Today, however, instead of reflecting on the son who was prodigal, I invite you to turn your gaze with me to our God, to contemplate the kind of God we have.
This parable, along with with the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10:29-37) and that of the Lost Sheep (Lk. 15: 3-7), is the most important of all the Lord’s parables. In it we get a glimpse of who God is: a loving and compassionate Father. False notions about God exist, and none of them describe God as He is presented to us in this parable. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who knows His Father intimately and loves Him to death, reveals to us this most important attribute of God, a Father, the true God whom we worship.
The father in the parable is also shown to be full of love, compassion, understanding, patience, forgiveness, goodness – also attributes our God, because the father in the parable stands for our heavenly Father, depicted for us by His beloved Son. Isn’t it clear why we should repent of our actions and return to God? We have a God who loves us to death. We should, therefore, want to be with Him, to live with Him, to share His life.
I have been corresponding with a journalist who is influential in society, and he recently expressed a difficulty to me that he has with the concept of “a God subject to angry temper tantrums.” “I don’t believe in an angry God,” he said. Neither do we, I replied. Unfortunately, the conception of an angry God which prevails in western Christianity (whether protestant or Roman Catholic), has exerted an influence among our Orthodox faithful as well, but this is not an Orthodox understanding. Our understanding of God is how Christ revealed Him to us: a compassionate father, magnificently illustrated in The Parable of the Prodigal Son, or, a better title would be, “The Parable of the Compassionate Father.”
A hymn chanted today says,
Brothers and sisters, let us learn the meaning of this mystery:
For when the prodigal son ran back from sin to his Father’s home,
his loving father came out to meet him and kissed him.
He restored to the prodigal son the tokens of his former glory,
and mystically made glad on high by sacrificing the fatted calf.
Let our lives, then, be worthy of such a loving Father who has offered sacrifice,
and of the glorious Victim who is the Savior of our souls.
Who is like this loving Father? If you say, “No one I know”, that’s because there is only one who has such great compassion for His children – our heavenly Father!
Fr. EH, 2014. Edited by AKH, 2025
