The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of Jesus’ most well-known and recited lessons (see Luke 15:1-3, 11-32). In telling this story, Jesus intended to challenge the thinking of the Pharisees, scribes, and others who had criticized him for associating with tax collectors and sinners. It’s not difficult to understand its teaching about the great love, mercy, and forgiveness of God the Father.
According to the parable, the son squandered his inheritance on immoral and loose living in a foreign and faithless land, and then as a result of his misdeeds ended up even worse off than pigs. Clearly, this young man would have been counted among the greatest of sinners, perhaps even among the ranks of the absolutely “unforgivable.”
Although the whole story is packed with symbolism and meaning, I believe one of the most poignant details has to do with those pigs, and how it clearly illustrated just how low and desperate the prodigal son had become. We are told he “hired himself out to one of the local citizens who sent him to his farm to tend the swine . . . and he longed to eat his fill of the pods on which the swine fed, but nobody gave him any” (see verses 15 and 16). To those who first heard the preaching of Jesus, this particular point would have added incredible and tremendous severity to the dire situation in which the young man had found himself.
At that time, and as adherents to strict kosher diets, Jewish people simply did not eat pork. It was also not permissible even to own or to work on a pig farm. To this day in the Jewish state of Israel the breeding of pigs is almost entirely illegal, and is only allowed in northern areas inhabited by Christian Palestinians. Accordingly, pigs were and are considered to be the most filthy (and therefore ungodly) of animals. No good and faithful Jew at the time of Jesus would have had anything to do with them. And so not only had the son become the servant of a gentile pig farmer, and was forced to live with such filthy animals, but to make matters even more dire, the pigs were eating better than he was.
Those who heard Jesus tell this story, and how he included the severity of this detail, would have understood that the son had sunken to the level of the lowest of the low, even to the point of being absolutely “unforgivable,” and you couldn’t get any worse than that! I believe this is the principal reason why the generous and merciful love, and the forgiveness of the father, would have seemed so incredible to those who first heard the parable.
Jesus himself had been criticized by the Pharisees and scribes because he had been seen associating with tax collectors and other sinners. Perhaps by comparison to Jesus’ own show of compassion, the treatment of the son by his father demonstrated an even greater mercy and love than that for which he himself had been criticized. I believe this is the very point of the story.
Of course it was necessary for the son to reach the conclusion to change his life, and to seek the forgiveness of his father, but it wouldn’t have been possible if the father had considered his sins to be absolutely “unforgivable.” And so today, as we contemplate this great and often quoted parable, we might ask ourselves if there are “sinners” in our own time and place who we might consider to be absolutely “unforgivable?” If so, are we willing to reach out to them and to show them the compassion of Jesus? Even more than that, are we willing to offer them the same kind of love, mercy, and forgiveness shown by our Father in heaven?
As we continue our Lenten journey, may we be grateful that this same forgiving God has called each of us away from the death of sin, has welcomed us into his loving arms, and has promised us the fullness of Easter life! May we treat others as we ourselves have been treated!
Praise God! Friar Timothy
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