Turn Back

A Homily for the Sunday of the Prodigal Son

And he went off and joined himself to one of the inhabitants of that land; and this man sent him into his fields to feed the pigs. And he desired to fill his belly with the husks that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything (Lk 15:15-16)

Here is what the younger prodigal son, mentioned in the Gospel parable, finally came to: he did not wish, out of an inexplicable willfulness, to remain in his father’s house—in the house where, as he himself later confessed, even the hired servants have plenty of bread[1]. Instead of the dear and truly kindred communion with his older brother, a man of intelligence and good character, he now attaches himself to one of the heartless residents of that unhappy land into which he had gone away from his father and in which he had squandered his substance, living in profligacy. The cruel resident sends him into his fields to feed the pigs. Instead of the full contentment and abundance that he had formerly found in his father’s house, he now suddenly endures the most extreme and shameful poverty, the fruit of a dissolute life, so that he desires to fill his belly with the husks, that is, the acorns, that the pigs were eating. How disastrous it was, brethren, for the prodigal son to depart from his parental home, with the property that fell to him in the division, into a country far away and foreign!

Does it need to be said that the prodigal son spoken of in the holy Gospel depicts us sinners? Indeed—our faculties: mind, will and heart; our body, with its health and with its supremely wise, beautiful structure; our stations in life, whatever each of us has been called to; our wealth, all our well-being, even the little patch of land on which we live—all this is the property of our heavenly Father that has fallen to our share in the division. He, solely out of His goodness, undeserved on our part, set apart for each of us a portion of good things from His rich treasury and gave us the freedom to go off in all four directions. It is rare for any of us to remain with his portion under the paternal roof; many, having taken their share, as it were go away from the all-good Father to a far country—into the sinful world—and live there in wantonness, held captive by the passions, until at last the cruelty and evident destructiveness of these convince them to return to their Father. Yes, our passions and our sins are utter tyrants to us. Let us talk about this.

The Lord our God is a being most perfect, so much so that our thought can never rise even to a full conception of His perfections. Since He is all-perfect, by that very fact He is all-sufficient and all-blessed. The all-perfect and eternally blessed God created us too, not so that anyone might torment and tyrannize us, but so that it might be eternally well with us, so that we might be blessed forever; but since only the one who strives to be perfect and holy, like God, can be blessed, the Creator therefore endowed us with free will and commanded us to be holy, as He is holy: be holy, for I am holy, the Lord your God[2]. Strive to imitate Him in holiness with your mind, your will, and your feeling; come to know His perfections, love Him and in Him all people, do the works of God: and you will be blessed. If you do not strive to know Him, to love Him, and to do what He has commanded, you will be a wretched sinner, a perpetual captive, a martyr to the passions; for blessedness is in God and from God; apart from Him there can be no blessedness: there the passions hold only a tyrannical dominion. What, it would seem, is the difficulty for a man in knowing and loving God with all his soul and with all his heart! Suppose his soul were merely some alien creation from God—but in fact it is His creation, the breath of His mouth, His image; how can it fail to love its Creator, its constant and eternal Benefactor, wholly and undividedly! Our body is the work of His all-wise mind, of His creating hands; our calling, our wealth, everything we have, except sin, is His property. How can we fail to know and love with all our soul such a Benefactor, who gives us life and breath and all things, in whom we live and move and have our being[3]! And how can we fail to love, together with Him, our neighbors as our brothers, as the children of one and the same Father! It would seem, indeed, that by all justice we ought to marvel instead at how we know and love anything other than Him! How can we withdraw from Him, the wellspring of life and blessedness; how can we contend against His law and statutes, do anything displeasing to Him! Yet we love many other things besides Him, we fail to do what is pleasing to Him, and we withdraw from Him. But then just look at what becomes of us, at whom we sometimes come to resemble.

Here is the daring freethinker, who does not say it in his heart but already proclaims it aloud: there is no God[4] or: there is no God-man Redeemer; there is no Church, and no heavenly gifts bestowed upon us in the Mysteries for our spiritual life, for our perfection, and for our salvation! What then? You have rejected all that is spiritual, sacred, and heavenly? Then you are flesh, earth; there is no soul in you; heaven is not for you to know; hell is your eternal lot. Where is your soul, tell me? Every soul is from God and knows Him, strives toward Him—but for your soul there is no God, it does not know Him; it is easier, then, to believe that your soul does not exist than that God, the Creator of all that exists, does not exist. O, I see how pitiable in you is what you call your soul. In the unknowable distance from the Father of spirits and of all flesh, it languishes, poor thing, in the region of flesh, darkness, and perdition, with an irrepressible longing for some loss, for something kindred to it; what emptiness and darkness it feels within itself, how cheerless it finds its condition! To be a spirit, to have spiritual needs and strivings, and to find no satisfaction for them—what torment to its soul! To see how others hasten to the churches of God with fervent prayers to God, how they receive from there the gifts of heavenly grace, and at the same time to feel within itself the struggle between a proud intellect that refuses to submit to holy truth and the natural strivings of its own soul—how deadly this is for the soul. Turn back home, prodigal son: where have you strayed? Why do you squander the estate of your heavenly Father far from Him, living in debauchery? Your mind is not your own: it is a gift of God; why do you put it to evil use? God endowed you with it so that you might come to know Him and strive to become like Him; and meanwhile you make of it a ruinous means—to go farther from Him, to forget Him and not know Him. Return to your Father, wretched man; you have gone too far; in that distance there is nothing but eternal death.

Here is the ambitious man, for whom earthly honors are the goal of life. Instead of striving for the eternal honor of the high calling in Christ Jesus, he wears out all his efforts to win, as much as he possibly can, honor from men. But on the way to his goal he meets a multitude of rivals who snatch away the dignities he believes belong to him! What vexation it is, how hard, not to receive what you strive for so earnestly and sometimes already count as your own! How many nights the ambitious man sometimes passes in sleepless torment! Turn back, even you: do you not notice that you are going into a far country, farther and farther from your heavenly Father? Love of this world, love of its honors and distinctions, is enmity against God[5]. Why do you want to be above others? Do you not know that the glory of man is as the flower of grass: the grass has withered, and its flower has fallen[6], while eternal glory in heaven with Christ is set before us? A heart has been given you in which, among other things, the love of good repute burns – not so that you would forever strive after honors that quickly pass away, but so that you would love the spiritual ascent from glory to glory, turning away with all your might from sin as the strongest obstacle to your spiritual perfection. Turn back, then, to your Father’s house, and cast away petty ambition.

Here is the money-lover, into whose hands many bright little gleams of earth have already passed, and who wants to gather up as many of them as he can. Silver and gold are his idol. And he has gone from God into a far country: wearisome cares about acquiring and safeguarding his treasure pursue him day and night; he sometimes hears the word of God, but the thought of riches overwhelms it; he has no time to think of God, of his own soul, of its fate beyond the grave. How many means, and what a variety of them, he sometimes employs to gather for himself as much of the beautiful, glittering earth as his boundless desires could hold! What business have you with so much silver and gold? What is it for? For a dark day, to provide for your family? But in the life of a true Christian there should be no dark days—that is, days that are unhappy by worldly reckoning—unless we are to call those days dark when we gravely sin and provoke the all-good Master of our life to anger. We live in the kingdom of our loving and solicitous Father, of the eternal Intercessor, the Son of God, and of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit—our God, the consubstantial Trinity. What dark days could there be in such a kingdom? To provide for your family? Very well. But a family needs incomparably less than what you have gathered. And you want to provide for your family for the future all by yourself! Why, then, do you not leave it to God to arrange the good of your children in the future, instead of entrusting them almost exclusively to soulless metal? And what if that glittering metal falls into the hands of spendthrift and dissolute children, what if it corrupts them? Then a double misfortune awaits you: one because you gathered your wealth and did not use it as you ought, and another because you ruined your children. Return, you too, to your Father’s house. It seems to you that you are increasing the estate that came to you from your heavenly Father: no, you are squandering it. To increase an estate means to multiply it by means of the use of it that accords with God’s intention. How? To multiply it by means of use? When you use it, you say, you are not multiplying it but squandering it. In the world that is indeed how it happens, but with God it is not so. But you are not using it as you ought, and so you are squandering it—squandering it beyond any doubt, willingly or unwillingly, sometimes perhaps without even noticing it yourself. Return, then, you too, to the house of your heavenly Father; learn here that all earthly wealth is His estate, and that we are stewards and dispensers of this estate; convince yourself that when we share our wealth, so far as we are able, with the poor, we are not squandering it but acquiring it.

But here also is the servant of sensual delight and lust. What of this one? Does he think of turning back to his heavenly Father? Or have the torments of his soul and the sufferings of his body not yet reached their final limit in him? But why wait for that time when the soul will already have utterly lost its strength from the shameful deeds of lust, and the body will have wasted away under the constant strains that are destroying it. You have forgotten, dear brother, that the soul and the body are not yours, but God’s: for we, belonging to God wholly as the work of His hands, have moreover been redeemed from our sins by the price of the Blood of the Son of God; you have forgotten that we must glorify God in our bodies and in our souls, which are God’s[7]. You have gone far from God; you rarely come into the church, for you are ashamed to appear with your impurities before the all-holy God. Cleanse yourself and turn back to your heavenly Father: it goes ill with you in the far country, under a cruel master – your shameful passion. Come to Me, says to you the heavenly Father and His Son the Beloved: with Me it is well. Come to Me, all who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest … for My yoke is good, and My burden is light[8]. Surely your passion gives you nothing for food but the carob pods that the swine eat; your pleasure is sickly, an illusion; come to Me: with Me there is enough of everything, with Me even My hired servants have bread enough and to spare[1].

And here is a pitiable sacrifice to the insatiable belly: a man who, from excessive love of inflaming drinks and tasty foods consumed to excess, is perpetually sick both in soul and in body. You, too—go. The heavenly Father has long been seeking you. He does not want you to perish beyond recall, but to be saved, to come to sobriety, and to become, instead of a fleshly man opposed to God, a spiritual man pleasing to God. Come to hate the service of the belly, and come to love the golden moderation; be spiritual, and do not squander the estate of your heavenly Father—your strength of soul and of body—by living dissolutely. Look at yourself: you do almost nothing but eat and drink, constantly drowning in the pleasures of sensuality; yet your heavenly Father still bears with you on His earth; still His sun keeps shining upon you; still He does not take His blessings away from you entirely. Like a barren fig tree, you ought long since to have been cut down and thrown into the fire; yet you are still standing. Return: the holy Church, too, is waiting for you. Long ago you forgot her, your mother. And meanwhile she aches over you as over her own child, concerned with how she is to save you, disobedient as you are.

The Lord now calls all of us through the voice of His holy Church into the embrace of His fatherly love; He desires to save everyone. Soon the days of fasting and repentance will arrive; let us all hasten to cleanse ourselves from our sins and passions, so as to become new and spiritual people. Almost all of us live in profligacy—in a far country—on sinful earth, utterly forgetting our longed-for and true homeland in heaven. O holy faith! Come to the aid of us who have gone astray; say that there is undoubtedly another life for us beyond the grave, a life without end, blessed or tormenting—depending on how each one lives here: whether like the faithful son of the heavenly Father, in constant communion with God, in purity, holiness, and love, or like the prodigal son, far from God, in lusts and impurity? Say that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God[9]. Brethren, reckon yourselves dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do not let sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts; neither present your members to sin as weapons of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as alive from the dead, and your members to God as weapons of righteousness. For sin must not lord it over you, for you are not under the law, but under grace. Do you not know that to whomever you present yourselves as slaves in obedience, you are the slaves of the one you obey, whether of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?[10]. Let us then cast off the works of darkness, and put on the weapons of light. As in the day, let us walk decently, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in fornication and shameful indecency, not in strife and envy: but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts[11]. Amen.