Day 15 | Radical forgiveness

Reflection

The pig food must have been really gruesome. A level of hunger unbeknownst to most of us, driving him to want to eat something truly repugnant.

There’s only one thing for it. Go home and beg his dad to take him back as a servant. All that money spent so frivolously – at best it’s insulting, at worst it’s treacherous.

Off in the distance, he sees his father start to run towards him. It’s going to be bad. If the roles were reversed, he would curse his son and banish him from his sight. But, what’s this?

The arms of his dad tightly wrapped around him. His scraggly beard scraping his neck. The sound of sobbing. This is the exact opposite of the reaction he expected.

This is grace. This is forgiveness. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. The charge sheet against the prodigal son is obvious – insubordination, callousness, gluttony, pridefulness. We could list them all day.

The father, to our mind, would be justified to take any course of harsh action– such is the weight of the transgression. He looks in himself, though, and finds nothing but joy and relief. Nothing but joy and relief that his son has come home.

Jesus knows what he’s doing when he tells this parable. You can almost imagine the confused faces of the crowd, wondering why the father isn’t acting in the way he’s supposed to.

We don’t know how many families throughout history have been healed because of this story told by Jesus. A greatly wronged brother remembers the mercy of the father in the story. A poorly treated mum imagines the patter, patter, patter of the sprinting sandals on the way to the embrace. An exasperated wife recalls the insistence that a celebration is in order. And, yet again, grace flows from where it shouldn’t.

Father, by your mighty power, give us strength to forgive those in our family that we can’t do alone. Amen.