Reflection on Forgiveness
We know little about St. Luke other than that he was a gentile
and possibly a physician. He never saw Jesus personally so his
conversion experience had to have come from stories that others told
him about Jesus, stories that apparently transformed him and compelled
him to become a storyteller for Jesus. The New Testament is composed of
27 books and about one third of the New Testament is contained in the
Gospel of Luke and his companion work, Acts of the Apostles.
Luke’s writings, authored around 90 A.D., chronicle the
birth, life and death of Jesus and relate how the earliest Christian
communities were formed and how they lived out the teachings of Jesus.
Some Scripture scholars state that the underlying theme of
Luke’s gospel is God’s mercy and forgiveness, a
subject with which most of us, if not all of us, have difficulty. All
of us have had an event in our lives where we (or someone we love) have
been hurt by someone else. We have all experienced the emotions of
anger, hatred or resentment. The need to get even often precedes the
awareness that we need to overcome these feelings. Obviously Luke not
unlike each of us had to have had similar human experiences and felt
similar emotions that ripped at his heart, hurts as deep as any that we
have experienced along with the need to resolve them.
Today’s gospel contains Luke’s familiar story of
the Prodigal Son. Depending upon events in our own lives, we tend to
identify with one of the two sons. While this story stands on its own,
Luke precedes it in Chapter 15 with two other stories, one the lost
sheep, the other the lost coin. In both of these stories what was lost
was found and there was cause for celebrations. Each story ends with a
comment that in heaven there is similar cause to rejoice when a sinner
repents. When the story changes from an animal or a coin to a person,
judgment sets in.
Presumably the sheep just wandered off and couldn’t find its
way back and the coin had no blame for being misplaced. Not so with the
Prodigal Son. He demanded his inheritance before he was entitled to it.
In fact, there is a question as to whether he was entitled to it at
all. Under the custom of the time, the heir to all of the
father’s possessions would have been the oldest son, so in
effect, the father was giving away the older brother’s
inheritance. Strike one.
Luke gives us little detail about where he went or how the money was
spent except for the one reference to prostitution, which not only
meant sex but unfaithfulness to everything that he had been raised to
believe in. We know that he eventually ran out of money and to avoid
starvation, he found a job feeding pigs, a reference that he had not
only lost touch with his natural family, but also his spiritual family,
his Jewish roots. Returning home he found his father had been waiting
for his return and ran out to meet him while he was still in the
distance. The older brother must have seen or sensed the
father’s loneliness at the loss of the younger son. Strike
two.
Like the two stories preceding the Prodigal Son, when something that
has been lost is found, there is cause for celebration, so the father
has the prized calf killed and throws a party for the lost son. Strike
three.
The older brother cannot and does not enter into the celebration. He
has been hurt by the brother, but in his mind more so by the father. He
cannot relate to Luke’s theme of mercy and forgiveness
epitomized by the father. While the story is brought to an end at this
point, we know that the father will be waiting and longing for the
older son to come to his senses just as he did for the younger son.
Forgiveness is a difficult theme for all of us to appreciate,
especially when we feel that we have been the one that was wronged. We
can always justify our reasons why mercy and forgiveness are not
appropriate responses in a given circumstance. Most of us would find it
difficult to have the attitude of the father in this story. Without our
own experience of being forgiven, it is probably not possible. To feel
forgiven, we must first accept the fact that we are guilty. If we learn
forgiveness from our own experience, then I think we learn a little
more about who Luke was before he was told about Jesus. The story of
the Prodigal Son is only found in Luke’s gospel. I believe he
wrote out of his own forgiveness experience and it was a story that he
felt compelled to share with us.
However and whenever we come to accept the Father’s attitude
of mercy and forgiveness, know that He patiently waits to greet each of
us with open arms.
Don Stanner, Lay Minister