Forgive Me, Father, for I Have Sinned

 

Yesterday I wrote on the nature of original sin and “original blessedness.” “Man is born to love, but learns fear,” the theme of a recent talk I attended, is wrong. Man is born with an inclination to sin.  Nor is this inclination eliminated b baptism, nor by faith in Christ. As the Bible says, we must “work out our salvation in fear and trembling.” 

Even leaving aside the Bible, consider the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.”

“The whole of man's history has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God's grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.” (Gaudium et Spes, 37 § 2). 

Of the heresy of Pelagianism, the Catechism notes: “Pelagius held that man could, by the natural power of free will and without the necessary help of God's grace, lead a morally good life; he thus reduced the influence of Adam's fault to bad example.”

Which is what our sermonizer of the last post did: he reduced original sin to the example of our parents.

“Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature, inclined to evil,” the Catechism warns, “gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action and morals.”

This is the fatal flaw in left-wing thinking since Rousseau. His notion of original blessedness led to the excesses of the French Revolution, Romanticism, Marx and Communism. It fosters the tragic mirage of a paradise on earth, created by human effort. It has killed tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions in the attempt.

To give the Devil his turn at the podium, our speaker cited the parable of the Prodigal Son as evidence of God’s readiness to forgive.

The prodigal spent all his inheritance. Yet his father, representing God the Father, did not reject him, but welcomed him home and killed a fatted calf in his honour.

The first common misunderstanding is that the son’s fault was in taking his inheritance and leaving home. No, it was being prodigal—that is, he spent all his inheritance. ”He squandered his property in reckless living.”

And it is essential to notice that he did not just come running to Abba to be embraced. Like Job, he repented in dust and ashes. He prepared this speech for his father, and delivered it: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.” 

God cannot forgive our sins unless we are both fully repentant and prepared to accept just punishment. No Get out of Jail Free. This is the step the evil ones always elide in the telling.

Compare the Good Thief, who died on a cross next to Jesus. He was granted heaven despite his sins. 

Why? 

Because he accepted that his punishment was deserved and just. He rebuked the third thief, who mocked Jesus: “Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes.”

This is why the sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation includes penance. This is why there is a purgatory, or we must believe there is. Only then can we hope for God’s forgiveness. We cannot expect it. “Thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Nor is the repentant prodigal of the parable, significantly, going to get another inheritance to replace the one he squandered. Too many miss this, wanting to stress forgiveness. He does not achieve equal standing with the brother who had not sinned. When the son who had remained objected to the feast his errant sibling was getting in his honour, the father responded by telling him, “all that is mine is yours.” 

That, surely, suggests that the prodigal gets no second inheritance. He gets, no doubt, secure food and lodging; but will remain now forever a lodger.

In terms of the afterlife, this suggests that the repentant sinner achieves heaven, the Divine Presence, reconciled to God. But there are ranks in heaven. We know this from the listed ranks of angels, the reference in Revelations to those “close to the throne,” and Jesus’s reference to “the least in heaven” when speaking of John the Baptist. 

He, the repentant sinner, will be given no authority.

God does not spoil his children.

The Prodigal Son

The inevitable Rembrandt: "The Return of the Prodigal Son."

In three of the four gospels, Jesus speaks in parables. He does not make his points, give his teachings, straightforwardly, but tells little stories. Why does he do that?

He tells us why. In the Gospel of Mark, for example, he explains to the apostles:

The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven.

Speaking in parables, then, is a way to separate the sheep from the goats. There is something about good people that corresponds with being able to understand the basic point of a little story, and something about bad people that prevents them from doing so. Good people, it seems, have imagination and discernment; bad people are literal-minded.

It is indeed striking that people very commonly get the vital points of the parables wrong. The common understanding of just about any of them is demonstrably incorrect. For example, the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the common idiom, calling someone a “Good Samaritan” simply means they help out another in difficulty. But that is only being a good neighbour. Everyone already knows that, without being told. The non-self-evident, new point Jesus was making is that this neighbour was a Samaritan. Most people don't even know what that means.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is the first parable cited if you look up “parable” on Wikipedia, so perhaps it is best-known of all. Many people seem to think it has to do primarily with a son leaving home. But this is absurd; in the ordinary course of life, unless we are talking of a family farm, all sons, all children, leave home. There is likely something very wrong if they do not. The point is that the son is prodigal.

But as with “Samaritan,” most non-religious people seem to have no idea what “prodigal” even means.

Jesus's parables always include some odd detail which is there to signal to us that we cannot read them literally. This is an important generic requirement. One is not free to randomly declare Biblical passages to be “metaphorical” or “symbolic” instead of meaning what they literally say. That is a sinner's trick to force the Bible to mean whatever you want it to mean. And it demonstrates a literalist's blindness to metaphor and symbol: a metaphor or symbol is not itself simply arbitrary or open to random interpretation.

If a metaphor is meant, a parable, there must be a textual clue. Something in the story must make a literal reading implausible.

Here, in the parable of the prodigal son, the initial premise is that the younger of two sons requests, and gets, his inheritance in advance.

Right out of the box, this is not a realistic situation. How is the father himself supposed to survive, if the estate is given away while he still lives? And how do you separate and render liquid half the assets in a working farm? At least in days before mortgages. It is jumping down the rabbit hole. “Dad, let's just pretend you are dead, and do it now.”

So, no, you cannot possibly read this literally as a real family situation, nor as advice on family relationships. Any more than the parable of the sower is giving farming advice, and suggesting you should sow indiscriminately on tilled fields, on the path, and on barren ground. No human father could do what this father does.

The point of the parable, rather, is given plainly in the Gospel. Jesus is responding to the Pharisees when they condemn him for spending time with sinners.

The father represents Jesus, by extension, God. We are the sons. The prodigal son represents the sinner, and the son who stays on the farm the Pharisees, those who are conventionally righteous in their conduct. And there is an implied third group as well: those who are not sons at all, and do not understand the meaning of the parable.

The prodigal son gets his inheritance in advance, and wastes it. That is what “prodigal” means: spendthrift.

All that we have, in this world and the next, is from God; it is our inheritance. He created it all. He is our real father; indeed, we are to call no man father, only him. We are all brothers. If we pursue the pleasures of this world, heedless of the next, we are spending our inheritance in advance. We will have no share in the next world—after our death, not our father's.

God, as father, like Jesus, is delighted to welcome sinners back home. This is repentance.

Yet notice—people always seem to miss this, too—that the prodigal also gets no new inheritance. That is genuinely gone. Divine mercy is not a magical “all is forgiven; back as we all were.” Forgiveness cannot work that way; for the obvious reason that it would violate divine justice. It would be unjust to those who do not sin, like the older brother in the parable. The father assures his other son, who has never made such demands on him, that everything the father has is his when he dies.

So what happens now to the prodigal son, based on the story, when his father dies? That is the meditation we are left with. If his father right now falls dead of a heart attack—if, in other words, the sinner dies soon after repenting—he is back in his previous destitute position.

This, it seems to me, kills the Protestant argument that salvation is by faith, and mere repentance is enough. The wayward son must now do something to build himself a new inheritance; presumably good deeds.

And then, if there is not time left in his life to do so, this means there must be some place of expiation after death—Purgatory. Otherwise there would be no point in repentance late in life. Repentance, in itself, would have no reward.

Here's the scariest bit: if most people don't get this, as really seems to be the case, this means, according to Jesus, that most people are going to hell. They are not even in on the reason for being alive.