So today we have Luke’s great story usually called the parable of the Prodigal Son, although, if we look at the whole, long tale, it would be better to call it the parable of the Prodigal Son, the Waiting Father, and the Resentful Older Brother. Today, however, I want to concentrate only on the prodigal himself.

It might be interesting to look at what an audience in those far off days when this parable was first told might have been expecting as the story began. In the first place, they would certainly have picked up on the fact that it starts out being about a younger brother. The Hebrew scriptures were full of tales about younger brothers: Abel was a younger brother, but God preferred his offering to Cain’s (even if it didn’t work out so well for Abel); Isaac was a younger brother, but he was the conduit of God’s promises, not Ishmael; Jacob was younger than Esau, but he received the blessing and the new name of Israel; David was the youngest of seven, and therein hangs a long, long tale. So, those first hearers may have thought, this younger brother is going to be the hero of this tale. And in that, my friends, they were very, very wrong.

Then, as the story progresses, after the son has taken his share of the inheritance and gone off to a Gentile land where God knows what sorts of carryings-on go on, and after he squandered all he had in “dissolute living,” those first heares could have recalled a bit from Proverbs: “A child who loves wisdom makes a parent glad, but to keep company with prostitutes is to squander one’s substance.” Well! they would have thought, no hero here! A cautionary tale, that’s what this is! And again, my friends, they would have been very, very wrong.

Then comes what would have been for those Jews of yore the really disgusting part. We hardly need to be reminded that for those people swine were an abomination: that the lad ended up in a pigsty, longing to share food with those revolting creatures— well, that was downright intolerable, far worse than the disrespect that the younger son had shown his father by asking for the inheritance in the first place while daddy was still alive, far worse than whatever drunkenness and debauchery had preceded the prodigals’ fall. This situation certainly put the young man totally outside the pale; certainly, those minds, so well trained in the lore and traditions of their people, would have assumed— certainly this is a nadir from which their can be no recovery. And of course, as we all know very well, in this they were very, very wrong.

For it is here that the story turns; it is here that, as Luke puts it, the young man “came to himself,” came at long last to realize and to know who he really was, what he really was, whose he really was. He had been, we must say, utterly sure of himself and his abilities. He had been a young man on the make in this world of glittering temptations and false promises, convinced that the talents he possessed and the mind he had been given, not to mention the money he had to spend, would see him through whatever came his way. He wasn’t so different from most of us. God, after all (as Scripture never said) helps those who help themselves. And he was going to help himself to the good life in a big way. He was going to be a success. He was going to make it all alone.

But he didn’t. Maybe his luck was bad. Maybe his taste for the good things in life carried him over the brink. Or maybe it was that famine, with the steep rise in prices which inevitable follows after food shortages— maybe it was that that did him in. He was desperate when he too that job in the pigsty, but we have to imagine he was still making excuses. We all make excuses, we spend our lives making excuses until we find ourselves, until we too realize and know who we are and what we are and whose we are.

Friday a week ago, Lucy and I went to St Andrew’s Church, Seguin, to the funeral of an old friend of ours who had been, for some twenty five years, headmistress of Trinity Episcopal School in Galveston. Her name was Elizabeth Hollamon, but she was always called Budgie, and she was very much her own woman. She liked to drink Scotch, and she took her coffee always in a china cup, holding the saucer in her left hand. She had a inventive and constant wit and more charm than anyone needs, but God help you if you crossed her! (And here I speak from experience.) After she left Galveston, she returned home to Seguin, to the house she had grown up in, a house, I might add, in which Sam Houston had slept.

She fell ill a couple of years ago, and had plenty of time to plan and orchestrate her memorial service. This she proceeded to do down to the last jot and tittle— and in this I am including her eulogy. That was, in itself, a remarkable and very typical affair. Before she took the job at Trinity, Galveston, Budgie had for many years run tours to various places over the globe, even, as the rector read her words, to nations that don’t exist any more. As can happen, there were disasters: lost passports, visas, luggage, delayed or canceled flights, trains, ships— just name it, it had happened. “But now,” the homilist read from her notes, “I am going on one last trip where I need no passport or luggage. My parents made sure of my destination when I was six weeks old and they brought me here to St Andrew’s to be baptized and made a child of God, a member of Christ, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”

Somewhere along the line Budgie came to herself and remembered who she was and what she was and whose she was. And I think, as happened in Luke’s story today, when she started out for home her Father didn’t just sit back and wait for her to come up to him; rather, the moment he saw her, he cast all dignity aside and went to greet her with open arms. That’s the way it happens when we come to ourselves. That is the best of all possible Good News.

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