Homily Two for the Sunday of the Prodigal Son
By St. John of Kronstadt
By St. John of Kronstadt
“Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything” (Luke 15:15–16).
This is what the younger prodigal son mentioned in the Gospel parable finally came to, who, due to some incomprehensible willfulness, did not want to remain in his father’s house, where, as he himself later confessed, even “they give bread to hired hands” (Luke 15:17). Instead of a native, truly friendly community with his older, intelligent and well-behaved brother, he now attaches himself to one inhuman inhabitant of that unfortunate region to which he had moved away from his father, and in which he had squandered his property, living in fornication. The cruel inhabitant "sent him into his fields to feed swine” (Luke 15:15). Instead of the perfect contentment and abundance which he had previously found in his father's house, he now suddenly suffers extreme and shameful poverty - the fruit of a dissolute life, so that he desires to fill "his stomach with the pods that the swine ate" (Luke 15:16). So disastrous, brethren, was it for the prodigal son who left his parental home, with the property he had received by division, to a distant and foreign country!
Is it necessary to say that the prodigal son mentioned in the Holy Gospel depicts us sinners? Precisely, our abilities: mind, will and heart, our body with its health, with its wise, beautiful structure; our ranks, to which each one is called, our wealth, all our well-being, even the patch of land on which we live - all this is the property of the Heavenly Father, received by us by division, Who alone in His goodness, undeservedly on our part, allocated to each of us a part of the goods from His rich treasury and gave us the freedom to go in all four directions. Rarely does one of us remain with his property under the paternal roof; many, having taken their share, seem to leave the all-good Father for a distant land - into the sinful world and live there dissolutely in captivity of passions, until, finally, cruelty and obvious destructiveness convince us to return to our Father. Yes, our passions, our sins are real tyrants for us. Let us talk about this.
The Lord our God is a most perfect being, so that our thought can never rise to a full understanding of His perfections. Since He is all-perfect, He Himself is all-satisfied and all-blessed. The all-perfect and eternally blessed God created us not so that someone would torment and tyrannize us, but so that we would be eternally well, so that we would be eternally blessed; but since only he can be blessed who strives to be perfect and holy, like God, the Creator gifted us with free will and commanded us to be holy, as He is holy. “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2; 1 Peter 1:16). Strive to imitate Him in holiness with your mind, will and feeling; know His perfections, love Him and all people in Him, do the works of God, and you will be holy, and you will be blessed. If you do not try to know Him, love Him and do what He has commanded, you will be an unhappy sinner, a perpetual captive, a martyr of passions, because blessedness is in God and from God, outside of Him there can be no blessedness: there is only the tyrannical dominion of the passions. What kind of work, it seems, is it for a man to know and love God with all his soul and with all his heart! Let his soul be some kind of alien creation for God, but it is His creation, the breath of His lips, His image; how can it not love its Creator, its eternal and perpetual Benefactor entirely, inseparably! Our body is the work of His all-wise mind, His creative hands, our title, wealth, everything that we have, except sin, is His property; how can one not know and not love with all one’s soul such a Benefactor, Who gives us “life and breath and everything,” by Whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25, 28)! How can we not love our neighbors together with Him, as brothers, as children of the same Father! It would seem fair to wonder how we know and love anything other than Him! How can we move away from Him - the Source of life and blessedness, how can we be at enmity with His law and statutes, do something displeasing to Him! However, we love many other things besides Him, we do not do what pleases Him and move away from Him. For that, look at what happens to us, who we sometimes resemble.
Here is a bold freethinker who does not speak in his heart, but already proclaims out loud: “There is no God” (Ps. 13:1), or: "There is no God-man Redeemer; there is no Church and heavenly gifts, imparted in the mysteries for our spiritual life, perfection and salvation!" What then? Have you rejected everything spiritual, sacred and heavenly? So you are flesh, earth, there is no soul in you, you do not know heaven, hell is your eternal lot. Where is your soul, tell me? Every soul is from God and knows Him, strives for Him, but for your soul there is no God, it does not know Him; it is easier to say that your soul does not exist than God, the Creator of all that exists. Oh, I see how pitiful in you is what you call your soul. In an unknown distance from the Father of spirits and all flesh, she languishes, poor thing, in the realm of the flesh, darkness and destruction, with inexpressible longing for some loss, for something native; what emptiness and darkness she feels within herself, how joyless she finds her position! To be a spirit, to have spiritual needs and aspirations and not find satisfaction for them - what torment for the soul! To see how others resort to the temples of God with fervent prayers to God, how they receive from there the gifts of heavenly grace, and at the same time to feel in herself the struggle of a proud mind, not submitting to the holy truth - with the natural aspirations of her soul: how deadly this is for the soul. Return home, prodigal son: where have you gone? Why do you squander the property of your Heavenly Father far from Him, living in fornication? Your mind is not yours: it is a gift from God; why do you use it for evil? God has given it to you so that you might know Him and try to be like Him; but you are making it a pernicious means of going further away from Him, of forgetting and not knowing Him. Return to your Father, unfortunate one; you have gone too far; in this distance there is nothing but eternal death.
Here is an ambitious man, for whom earthly honors are the goal of life. Instead of striving for the eternal honor of the heavenly calling in Christ Jesus, he exhausts all efforts to obtain as much honor as possible from men. But on the way to his goal he meets many rivals who admire the dignity, which, in his opinion, belongs to him! What a vexation, how hard it is not to receive what you so diligently strive for, and which sometimes you already consider your own! How many nights does the ambitious man sometimes spend in sleeplessness! Turn back, do you not notice that you are going to a far country; further and further from your Father in heaven. “The love of this world,” the love of its honors and distinctions, “is enmity against God” (James 4:4). Why do you want to be above others? Do you not know that “the glory of man is like the flower of the grass: the grass withers, and its flower falls away” (1 Peter 1:24; Isaiah 40:6–7), that we have been granted eternal glory in heaven with Christ? You have been given a heart in which, among other things, the love of good glory burns – not so that you would eternally strive for fleeting honors, but so that you would love the spiritual ascent from glory to glory, turning away in every way from sin, as the strongest obstacle to your spiritual perfection. Return then to your Father’s house, cast off petty ambition.
Here is a money-lover, into whose hands a multitude of bright earthen sparkles has already passed and who wants to accumulate as much of them as possible. Silver and gold are his idol. And he has withdrawn from God to a far country; tiresome cares about acquiring and preserving his treasure haunt him day and night; he sometimes hears the word of God, but the thought of wealth suppresses it; he has no time to think about God, about his soul, about its fate beyond the grave: and he lives in fornication. How many and what means does he not sometimes use in order to collect for himself as much beautiful, shining land as his unlimited desires can accommodate! Where do you need so much silver and gold, for what purpose? For a rainy day, to provide for your family? But in the life of a true Christian there should be no black days, that is, unhappy days, according to worldly concepts, unless we call those days black when we sin greatly and anger the all-good Master of our life. We live in the kingdom of our loving and caring Father, the eternal Mediator, the Son of God, and the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, our God, the Trinity of one essence. What dark days can there be in such a kingdom? To provide for a family? Very well. But a family needs far less than you have collected. And you want to provide for your family for the future all by yourself! Why do you not leave it to God to arrange for the future welfare of your children, leaving them almost exclusively to soulless metal? And what if the shiny metal falls into the hands of wasteful and dissolute children, if it spoils them? Then you have a double misfortune: because, having collected it, you did not use your wealth as you should, and because you have ruined your children. Return, you also, to your Father’s house. It seems to you that you are increasing the property that you received from the Heavenly Father: no, you are squandering it, living in fornication. To increase one's property means to multiply it by means of use in accordance with God's intention. How do you multiply by means of use? When you use it, you do not multiply it, but squander it, you say. In the world this is indeed so, but not so with God. But you do not use it as you should, therefore you squander it, you certainly squander it willingly or unwillingly, sometimes perhaps without noticing it yourself. Return then to the house of the Heavenly Father; learn here that every earthly wealth is His property, that we are stewards and distributors of this property; be convinced that, having given as much of our wealth as we can to the poor, we do not squander it, but acquire it.
And here is a slave of pleasure and lust. What about this one? Does he think to return to the Heavenly Father? Or have the torments of his soul and his bodily sufferings not yet reached their ultimate limit? But why wait for the time when the soul will be completely weakened by shameful deeds, lust, and the body will be exhausted by constant, killing tensions. You have forgotten, dear brother, that the soul and body are not yours, but God's, because, belonging to God entirely, as the work of His hands, we, moreover, are redeemed from sins by the price of the blood of the Son of God; you have forgotten that we must "glorify God in our bodies and our souls, which are God's" (1 Cor. 6:20). You have gone far from God; you rarely go to Church , you are ashamed to appear with your impurities before the all-holy God. Cleanse yourself and return to the Heavenly Father: it is bad for you in a distant land with the cruel master of your shameful passion. "Come to Me," says the Heavenly Father and His beloved Son to you, "it is good with Me." "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest; for My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matt. 11:28, 30). Your passion truly gives you nothing for food except “the pods that the swine ate;” your pleasure is painful, imaginary. "Come to Me, I have enough of everything, with Me even “the hirelings have enough bread” (Luke 15:17). And here is the pitiful victim of an insatiable belly, a man, from an excessive love for hot drinks and tasty dishes, consumed in excess, eternally sick both in soul and body. You too, go ahead. The Heavenly Father has long been looking for you. He does not want you to perish irrevocably, but to be saved, sober up and become, instead of a carnal man, who is contrary to God, a spiritual man, who is pleasing to God. Hate the service of the belly, love golden moderation, be spiritual and do not squander the property of your Heavenly Father, your spiritual and physical strength, living dissolutely. Let His infinite goodness serve as an incentive for you to return to the arms of the Heavenly Father. Look at yourself: you almost only eat and drink, constantly drowning in the pleasures of sensuality; and the Heavenly Father tolerates you on His earth; all His sun shines upon you; everything does not yet take away from you completely your blessings. Like a barren fig tree, you should have been cut down long ago and thrown into the fire; meanwhile, you still stand. Return, for the holy Church awaits you. You have long forgotten her, your Mother. And meanwhile, she aches for you, as for her child, worrying about how to save you, the disobedient one.
The Lord now calls everyone with the voice of His holy Church into the embrace of His fatherly love, He wants to save everyone. Soon the days of fasting and repentance will come; let us all hasten to cleanse ourselves of our sins and passions, in order to become new and spiritual people. Almost all of us live prodigal lives - in a distant country - on sinful earth, completely forgetting about our desired and true fatherland in heaven. O, holy faith! Come to the aid of us who have gone astray, and tell us that there is certainly another life for us on the other side of the grave, an endless life, blessed or painful, depending on how one lives here; whether as a faithful son of the heavenly Father, in constant communion with God, in purity, holiness, and love, or as a prodigal son far from God, in lusts and impurity. Tell us that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15:50). “Brethren, consider yourselves as dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to obey it in its lusts: neither present your members the weapons of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves alive to God, as from the dead, and your members the weapons of righteousness to God. Let not sin have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. Know you not that to whom you present yourselves servants to obey, to him you are servants whom you will obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?" (Rom. 6:11–14). “Let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts" (Rom. 13:12–14). Amen.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
