The Prodigal Son

Archbishop Anthony

​Sunday, March 3
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today’s parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) gives one of the greatest images of God’s love. The greatest, of course, is the image of Christ on the cross. We are beginning this journey towards that image, the Pascha of the Cross and the Resurrection. The church now gives us this parable to break up the ice of our hearts with this story that speaks on a deep level to all of humanity collectively and to each one of us separately. 
 
Today I would like to view some aspects of the parable from the angle of church life. The Father’s house is clearly the church.  The two brothers represent two approaches to the church and the spirit of its life. Christ wants us to learn not only about the spirit of the repentant young man but to learn from the image of the patient and forgiving father. The life of any parish is built up from the spiritual work of its pastors and the whole family.  I would like to share something from the past of our parish.
 
We had a saintly archpastor here in Melbourne during the 1960s, who projected the loving image of the father, just like in today’s parable. He was Bishop Anthony. Bishop Anthony left Melbourne in 1967 to go to San Francisco to take over from the holy hierarch, St John Maximovitch.  Melbourne’s own bishop in the church of St John!  There he became Archbishop Anthony. There is a short story by the Soviet writer, Konstantin Simonov, who visited San Franscisco in the 1970s, with an official Soviet guide. This guide told him that the ROCOR parish was a bad parish. This description piqued the writer’s interest in visiting Archbishop Anthony. He went to his modest apartment and knocked on the door. When the door flung open Simonov gasped because there in front of him, greeting him, was someone who was just like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son.  He had open arms, flowing white hair and eyes filled with love. Simonov writes: I felt that I had come to him like the Prodigal Son. The result of this meeting was the short story called “Bad Parish”!  Another similar story was shared with me by my late father-in-law, Fr Vladimir Vygovsky whose bishop (Gideon) in Novosibirsk visited San Francisco in the 1980s.   He felt the same effect on meeting Archbishop Anthony. 
 
We all wish to enter the joy of the father’s house.  We are all prodigal sons. We need to understand the loving spirit of the church and to project it in the way that Archbishop Anthony did. But it cannot happen straight away. It can only happen when we are firmly established in the family of the church.  Before we get to that level of love we need to learn from the prodigal son that we cannot dictate our terms of return to the father. It must be an unconditional surrender to his love and to the spirit of the church.  We can never act in the spirit of the older brother who insists on his merit before the father.  Such a person seeks justice. St Isaac the Syrian wrote: Don’t call God just. When we were His enemies, He sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross for us. What kind of justice is that? The church is not about justice. It is about humility and love. 

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