*[This is a theological essay, not a traditional poem. I'll provide it as instructed while noting its prose nature]*
From the Bible we know that Jesus Christ reveals to us God as a loving Father. At the beginning of the fifteenth chapter of Luke's Gospel, it is written: "Now all the tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to hear him." The word "all" implies a great number of tax collectors and sinners.
Who were these people? With sinners, it's somewhat clear. But the tax collectors were collaborators—Judeans by birth who served Rome in governmental positions. The Roman Empire included Judea. Tax collectors typically collected tribute from their own countrymen to send to Rome's treasury. People's attitudes toward them were correspondingly negative, perhaps similar to attitudes toward police officers during World War II who served the Wehrmacht.
There was no way out; they had to obey, but the people's attitude toward them was extremely negative—this was considered the most vile, despicable, unimaginable occupation. Those called tax collectors and sinners belonged, perhaps, to a contingent of people who had fallen into every vice: drunkards, addicts (perhaps they didn't exist then in the form they do today), fornicators and adulterers, thieves and murderers... In general, a most repulsive contingent.
Now imagine: holy Jesus walks through Israel, and to Him, as if drawn by a magnet, these strange fellows—tax collectors and sinners—are attracted. The religious leaders viewed them with extreme negativity. The Jews believed you couldn't even speak with these people, have contact with them, touch them. They were nothing but trouble. Rather, they believed their task was to protect God's people from these tax collectors and sinners, to keep them at a proper distance, because with them everything was clear—judgment had already been passed on them, and more was yet to come. In short, they were used-up material, people cast out, beyond the camp of Israel. "And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, 'This man receives sinners and eats with them.'"
And here's the conflict: Jesus attracts these people. Perhaps it's not entirely clear what the problem is, but in that time, it was forbidden to associate with them—you had to keep a respectable distance. If you saw sinners, you had to cross to the other side of the road, lower your eyes, avoid any contact with them. But Christ not only makes contact with them; He doesn't merely start a conversation with them—which would itself be catastrophic—but He even sits down with them. In the East then (and even today), one could not sit down beside someone considered unacceptable for any reason. To share a table, to share a meal with such a person—this meant sharing more than food; it meant sharing communion, values... In short, it was unthinkable to invite sinners into one's home.
Yet this entire story occurs before the Pharisees' eyes. The Pharisees were the religious party of that time. They were very proper, wore special garments visible from afar. The Pharisees spoke correct words and monitored morality—a kind of moral police; they ensured that every Jew observed God's Law precisely. They were all serious, strict, proper. Everyone feared them, obeyed them. They were examples: they prayed on street corners, demonstrating how it should be done. In general, everything about them was proper and good.
The scribes and theologians of that time—learned men who knew much about the Law, who had read many books (for not everyone could read then!)—were also deeply troubled by Jesus' behavior. They, the elite of society, the "upper crust," completely didn't understand what He was doing. They heard His sermons, realized He spoke something supernatural, saw His deeds, especially the healings He performed. But at the same time, some of His actions deeply troubled them. There was a certain discord. It was as if He were challenging them.
This misunderstanding ultimately led to direct hatred and opposition between the religious leaders and Jesus. And ultimately ended in false accusation and the cross of Golgotha. Jesus reveals to them God the Father and shows His heart through parables. He explains how God looks upon this world. He came to fulfill not His own will, but His Father's. "But he said to them, 'Which one of you, if he has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?'"
This parable might not be entirely clear to modern people. I myself have never dealt with sheep; my knowledge of sheep herding is very limited. But in that time and for that audience, it was a very understandable example. Sheep wander about by themselves; they absolutely need a shepherd. There are animals that can graze themselves. On the Caucasus, I've seen cows that would leave at the beginning of the season into the mountains, graze there, and when autumn came, they'd return. They had no shepherd. They'd come to their masters' gates to winter over.
But sheep behave quite differently. In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah 53:6, it is written: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."
In ancient times, they built special pens for sheep so they wouldn't scatter. But there were cases when one sheep would get lost. It was precious. One lost sheep was very dear. "And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance" (Luke 15:5-7).
Jesus explains that each person has tremendous significance. Great joy happens not only on earth but in heaven over one repenting sinner. By the most conservative estimates, at least two thousand people each day come to understand their need for Jesus, repent of their sins, and give Him their lives. This means that each hour about ninety people come to faith in Christ. Divide this by minutes. Every minute one person repents, which means the choirs of angels, all the heavenly hosts without pause for thousands of years sing praise and "Hosanna" to God. It seems to us that the whole world is rushing toward catastrophe, about to collapse and perish, but there is comfort in the fact that the heavens rejoice even over one repenting sinner.
This happened in my life on July 31, 1993. The heavens sang a hymn of praise to God because I, like a lost sheep, came to Him. This happened once with everyone who has turned to God. This will happen with those who have not yet come to Him but are already on the way. Jesus appeared on earth to show God. He wants you to understand what is on His heart: everyone who is lost, who has gone astray, who has strayed from the right path, can return to Him. Jesus says He did not come to serve the righteous. The righteous have a temple, they have rules and ordinances. He came for the sick, for sinners, to bring them the message of God's love.
Jesus told another parable: "Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents" (Luke 15:8-10).
What is the value of this coin to the woman who loses it, and why is it so important to find this coin? In that time, the most important thing for a girl was to marry. Women could not work and survive in that world. Without a man's support, it was almost impossible. She had to depend on her parents. Early marriages were common not because of high morality, but simply for survival.
A girl could not marry until she gathered her dowry. Many peoples have kept this custom to this day. In Christ's time, this dowry consisted of ten coins—drachmas. Usually the girl wore them around her neck or on her forehead as ornaments. If she lost one coin, it was equivalent to saying the girl could not marry. By the law of that time, no one would bless such a marriage. One lost drachma was a real drama for her. The girl would light all the candles and search, not waiting for morning. For her, it was a matter of life and death, a matter of survival. Jesus gave simple examples from that time—about the importance of one sheep, about the importance of even one coin. But then He emphasizes how priceless a human soul is. He says that for many, value lies in a coin, a sheep (and today any other animal—a dog, cat, parrot). Many people love animals. But human life, his soul—is an absolute priority and the supreme value.
Jesus says that people have learned to value coins. Today we use credit cards, virtual money, or dollars. Losing a hundred dollars is not a catastrophe. But we'll still try to find them. We've learned to determine values, but God wants us to look at the supreme value, at what is precious in His eyes. These are the souls of people who are perishing without Christ.
Jesus came, leaving the glory of heaven, for one simple reason: millions of people wander in this world, they are lost and don't understand that they're heading straight to hell. The Israeli people took the wrong path: they paid great attention to being with God, to perfecting their relationship with Him. Christ didn't criticize them; He said they had stopped seeing the world through His eyes. In striving for spiritual perfection, they forgot the main thing: why He came to this earth—not for the righteous and not for the healthy, but for sick sinners. Then He offers the next parable—the third in this chapter. Perhaps one of the most famous parables in all the New Testament. It gained universal recognition under the name of the parable of the Prodigal Son. It speaks of two sons (and it's not entirely fair that people forget about the second son). This parable can be called the parable of a good and loving father. "And he said, 'A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the share of property that falls to me." And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living'" (Luke 15:11-13).
Father and son... A drama unfolds. The people of that time, the Pharisees and scribes who had listened to this point, gasped twice: first when the son demanded his inheritance from his living father. And even today in many cultures among many peoples, such a thing is not done even from a legal standpoint. Especially in Christ's time. No sane Jew would demand his share of inheritance while his father was still alive. One could speak of inheritance only after the parent's death. He might leave one son nothing and give everything to another. That was his full right. He might also disinherit his children entirely.
The son in the parable acted very strangely. I'd even say—impudently, disrespectfully, without regard for his father or his people's customs. By demanding his share, he violated every imaginable and unimaginable prescription. And so the Jews gasped and condemned the younger son. But they gasped a second time when the father gave his son his inheritance. This seemed to make no sense: what if this little boy asked for something? How should a proper father have acted? Take a whip: "You worthless fellow, so you want money—come here, I'll give you one inheritance, then another, and when I catch you running, I'll give you a third..." And of course, give no inheritance at all. First, he wasn't obligated to; second, it would contradict common sense; and third, he should have understood the consequences: give such a person an inheritance—and what would he do with it? Start some business? Invest it in something useful? Engage in charity? It's obvious: whoever violates paternal traditions can't do anything good with money. Obviously, he'll spend it wrongly and invest it in the wrong place, do something very improper.
That's why they gasped a second time hearing this story: okay, the son is worthless, but even the father is somehow improper. The son found nothing better to do than spend the money on women—that is, lived beautifully, merrily, extravagantly. There were no restaurants or cars then. Maybe he bought himself a beautiful horse, some tack... In any case, the money quickly ran out. No matter what the inheritance was, when we don't understand its value—we spend it very quickly, and we recognize in this worthless prodigal son a certain part of humanity, I'd even boldly say—all of us before we returned to God the Father and didn't know Him, didn't repent before Him. This story is about us, about philosophy, about the worldview that drives us. Humanity hasn't changed much, but throughout the ages has tried to find truth, to answer the question: why do we live, what is the main value of life?
Some believed that truth is found in wine, that the best thing we can do with our lives is to burn through it, but do it beautifully: drink, use drugs, fornicate, take everything from life... After all, we live only once! But how much of that life is there?! "Eat, drink, and be merry, soul, for tomorrow you will die..."
Others say that truth is in war. Starting from ancient Egypt, Greece, ancient Sparta, people elevated this philosophy to an absolute: only in war does true character reveal itself, the spirit is tempered, will appears, states are formed... They say that in war, boys become men, girls begin to love real men. Reflecting on this in his work "War and Peace," Count Leo Tolstoy showed very interesting events. He described one of his heroes—Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. A young officer dreamed of performing a feat and inscribing his name in the history of state with golden letters. By that time, he already had a wife whom he didn't love and a child whom he loved perhaps twice as little as his wife. He completely ignored them, saw no manifestation of manliness in caring for his wife and child. All his dreams and aspirations were about war, his main idol—Russia's enemy, Napoleon. His country and army fought him, but Andrei idolized him, wanted to meet him.
Tolstoy describes the battlefield at Austerlitz, where the Russian army shamefully lost to Napoleon. I remember the episode when cannons boomed, battle began, and Prince Bolkonsky in his white officer's uniform saw Russian regiments retreating. How could this happen? After all, Russians always win, yet here they're retreating in shame. He sees them running past him, dropping flags, weapons, running like hares. Bolkonsky understands that his moment has come: for this moment he has lived. He picks up a flag that fell, already without a horse throws himself into the thick of battle, where smoke billows, shouting "Hurrah!" In his imagination, he runs, and he pictures that regiments that were retreating run forward behind him. Now they'll rush at the French and crush them. He stops because he hears no sounds, realizes he's running alone. Suddenly he's wounded. He falls unconscious, lies like that for several hours, and when he comes to, he sees what he didn't want to notice before. He, it seems, for the first time in his life sees the sky, lies and looks at it.
"On the Pratzen Heights, in that very place where he fell with the flag staff in his hands, lay Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, bleeding profusely, and, without knowing it, was groaning with a quiet, pitiful, childlike moan. Toward evening he stopped groaning and fell completely silent. He didn't know how long his oblivion lasted. Suddenly he felt himself alive again and suffering from a burning, tearing pain in his head. 'Where is it, that lofty sky which I did not know until now and which I have seen today?' was his first thought. 'And the suffering of it I did not know either,' he thought. 'Yes, I knew nothing, nothing until now...'"
Beautiful thoughts ended when over his face bent the physiognomy of Napoleon. After every battle, he loved to look at the faces of the dying. When he came up to Andrei Bolkonsky and saw his blissful face, he thought he was dead, leaned over him and pronounced: "That's a beautiful death." "Prince Andrei heard these words as if he heard the buzzing of a fly. He was not only not interested in them, but he didn't even notice them, and immediately forgot them... His head burned; he felt himself bleeding away, and above him he saw a distant, lofty, eternal sky. He knew this was Napoleon—his hero, but in this moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant man compared to what was happening now between his soul and that lofty, infinite sky with clouds racing across it..." Bolkonsky thought of only one thing: when would Napoleon remove his face from the sky, which was obscured by the "truth" about war.
The Spartans said that a real man was a warrior. So they taught their children. As soon as they could walk, they held a sword—first wooden, then iron. All boys born with defects, with various abnormalities, who couldn't hold a sword, were ruthlessly destroyed. The Romans supported this idea. Today, in the twenty-first century, people remain intoxicated by war. They think there's some happiness in it.
Many believed that truth is in asceticism. There was such a philosopher, Diogenes, who lived in a barrel to deprive himself of all worldly pleasures. Other Eastern philosophers echoed him, saying that one must achieve a state of nirvana, and for this one must sit in a certain pose and meditate. The goal is one—to turn off your emotions. They said our problems come from emotionally perceiving this world too much. The main thing is to merge with the cosmos, which is possible when we turn off all emotions and stop feeling anything. Don't feel anything: neither anger nor joy. Then we'll enter this state of infinite nirvana. And another, more modern philosopher, Camus, after listening to all this, said that human life has no meaning whatsoever, so the best thing we can do with it is end it with suicide, though he himself lived a fairly normal life and died of natural causes. But he described it all so vividly, colorfully, emotionally that many people even today believe that the best thing they can do with their lives is take their own lives. That is, this is a philosophy that life has no meaning, and when we speak of the prodigal son, we should think precisely of this: what philosophy of life is close to us, what Truth did Jesus speak of, what did He call us to. Does this Truth even exist? Pilate, when Christ stood before his judgment, asked Him a rhetorical question: "What is truth?" He probably wasn't interested in hearing Jesus' answer, since before that He had said: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).
Christ prayed for His disciples and for all the world, asking the Father: "Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth" (John 17:17). Jesus said He came into this world so that we might have life abundantly. He didn't come to slightly change the philosophy or religion of Jewish society, didn't come to rebuke the Jews for doing something wrong. He came to call people to living communion with the Father, which didn't particularly please His listeners, especially those from religious circles.
The story of the prodigal son is about God accepting sinners, that He loves them. The father waited for his son, went out on the road every day to see him. Perhaps at the beginning of the work day, before going out to the field, he waited several hours for his son, to see if he'd appear on the horizon, and then, after work, in the evening, he'd go out and continue waiting. This is the heart of our Father: He continues to wait for each of us. This waiting isn't forced: He doesn't break into our lives. We can do whatever we want with our lives, but God waits for us like the loving father in the parable. He gave us the right to dispose of our lives as an inheritance.
The prodigal son, when he lost everything and understood the catastrophe of his situation, thought of something simple but very understandable: not about restoring family relationships. He was ready to return to his father just to survive. In other words, I'll be a servant, I'll ask him for work. This was an important moment of reassessing what happened. You cannot come to God while you're on a horse, while in a white uniform, while running forward with a flag in attack. You can come to God only when you're bankrupt, when a cannonball hits your head, when you lie helpless, when you understand that the philosophy you chose in life no longer works.
Famous physicist and mathematician Blaise Pascal once said: "Only God can fill the vacuum in each person's heart. Nothing created by man can fill this vacuum. Only God, whom we know through Jesus Christ, fills this emptiness." Some try to fill the emptiness with a thirst for money and power, various pleasures, but not for long. God left this place only for Himself.
If I'm honest, all of us have experienced or experience longing for Heaven. No matter what we achieve in life, how low we sink, this longing doesn't go away. Only when we unite with God in true communion, in repentance, in spiritual rebirth, only then do we receive true satisfaction. For all who have believed in Christ, their eyes opened. We finally came home. And this is because God loved us so much and accepted His prodigal children without reproach. The father didn't lecture his son. He joyfully welcomed him, asked the servants to bring the best robe and give him a ring on his hand as a sign that he was accepted again into the family. The son had done nothing yet, he was still dirty, tattered, smelly, but he was already a son, because he repented.
In conclusion—about the elder son.
Many world religions condemned the Jews for having a very strict God: try to break just one commandment—and immediately thunder from heaven, lightning will rain down. But in reality, God highly values our freedom, which He gave us, and desires to have relations with us not under compulsion, not under fear, but out of love. Therefore, the main commandment, mentioned in the Old Testament and repeated by Jesus: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart," testifies to love, born only in a free heart.
The problem of the elder son, mentioned in the parable, is the problem of all religious people. Today on our planet Earth there live nearly 8 billion people. Only 200 million active atheists. That is, to one degree or another, people are religious, attend temples, perform rituals. A person hides behind religion, it seems to him that everything is fine. The problem in the heart of the elder brother arose when he saw his younger brother who had returned and was accepted by the father. It turned out that he didn't know his father's heart at all. Yes, he was near him, did what he asked, but his heart was far from the values and truths that were in his father's heart. He had neither love nor compassion, he thought only of himself and his friends. The accusation that his father forbade him from having fun with his friends, he threw at his father as a direct challenge, just as his younger brother once demanded his share of the inheritance. The father answered the elder son gently, kindly, beautifully, but in principle it was the same story. You can spend your whole life being religious or quasi-religious, but never know the Living, true God. Both sons needed to return to their father, understand his heart, understand his thoughts, and actually, both needed repentance.
For me, this is a very important story, because throughout my life I was also like that: I ran from philosophy to philosophy, from religion to religion, as many of us do. I understood that such a life was meaningless. Where to run and what to do? So many churches, so many religions, so many believers! Where is the truth?! And in the end the answer was very simple: there is no truth, everyone has their own truth, it's subjective. But Jesus speaks very directly that He is the truth. He is the Lord. God revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. He is the only bridge to salvation, the source of wisdom and knowledge. He is the living Word, the One God chose to save each of us. And today He calls us to Himself: "Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).
So you will find truth and peace. The vacuum that is in your heart will be filled with Christ.
We lived by our philosophy, thought we were very wise, but actually we were just wandering like sheep, rejecting God. So who is right? The one who decided to return to his father, or the one who continues to eat husks from the pig's trough and says it's his choice, that he's a free man?
God created each of us uniquely: He doesn't want us to feed on scraps and garbage. He wants us to live in His house—the Royal house. His blessings, His riches are open to us. All we need is to come to Him, accept Jesus into our heart, and begin a new true life in Him—in the true God!
