I would like to make a preliminary remark before I try to say something that I hope will be useful about this famous parable of the Prodigal Son or, depending on your point of view, the Prodigal Father.

Luke is probably the one of the four Gospel writers who is most anxious to establish Jesus' recognition of gender equality, to put it in our terms. I mean, Luke is at pains over and over to overcome the patriarchal sexism of his day, and so we get again and again what we have in this reading. First, we have the parable told with a man as the protagonist, and then a comparable parable told with a woman as the protagonist. You will notice, if you go through the Gospel of Luke, that he does this time after time: Zechariah gets John the Baptist's birth announcement, then Mary gets Jesus' birth announcement, and so it goes throughout the Gospel.

But to this famous parable... What are the parables for? It was a standard Jewish mode of teaching: the rabbis regularly told little stories. In the case of Jesus' parables a pretty clear pattern emerges. The point of the parables is simply to raise questions, to cause the listeners to wonder about the way they put the world together. And the hope is, of course (we can presume on Jesus' art), that they move from the way the listeners originally saw the world to the way Jesus saw the world. In a sense, then, the parables could be considered a kind of means of calling people to conversion, to a change of point of view. And the way in which this happens over and over is extraordinarily clever. He starts with standard issue experience, everybody's experience: every late-adolescent kid needs to go out, declare their independence, sow their wild oats. And so there are no surprises there. And, on the other hand, there are the standard, nose-to-the-grindstone types, who say, "Yes, by God! There is no free lunch and we work for everything we get, etc.". And the marvellous thing about this parable is that both of those standard ways of putting the world together are radically set in questions, because the mediatory figure is that of this extraordinary father.

We have to remember that this story was told in a society that was profoundly patriarchal, where men really did "rule the roost". As I said a few weeks ago, one of the great Jewish prayers that a male says when he gets up in the morning is "Thank-you God that you did not make me a woman". (I am sure the prayer is still prayed by many of us in one way or another today.) But what is extraordinary is that we have this boss - - The Boss - - who does not act like a boss at all. No Jewish man is going to run after his kid, run toward his kid, for example. No Jewish man is going to lay on this extravagant reception, this welcome for his kid. No Jewish man is going to embrace a wayward, errant person, a son in this case. Justice, we want justice. And so, Jesus tells about this man and this kid, reversing this familiar pattern, in the hope that people will say: "That does not make any sense. This kid ought to be punished! The kid was right when he said that `I do not deserve to be called your son'. But what Jesus is getting at is that the way we normally construe the world, the way we operate in the world, is not the way Jesus construed the world.

Perhaps even more familiar, for those of us who are older, is this notion of having put in a lifetime of labour and wanting what is fair recompense: "I worked all these years, like a slave and you have done nothing for me". In other words, that older son puts the world together in such a manner in which everything is supposed to work out as a quid pro quo. Justice above all. Fairness above all. And yet the point of the parable is that God absolutely, in the figure of this father, skews that normal way. So on the one hand the priggish self-righteousness that afflicts so many of us is undercut and a kind of self-seeking, a hedonism which seems to erect absolute barriers between the son and this father, is also dismantled.

But the world does not work the way the story has it. The Church does not work this way! I mean, if you were to ask what is the leading characteristic of the Church, would you answer, as this parable suggests you answer, "It is the place where I can be welcomed back all the time". We do not do that. We exact our pound of flesh or shame or guilt. So, the listeners to the parable, those who really hear it, say, "This does not make sense. This is not the way the world works," which is absolutely true. What Jesus is implicitly proposing is that the way the world works is not authentic, that the world, as it works right now, wherein we work out our ego problems, ambitions, shame, guilt, appetites, and fears of each other that so circumscribe us and distance us from each other – that all this is not in fact the real world. The real world, for the people who truly hear this parable of Jesus, is the world that Jesus construes. That is the real world. Therefore, the world as we know it is radically set in question.

Finally, I think it is inordinately important that we have the opportunity to hear these texts, that we hear these texts together. In other words, it is within the context of the Mass, of the our common worship, that these texts ought to take on greater life. Because outside these doors, in the world at large, these texts are not heard. Therefore, it is also enormously important for us that we have an opportunity to hear these texts together. Because the problem of hearing them all by myself is that it is very easy to abstract and desiccate these texts But, when I have to sit, face to face with other human beings whom I do not forgive, from whom I do demand justice... Then this is the place where my "normal" expectations are emulsified, if you will, or even for a short time that they dissolve into a vision of a whole different kind of world. So we come together to remember a man who said: "This is my life for you. This is my body for you. This is my blood for you. This is my self, this is all that I am for you". You do not hear that anywhere else, but we have the opportunity both to hear it and celebrate it, and even desire to affirm it in our own lives. That is why we are here today and that is why I think that this hour we spend together once a week is so vital.