The far country
The prodigal comes to himself
Some wildernesses we are driven into. This one the younger son walks into on purpose. He asks for his share of the estate while his father still lives, which is a way of wishing the old man dead, and takes the money to a far country and burns through it on nothing that lasts. Then the famine comes. He ends up in a pig field, a Jewish boy hired to feed swine, so hungry he eyes the pods the pigs are eating. And there, at the bottom, Luke uses a phrase that opens the whole parable: he came to himself. As if the far country had made him a stranger to who he was, and starvation finally woke him. He rehearses a speech, careful and small, asking only to be a hired servant, the best he dares hope for. He never gets to deliver the second half of it. While he is still a long way off, the father, who must have been watching that road for months, sees him, and is moved, and does the most undignified thing a Middle Eastern patriarch could do. He runs. He falls on the boy's neck. He kisses him before a word of repentance is finished.
“When he came to himself he said, How many of my father's hired servants have bread enough to spare, and I am dying with hunger.”
— Jesus, of the prodigal — Luke 15:17 (WEB)
“While he was still far off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”
Maybe the wilderness you are in is one you chose. A far country of your own walking, and now the famine you did not plan on. There is a particular shame in that kind of disorientation, the knowledge that no one drove you here, that the pig field is the harvest of your own choices. And the lie shame tells in the far country is precise: you can go back, but only on your knees, only after you have groveled enough to earn a place. So we rehearse our small speeches, settling for hired-servant terms, because anything more feels like presumption. But watch the father, because the father is the gospel of the parable. He is not at the door with his arms crossed and a list. He is scanning the road. He runs while you are still a long way off, before you finish your confession, before you have proven anything. You do not have to crawl home perfectly. The turning point was never the quality of your repentance. It was simply coming to yourself, and turning your face back toward a Father already running.