Protopresbyter Dr. Georgios Lekkas is a priest of the Holy Metropolis of Belgium
There those who are children of God in nature and in attitude and there are those who are His children in nature, but His servants in the attitude they adopt towards Him. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the younger son shows himself to be a child of God in both nature and attitude when he returns to his father, while his older brother, although by nature a child of the same father, behaves in practice as his servant.
The eldest son acts as a servant because he both fears and envies his father. Fearing to be refused, he does not ask him for anything at all, and because he resents him, he unjustly deems him incapable of managing the affairs of his house. He could do better!
He lives in the same house as his father and yet is incapable of understanding his father’s love. He is the uncompromising upholder of justice as the world usually understands it, and fails to understand God’s philanthropic justice. Although he is his father’s child, he acts as his servant, because he does not share his love, but judges him exclusively according to the criterion of justice as it is understood by those who live in fear.
There are temptations “from the left” and there are temptations “from the right”. The young son succumbed to temptation from the left and went and squandered his share of the father’s fortune. The elder son, however, succumbed to temptation from the right, being blinded by his own sense of moral superiority and becoming the envious and jealous critic of paternal love. ‘You should thank God even for your sins’, Father Ananias Koustenis once told me, ‘because without them you would not become humble’.
The envious critic of paternal love divides people into us and them, superior and inferior, useful and irrelevant: he honors the former and disparages the latter, for he cannot see the love of God that embraces them all. He does not grieve with those who grieve nor rejoice with those who rejoice. His only concern is with how he will perform the tasks assigned to him as a good servant, so that (as he believes) he will be exalted in the eyes of his father.
The younger son erred, was broken, repented, and was saved. The elder brother refuses his own salvation for as long as he retains his position of moral superiority and unrepentantly judges and rejects paternal love as a weakness. The greater the pride one takes in one’s moral superiority, the more difficult it is to repent. But those who partake of divine love pray for the return of even the proudest man, being certain that ‘things that are impossible with men are possible with God’.
Sunday of the Prodigal Son and his envious brother, 12.2.2023.
Fr Georgios Lekkas is a priest of the Orthodox Archdiocese of Belgium. He studied Law, Philosophy, and Theology at the University of Athens. He has a Ph.D. in Greek Studies from the Sorbonne (Paris IV) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Research Agency (2000-2005). He taught Greek philosophy in Greek Higher Education (2005-2017). His latest poetry collection, PROSECHOS ANAGENNISI (IMMINENT REBIRTH) was published by To Koinon ton Oraion Technon (Athens, 2021, 79 pages), while his essay THE SECOND WORLD. ODYSSEAS ELYTIS AND GIORGOS SARANTARIS was published recently by Ekati publications (Athens, 2022, 171 pages).