The Prodigal Daughter

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Mass-Blog-for-the-Fifth-Sunday-of-Lent-2025.mp3)

Any parent of a rebellious teenage girl might feel left out after reading the parable of The Prodigal Son. That’s Christ’s tale of the boy who blew his Father’s inheritance, then came crawling back to a father who joyously celebrated his son’s return. This Sunday’s Gospel reading (John 8:1-11) offers parents of girls a sequel that might be called “The Prodigal Daughter.”

Imagine Jesus writing this sequel while a mob of self-righteous scribes and Pharisees surround him, waiting for his judgment about what to do with the adulterous woman they brought to him. They cite the Law of Moses to justify their vengeful urge to stone her to death. And if they can get Jesus to advise against following that law, they could justify killing him too.

That’s when Jesus starts writing on the ground with his finger. Maybe he’s repurposing the lesson he placed in the heart of the Prodigal Son’s Father upon his penitent son’s return.

“Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone,” Jesus finally tells them.

They all gradually and sheepishly drop their rocks and go away—presumably back home to their families.

Seeing that none of them could bring themselves to condemn her, he assures this Father’s daughter,

“Neither do I condemn you.”

But then he suggests a change of heart as substantial as the one her would-be executioners had:

“From now on do not sin anymore.”

John’s gospel doesn’t tell us whether there were any fathers of rebellious teenage daughters among those angry scribes and Pharisees, but we CAN imagine, by the time they arrived home, each of them pondering the guilt Jesus exposed in their own hearts.

If there were any fathers of prodigally licentious daughters among them, did they suddenly see the face of their intended victim upon looking into their daughters’ eyes?

And if so, did they conclude their own story the way Jesus ended the parable of The Prodigal Son?

Could they have ended it the way Jesus ended John’s account? You know, with the forgiveness these fathers failed to offer some other Father’s daughter?

Did these fathers then hug their own daughters a little tighter than usual, as any shepherd of a once-lost and now-found sheep might?

Ours is a new take on an old gospel account. But in Sunday’s first reading from Isaiah’s even older take on God’s thinking, this prophet quotes the Father of us all:

Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new! … In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers. (Isaiah 43:16-21)

Even the uninhabitable desert of the most unchanging mind is subject to God’s rewriting. The Apostle Paul testifies to that in Sunday’s letter to the Philippians (Philippians 3:8-14). This former persecutor of Jesus’ followers had a change of heart as epic as any lost soul’s discovery of a hidden truth. Such truth drives humanity toward a maturity Paul would never stop seeking:

“It is not that I have already taken hold of it,” he confesses, “or have already attained perfect maturity, but I continue my pursuit in hope that I may possess it, since I have indeed been taken possession of by Christ Jesus.”

There’s one teaching Paul did latch onto and offers to all of us prodigal sons and daughters. The one about …   

… “forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead. I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.”

Our onward and upward journey to maturity is the never-ending story our Author is always writing.

–Tom Andel