Today I invite to reflect on the beginning of the parable – simply the first five rather harmless words of the parable: “A man had two sons.” There was the younger son who had run away, blew all his inheritance, and acted totally irresponsibly, and then there was the older son who stayed home, budgeted his money and did all that was asked of him. The sons were as different as night and day. Yet, despite their differences, they shared the same father. Though poles apart in personalities, they could not escape the fact that they were brothers. They were family. And so, the parable begins: “A man had two sons.”
That moment we recognize that God stays with us, changes us. Prayer helps us to discern God’s presence and be transformed by the encounter, even if we don’t realize right away that God is with us.
Plain and simple, the conversion we seek must come from the inside. We need to be aware of our inner life, our interior life if we are to live out the Gospel demands in our outer life. Jesus in the Gospel proclaims the tree cannot bear good fruit unless the core of the trunk of the tree is solid. “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, not does a rotten tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit.” So too, a good person out of the store of the goodness in his heart produces good fruit, for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.