Coming Home to Wounded Love — A Reflection for Week of the Prodigal Son on 2 John 1:1-13 and Mark 15:22-25, 33-41
The prodigal walks home rehearsing speeches. He has prepared his groveling, calibrated his contrition, calculated exactly how much shame to perform. But the father—scandalously, impossibly—runs. The dignity of patriarchs abandoned, robes gathered up like a servant’s, the old man sprints down the road before a single rehearsed word can be spoken. This is the week of that homecoming, and these readings—the elder’s tender letter, the brutal hilltop—reveal what awaits us when we finally turn around.
The truth that dwells in us: John the Elder writes to the elect lady with a strange insistence on this phrase. Not truth we have learned, not truth we possess, but truth that has taken up residence. The Greek is striking—the truth dwelling in us and shall be with us forever. Something has moved in. Something refuses to leave. Even in our far country, even feeding swine and forgetting our name, this indwelling truth remains. The prodigal never stops being son. His degradation cannot unmake what the father’s love has made. John’s letter assumes this: he writes not to strangers but to those in whom truth already lives, calling them to walk in what they already are.
This is the first gift of the week: you cannot wander far enough to become someone else. Your citizenship in the father’s house is ontological, not behavioral. The famine that drives you home does not create your sonship—it merely reminds you of what starvation cannot destroy.
But the Gospel gives us something harder. At Golgotha, the Son who never wandered cries out as if he had. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?—the words torn from Psalm 22, the prayer of one who feels abandoned utterly. Here is mystery that cracks understanding open: the eternal Son, never for one instant separated from the Father’s love, enters the experience of absolute forsakenness. He does not pretend. The cry is real. The darkness covering the land for three hours is real. Whatever he experiences in that suspended time, it is enough to wring from him the most desolate words in scripture.
Maximus the Confessor illumines this when he writes that Christ assumed our fallen condition entirely, entering “the whole of human nature, even to the experience of death and the descent into hell.” Ambigua The Son takes the prodigal’s journey in reverse—not squandering inheritance in a far country but carrying the father’s love into the farthest exile imaginable, the exile of death itself. He goes where we went. He tastes what we tasted. And he does it not because he must but because love will not let the beloved suffer alone.
John warns against those who deny that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. This is not academic controversy. The flesh matters because the journey matters. A phantom Christ cannot walk the prodigal’s road. A docetic savior cannot enter the pigpen, cannot feel hunger, cannot cry out in genuine abandonment. The deceivers John warns against would give us a God who observes suffering from safe distance. But the torn veil tells another story. The temple’s holy of holies—that guarded space where God dwelt behind barriers—splits open from top to bottom. Not from human effort climbing up, but from divine love tearing down.
The centurion sees it. This pagan soldier, watching a condemned criminal die, speaks the confession that religious authorities refused: Truly this man was the Son of God. Recognition comes to the outsider, the far-off one, the gentile who had no inheritance to squander because he was never counted among the heirs. Yet here he stands, first to see what the cross reveals. Gregory of Nazianzus observes that “what has not been assumed has not been healed” Epistle 101—and in this Roman’s confession we see the healing beginning to spread beyond Israel’s boundaries to all the prodigals of every nation.
The women watch from afar. They do not flee like the twelve. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, Salome, and many others—they remain present to the unbearable. This is its own kind of homecoming: the willingness to witness love’s cost without looking away. The prodigal son, remember, wanted to become a hired servant. He thought love could be earned through labor, that he must work his way back into the house. But these women are not working. They are simply there. Presence as prayer. Watching as worship.
John’s letter ends with an ache: I trust I shall shortly see thee, and we shall speak face to face. Paper and ink cannot carry what needs passing. The elder longs for presence, for the fullness that only embodied encounter provides. This too is the prodigal’s longing—not merely forgiveness pronounced from heaven, but the father’s arms, the robe, the ring, the feast. Salvation is not transaction but embrace.
As we prepare for Pascha, these readings pose the essential question: Do you believe you can come home? Not whether you should, not whether you ought, but whether the road actually leads somewhere, whether the father actually waits, whether the arms will actually open. The torn veil says yes. The cry of dereliction says the Son has already walked your darkest mile. The indwelling truth says you never fully left.
Isaac the Syrian counsels that “the one who has seen their own sins is greater than one who raises the dead.” Homily 34 This week invites exactly that vision—not morbid guilt but honest seeing. The prodigal’s breakthrough came in a pigpen: he came to himself. He woke up. He saw where he was. This is the beginning of all return.
The road home runs through Golgotha. It cannot be avoided. But beyond the skull-place, past the darkness and the cry and the giving up of the ghost, the veil lies torn and the father runs to meet you. He has always been running.
prodigal, homecoming, incarnation, abandonment, veil, indwelling truth, presence, flesh, centurion, return
The Greater Horizon 