Fathers & sons.

I have been thinking about mortal sin, grave abuses, and the fathers who name them. They're in the news. They're in Scripture. Like the son (Luke 15: 11-32) whose father wouldn't do the convenient thing and die. He tires of waiting for the will to be read and demands, "Give me my money now. I've got things to do."

What he had to do is cat around, sucking the money up his nose with a straw or shooting it into his arm with a needle. When the money ran out, he had a revelation: his father's servants lived better than he did. That's it, the whole understanding: Life in my father's stable is better than life in this flophouse. The young man wants for a solid roof and a hot meal. He's going to go home and apologize--words children learn to say long before they learn contrition--and hope he's in time for the pot roast.

My husband, a lawyer, the father of our five children, says he tracks with the story so far. We know this kid. We've been this kid, as well as his older brother. But now we're parents, lying awake at night, waiting for the front door to open, willing the phone not to ring, wanting him home, needing her home, safe. We know what it is to watch the road, relieved when the car pulls into the driveway.

What my husband doesn't get is the father's silence. He understands the welcome, the running out to meet the returnee, the relief, "This son of mine was dead, and has come to life again." He gets the son's apology, believes it to be the least the ungrateful brat can offer.

But then my husband is lost. Where are the consequences? The stern lecture about how slowly one builds trust and how quickly one can lose it? The caution that the young man has run through his inheritance and there will not be another? The news that the son will, in fact, be expected to work off the money he took, pay back the estate, and earn his room and board? Won't there be a single selection from the paternal repertoire? No penance at all? Aren't there a few things this kid and his father need to get straight?

My husband says he understands how glad and grateful the father is, but throwing this kid a party, killing the fatted calf for a son who's killed the father's retirement account, seems a bit much. Allowing the son to serve at table, maybe; but serving him? Not just yet. My husband says he doesn't understand the father's love, knows he couldn't let the matter rest without a word about the worry, the distress, the humiliation this son has caused. He knows he couldn't go from weeping to rejoicing without some reproachful segue.

My husband is grateful for this much: the father in the parable doesn't excuse his son's behavior. He doesn't chalk the son's selfishness up to childhood obesity or bottle-feeding or bed-wetting or failure to make the soccer team. He doesn't assume the son wants him dead because the kid didn't get braces. He seems to know sin for what it is, the habit of grave abuses that can lead to mortal sin.

Still, my husband says, little as he understands this story, what he could never understand is a father who would cast his son away, turning his back and shunning him. Forever. That, he says, would be a father who has forgotten, forgotten the smell of a newborn, his breath like freshly mown grass, forgotten the sight of a toddler, running to meet him and crying out to be swung to the sky.

But then, Jesus isn't talking about my husband, the father of my children. He's speaking of another father, the one Isaiah says remembers us always, even when we always forget him. Jesus is talking about the father whose face is turned toward us, even when we turn our backs to him. He isn't a chump; this father knows a mortal sin when he sees one. It's just that no sin is so deep that the father's love is not deeper still. Whatever the son has done, or failed to do, is as nothing before the father's mercy.

Still, the story continues to offend my husband's sense of fair play, his sense that the father in the story deserves better somehow. And, no doubt, he does. My husband keeps that sense of justice denied right until the moment we walk into church on Sunday morning, our clothes stained and smelling of the various pigsties where we've taken up residence during the week. We come wondering if God has forgotten us, we, "who are not worthy to receive you," and the only answer we hear is a telling, again, of God's mercy, a call to be clothed, again, in the royal white garment of our baptism, and an invitation, again, to God's own banquet table. "Let the feast begin," the father says, as all the prodigals come home.

Melissa Musick Nussbaum wrote "Dateline: Colorado Springs" in the June 4 issue. She has taught Scripture for twenty years.