"This son of yours," says the older son. The younger son renounced sonship by demanding his share of the estate as if his father were already dead, and by living as if there were no father, as if he were not the son of one who knows how to love. The older son did not do this; he lived with his father and did everything his father asked him to do. He may even have truly loved his father. But, as one priest said in a sermon on the prodigal son, by refusing his brother, by not wishing to call him brother, the older son also refuses the father; he deprives himself of sonship just as the younger one did before. For if the younger one is now a son, "this son of yours," and he does not consider him a brother, then by that very fact he ceases to be a son.

It follows that only lack of love for our neighbors deprives us of the possibility of being children of God. And it is precisely love that makes us His children, because love is the family trait of the saints. A saint is one who belongs to God, and God is love.

Today's parables of the Lord Jesus about the lost sheep and the lost drachma, especially the first one, have had an exceptional influence on the consciousness of many generations of Christians. The image of the shepherd carrying the found sheep on his shoulders was painted on the walls of the Roman catacombs by Christians of Rome, and it became the first icon of Christ. From the eighth century to this day in the Eastern Church, as we accompany brothers on their final journey, we sing: "I am the lost sheep; call me back, O Savior, and save me". This is one of the most vivid images of salvation and one of the shortest summaries of the essence of the Gospel. God came into this world as the Shepherd in order to save the sheep that had run away from Him. Into ravines, into the very depths of the earth, and even down to hell He descends in order to find us. Everything here matters: that the sheep gets lost through its own foolishness, not following the Shepherd; that this sheep is unable to return to Him on its own; and that the Shepherd goes after it, moved by love and compassion.

But what matters most is what the Lord wanted to say through this parable to the Pharisees who were questioning Him. They believed that Christ should occupy Himself with them, people who carefully observed petty ritual prescriptions and despised others. Today we have various honorary titles: distinguished physician, distinguished teacher, distinguished this or that. The Pharisees, in our language, wanted to be distinguished righteous people, entitled to privileges in the Kingdom of Christ. But in these two parables the Lord answered them that God needs all His sheep, not only some of them. And only repentance makes you a found sheep rather than a proud and disobedient ram.

These three parables are usually called parables about repentance, but repentance is shown in them from a completely unusual side. What is described here is not so much the experience of the repentant person, his feelings, pain, and so on. Jesus speaks about how God and His angels rejoice when a person finds the road home. This is repentance "from God's point of view."

This is apparently not accidental. When a person reasons about his conversion, about seeking God, about faith, he is always inclined to think about himself: about his motives, about his spiritual path. God here is imagined as an impersonal "goal" that one has to reach, as an abstract "meaning of life" that one has to find. But it turns out that for God our conversion is far more important than we realize. He rejoices like a shepherd who lost a beloved sheep and found it again, like a poor woman who gathers her neighbors for a festive treat out of joy over a found coin, like a father who saw a son who had been lost forever. "God is not indifferent to your fate," Jesus seems to say. "Let this support you on the way."