the prodigal son

 

 

The story of the prodigal son is found in Luke 15:11-32.

The story begins with a man who has two sons. The younger son asks his father for his portion of the family estate as an early inheritance. Once received, the son promptly sets off on a long journey to a distant land and begins to waste his fortune on wild living.

When the money runs out, a severe famine hits the country and the son finds himself in dire circumstances. He takes a job feeding pigs. Eventually, he grows so destitute that he even longs to eat the food assigned to the pigs.

The young man finally comes to his senses, remembering his father. In humility, he recognizes his foolishness and decides to return to his father and ask for forgiveness and mercy. The father who has been watching and waiting, receives his son back with open arms of compassion. He is overjoyed by the return of his lost son.

Immediately the father turns to his servants and asks them to prepare an enormous feast in celebration of his son's return.

Meanwhile, the older son boils in anger when he comes in from working the fields to discover a party with music and dancing to celebrate his younger brother's return.

The father tries to dissuade the older brother from his jealous rage explaining, "Look, dear son, you have always stayed by me, and everything I have is yours.  We had to celebrate this happy day. For your brother was dead and has come back to life! He was lost, but now he is found!” (Luke 15:31-32, NLT).

https://www.learnreligions.com/prodigal-son-luke-1511-32-700213

The Bible has numerous references to forgiveness.

 The beauty of Christianity is that its core message is one of forgiveness.

God loves people, but we have rebelled against Him and need to be forgiven. We cannot earn or deserve that forgiveness, so God came to earth Himself in the person of Jesus to live a perfect life and earn forgiveness for us by sacrificing Himself for everything we’ve done wrong. Now, He offers forgiveness to each of us, but we must confess our wrongdoings and accept Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf.

Forgiveness is the way your relationship with God begins and it’s the way you should live with others as well.

Forgiveness is great conceptually, but actually putting it into practice can be challenging. Both asking for forgiveness and granting forgiveness are some of the hardest interpersonal interactions, but they are both essential for the Christian life.

https://www.cru.org/us/en/train-and-grow/spiritual-growth/forgiveness-scriptures.html

The reason this topic came to mind today is that a well-known prodigal son finally received reckoning for some of his deeds.

President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would likely keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday.

 

Any proposed plea deal would have to be approved by a federal judge. Both the prosecutors and the defense counsel have requested a court hearing at which Hunter Biden, 53, can enter his plea.

 

The agreement caps an investigation that was opened in 2018 during the Trump administration, and has generated intense interest and criticism since 2020 from Republican politicians who accused the Biden administration of reluctance to pursue the case. The terms of the proposed deal — negotiated with Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a holdover from President Donald Trump’s administration — are likely to face similar scrutiny.

The story of the Biden family, naturally, is complicated.

 

In 1972, shortly after his first successful run for office, Joe Biden’s first wife and infant daughter were killed in an auto accident just before Christmas. Although his sons Hunter and Biden were in the car, they were not killed, but both spent some time in the hospital after the accident.

 

Both of them eventually had successful careers.

 

Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III (February 3, 1969 – May 30, 2015) was an American politician, lawyer, and officer in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps from Wilmington, Delaware. The oldest child of current U.S. president Joe Biden and Neilia Hunter Biden, he served as the 44th attorney general of Delaware from 2007 to 2015 and was a major in the Delaware Army National Guard in the Iraq War. He died of glioblastoma in 2015 at the age of 46.

 

His son’s illness was the primary reason that Joe Biden did not run for president in 2016.

 

Hunter Biden did not seek election to a third term as attorney general in 2014. In the spring of that year, he announced his intention to run for governor of Delaware in the 2016 election to succeed term-limited Democratic Governor Jack Markell. At the time of this announcement, the cancer that would kill Biden in 2015 had been diagnosed (in 2013), but was in remission

 

Robert Hunter Biden (born February 4, 1970) is an American attorney, businessman and artist who is the second son of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first wife Neilia Hunter Biden. He is also a hedge fund, venture capital, and private-equity fund investor who formerly worked as a lobbyist, banker, public administration official, and registered lobbyist-firm attorney. Biden was a founding board member of BHR Partners,  a Chinese investment company. In 2020, he began exhibiting his paintings.

 

Although he was a successful businessman, his personal life was a mess.

  

He eventually became addicted to drugs, which cost him his first marriage, and a small fortune. His 2021 memoir (titled “Beautiful Things”) describes his life as an addict, and it’s a frightening story. Although he went through countless rehab sessions, what finally cured him was his second wife (Melissa Cohen) who he met in 2019.

 

The Biden family has been targeted with numerous investigations over the years by Jo Biden’s political opponents. The details on those investigations can be found at the link below:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/30/gop-investigation-hunter-biden-fbi/

 

To quote William Shakespeare, all of the investigations were “much ado about nothing”

 

In an effort to distract voters from Donald Trump’s phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019 (for which he was impeached) Trump’s allies (including Rudy Guiliani) tried to find a scandal involving Hunter Biden and Burisma, where he served on the board. Ultimately, no wrong going was ever discovered.

 

The “perfect phone call” to Zelensky turned out to be anything but that, and Trump was impeached (for the first time) in December of 2019.

 

Joe Biden’s first run for the presidency (in 1987) did not end well, and was short-lived.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/us/politics/biden-1988-presidential-campaign.html

 

By the spring of 2019, though, he felt that it was time to try again.  

 

In his campaign announcement video, Biden rebuked the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and President Donald Trump’s handling of the aftermath. “He said there were quote some very fine people on both sides,” Biden said. “With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

Biden framed the 2020 race as a “battle for the soul of this nation.”

“The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake,” Biden said in the video. “That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.”

Biden, 76, entered the crowded Democratic primary field of 20 candidates as the presumptive front-runner sitting atop the most recent polls. But his more than four-decades-long career is set to undergo an unprecedented level of scrutiny as he seeks to win the Democratic nomination to take on Trump in a general election.

Biden, a centrist Democrat who often touts his relationships with those across the aisle, also will grapple with a Democratic Party that is increasingly feeling a pull from the left with a number of progressive candidates, like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, in the 2020 race.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/25/politics/joe-biden-2020-president/index.html

 

Biden’s Republican opponents tried to hobble his campaign by reminding us of his son’s business dealings, but their efforts were not successful.

 

Hunter Biden is certainly a flawed character, but he is on the road to redemption

 The court papers indicate the younger Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. The combined tax liability is roughly $1.2 million over those years, according to people familiar with the plea deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe details of the agreement that are not yet public. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, these people said. Biden’s representatives have said he previously paid back the IRS what he owed.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/20/hunter-biden-plea-deal/

Hunter Biden has had a life-long struggle with drug and alcohol abuse and detailed his struggles in his memoir Beautiful Things. He believes his addiction can be linked back to trauma from the 1972 motor vehicle accident that killed his mother and sister. Over the past two decades, Biden has been in and out of rehabilitation, with long periods of sobriety followed by relapses. Following the death of his brother Beau, his addiction escalated, and he claims to have been "smoking crack every 15 minutes." A detailed analysis of Hunter Biden's hard drive by NBC News showed that Biden and his firm were paid $11 million from 2013 to 2018, and the funds fueled his addiction. In his autobiography Beautiful Things, he said that the money from Burisma "turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction" and "hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly so I did”.

Hunter Biden’s convictions aren’t going to stop continued assaults on his character, but if there is anything that all of us can learn from the Bible, there ARE times when we are compelled to show some compassion.

 

Even to prodigal sons.