is, however, it's not the only way it happens, nor is it the most hopeless. Sometimes relationships simply drift apart. There's no single crisis that precipitates this parting of the ways. The emotional disengagement is gradual, so gradual you almost don't notice it happening. The marriage doesn't shatter because of the assault of some external sexual temptation; it dies imperceptibly from within. The friendship isn't terminated overnight. It slides by degrees into mutual indifference. Affection cools, communication dries up, until one day we realize we've become strangers to one another; not so much hostile as apathetic; not so much angry as frigid—because this isn't 'the big row', but the 'slow freeze'. When relationships disintegrate in this second way, there's no volcanic disturbance. The result can be just as tragic and as emotionally impoverishing. We may not have told the other person to get lost, but we lose out just the same, and perhaps even more irretrievably. At least, that's the warning which Jesus seems to be giving in his story of the prodigal son. It is perhaps the most famous story he ever told.
It is important to notice the very beginning of the chapter in which Luke records it.
Now the tax collectors and 'sinners' were all gathering round to hear [Jesus]. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, 'This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them' (Luke 15:1–2).
This scene-setting paragraph is an indispensable clue to the meaning of the story which follows. It provides its social context; a division between two classes of people in Jewish society in the first century. On the one hand there were the 'sinners'; on the other the 'saints'. 'Sinners' is perhaps an unfairly pejorative title; not everybody in this class was categorized thus because of
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