: The Prodigal returned to his dad not because
: he wanted to return home, but because he was
: penniless, and starving leaving him no
: choice.

I don't agree, Alex, and I think the distinction matters.

He had a choice, he could have continued down the gurgler and perished.

But his predicament brought into relief the plenitude of his father's love (even servants had food to spare) and he wished to be reconciled to him so to live in this love.

From von Balthasar's Love Alone Is Credible:

Once a person learns to read the signs of love and thus to believe it, love leads him into the open field wherein he himself can love. If the prodigal son had not believed that the father’s love was already there waiting for him, he would not have been able to make the journey home – even if his father’s love welcomes him in a way he never would have dreamed of. The decisive thing is that the sinner has heard of a love that could be, and really is, there for him; he is not the one who has to bring himself in line with God; God has always already seen in him, the loveless sinner, the loveless sinner, a beloved child and has looked upon him and conferred dignity upon him in the light of this love.

No one can resolve this mystery into dry concepts and explain how it is that God no longer sees my guilt in me, but only in his beloved Son, who bears it for me; or how God sees this guilt transformed through the suffering of love and loves me because I am the one for whom his Son has suffered in love. But the way God, the lover, sees us is in fact the way we are in reality – for God, this is the absolute and irrevocable truth.