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In February 1994, CT's Philip Yancey and David Neff joined President Bill Clinton and a host of dignitaries in listening to a bracing moral lecture from the late Mother Teresa. Her passion for truth trumped any concern she might have had for the feelings of the powerful gathered in the Washington Hilton ballroom. Later that same day, Neff and Yancey interviewed the President in the Oval Office and the presidential limousine. In writing up that interview (CT, Apr. 25, 1994, p. 24), Yancey contrasted Mother Teresa's bold loyalty to truth with the President's perennial penchant for taking his cues from the crowd.

That interview in the limo was a metaphorical moment: as Neff and Yancey questioned him about his views on abortion, a distracted President scanned the sidewalks, waving to people. He seemed to need constant affirmation, and the likelihood was low that he would deal with Mother Teresa's bracing slap with the hand of righteousness.

In 1994 we saw a politician eager to give the people what they want. On August 17 of this year we saw the same thing: the President's polls showed that the people would forgive him for having sex with an intern, but that they favored impeachment for perjury. So the President gave the people what he thought they wanted—so he could get what he wanted. In a televised nonapology, the President owned up to the "inappropriate relationship" with Monica Lewinsky, but hid behind weasel words on the issue of perjury.

The President was wrong. When he offered the nation his grudging statement of regret and then proceeded to blame others for his troubles, he shed his last shred of moral authority. That moral authority had been based in part on his famous compassion. But that Clintonian compassion was hollow: having led his friends, staff, family, and supporters into lying for him, it was clear he had no feelings for anyone but Bill. We learned that he'd been operating several commandments short of a decalogue.

The week the President "apologized" was also the week our editorial staff was putting the final touches on a series of essays on the parable of the Prodigal Son, which will appear in our next issue. It was profoundly disturbing to meditate on that wonderful parable of radical grace while hearing the President's attempt to excuse his stonewalling and his misleading of his wife, daughter, friends, and nation.

The President was no prodigal, limping home, hoping for some minimal acceptance as a servant. He was still in the far country, hoping somehow to make it on his own.

The parable of the Prodigal Son, like the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin also found in Luke 15, is about Jesus' joy in searching out sinners. The shepherd finds the lost sheep, the housewife finds the lost coin, the Father declares his son once lost but now found. But there is a huge difference between being found and being cornered. That difference, though, is in large part what the lost will make of their being discovered. Will they, as Kenneth Bailey writes in our next issue, "accept to be found"? (For that is the notion of repentance in these parables.) Or will they find in their moment of discovery that they are cornered?

On August 17, Bill Clinton acted like he was cornered. There was no mea in his mea culpa. He no sooner acknowledged an "inappropriate" sexual relationship with a female intern less than half his age, than he started blaming those who were doing their duty in pursuing the truth and upholding the law. Even his subsequent attempts at apology—to his cabinet, to party loyalists, to Democratic members of Congress—looked more like sandbagging operations to shore up crumbling support than like the fruit of personal reflection. For Bill Clinton, there was no openness to being found.

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October 5 1998, Vol. 42, No. 11