We are continuing our trek towards Easter today with a very familiar story – the parable of the prodigal son. This Lent, we have been talking about the Christian faith using the metaphor of a journey. The first week, we looked at the beginning of our journey. In Romans 10, we saw that our journey begins with the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord, and the belief that God raised him from the dead. Every journey begins somewhere, and this one begins with a confession and a belief.
In Philippians 3, we saw that there are always choices that we have to make along the way. There are forks in the road of this journey, and when we come to these forks in the road, we have to decide if we are going to continue following Jesus down the path he is leading us, or if we are going to go our own way. We all know people in our lives who have stopped following Jesus altogether, and we have to be intentional about our decision to follow him or else we end up in a similar position.
Whenever I go on a long road trip, I always like to have something to drink nearby, and last week, we looked at the invitation to come and drink. On every long journey, it is necessary for us to rest from time to time. This is even more true when we look at our Christian journey. We need to thirst after the things of God. We need to chase after things that will sustain us. And we need to spend our lives chasing after Him, not chasing after the things of this world.
As we look at this familiar passage, we come across another aspect of our Christian journey. It’s something that we all hate to see when we go on a trip, but from time to time, we come across them anyway. As hard as we may try, no matter how much we plan and no matter how much we try to stick to the original route, we run into these things. A lot of times, because of these things, we end up making a wrong turn and getting lost. I’m talking about detours.
If you are anything like me on a long trip, you hate detours. You spend so much time planning the trip, trying to be familiar with the roads, and then you get thrown a curve. It’s difficult enough to go through an area that you may not be familiar with in the first place, but to get off the main road and go down an unfamiliar path can be really frustrating. The same is true in our walk of faith. There are times when something unexpected happens and we have to go down a route that we hadn’t plan on traveling.
The thing about detours, though, is that there are different kinds. Sometimes, the main road is not ready for travel. They are paving the highway, so it’s shut down. There has been a major accident, so you have to find a different way around. But sometimes… sometimes, we take detours because we want to. We hear about a restaurant that’s a little ways off the road. The car needs a minor repair. The world’s largest ball of twine is calling your name.
Katie and I watched a show a couple weeks ago called The Middle. And during the course of the show, the family was on its way to Chicago for the youngest son’s regional spelling bee, and they let their daughter make decisions on all their stops along the way because they forgot her birthday. One of the things that she wanted to see was the world’s largest tree stump. And it was exactly what you would expect it to be, a large tree stump in the middle of a field. To say the least, some of the detours that we take are not nearly as promising or as exciting as we originally thought. When we come to today’s passage, we see a story about one particular person’s detour, but he wasn’t the only one who had strayed from the correct path. Before we jump right into the middle of this story, let’s take a step back and see what it is that prompts Jesus to tell it in the first place.
At the beginning of Luke 15, Luke tells us that tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to Jesus. Now, understand that the way the Roman tax system was set up, a person could become very rich. People were given a certain area and a certain amount that they needed to raise from those living in the area. Anything above what they had to pay went in their pocket. Well, as you can imagine, there were a lot of tax collectors who were getting way more than they were required and becoming quite wealthy because of it. Tax collectors were the worst of the worst in first century Judea. They are so bad, in fact, that they aren’t even lumped together with the sinners. They are given their own category, and there are a couple places in the gospels where you’ll see the phrase “tax collectors and sinners.”
When the Pharisees and the scribes see that Jesus is eating with these tax collectors and sinners, they start grumbling against Jesus. Jesus then goes on to tell them three parables. In the first one, there is a shepherd with 100 sheep, but one of those sheep has gone astray. The shepherd leaves the 99 behind to go after the one because each sheep is important. In the second parable, there is a woman who has ten silver coins, but she loses one, which is the equivalent of 10 days worth of wages. She turns the house upside down until she finds it and rejoices when she does. And what we read in today’s Scripture is the third of these stories. This time, it is not a sheep or a coin that is lost, but a person, or as we’ll see in a little bit, two people.
It is so obvious to us that the younger son is lost, right from the very beginning of the story. We are told that there is a man who had two sons, and the younger son comes to him and demands his inheritance right then and there. The fact that there are two sons is immediately relevant here.
Inheritances were dividing up among the sons with the eldest son receiving a double portion. If there were 10 sons, the wealth of the father would be divided into 11 parts, and the oldest son would receive two of those parts while the remaining 9 would each receive one part. In this case, with only two sons, the younger son would receive one-third of the father’s wealth, while the older son would receive two-thirds.
It was possible at that time for the father to go ahead and split up the inheritance between his sons, but it had to be at the father’s initiative, not the son’s. Essentially, when the younger son comes up to the father and demands his share of the inheritance, he is saying, “Dad, I wish you were dead.” It is a severe slap in the face.
The younger son severs his ties to the family. He shirks his responsibility to take care of his father in his old age, and shows a complete disregard for his father. In the ancient world, the father would be ashamed to have raised a son like this, and his neighbors would be grateful that they didn’t have a son like him.
What is amazing in all of this is that the father does it. He shows a lot of grace in allowing the younger son to treat him like this. He could have easily rebuked the younger son, and the matter would be over. But he doesn’t. He divides his property between his sons.
And just so we aren’t so focused on the younger son here, there is no mention of the older son through this part. He could have declined the inheritance as a sign of protest against his brother’s actions, but we don’t hear a peep out of him either. The story continues.
A few days later, the younger son takes all his newfound wealth and goes off to a distant country. Now, the phrase “distant country” probably has more to do with the story than just geography. Not only is this place that he goes physically far away from his home, but it is also a place that is culturally and morally miles away from his home.
Now, think about your own life for a minute here. Have you ever been in the younger son’s shoes before? Have you ever strayed so far away from God that it was a slap in His face? I think if we are all honest with ourselves, there have been times when we’ve done this. Through our actions, and maybe even through our words, we say, “God, we don’t need you; we don’t want anything to do with you,” and we just go our own way. Maybe, if you’re not ready to admit this to yourself, you can think of somebody in your life who has done this. It’s always easier if we can distance ourselves, isn’t it? But the truth is, we’ve all done it at some point. And maybe it didn’t last long, but it did happen.
We don’t know why the younger son decided to do this. All we know is that he did. And, Jesus tells us, that he “squandered all he had on reckless living.” We don’t know exactly what it was that he was doing, but we have some ideas. And reason that we have some ideas is because we have been there ourselves. Whether he spent it all on booze, women, gambling, shoes, extravagant living, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he failed to live up to his responsibilities to his family and wasted all he had because of his selfishness. The biggest danger that we face in this world is the fact that sometimes, in spite of all the scientific evidence against it, we think we are the center of the universe. We’re not, and the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can get back to the main part of our journey. When we realize that God is at the center, we don’t get lost on the detours of life nearly as often.
Finally, the younger son comes to his senses. He looks around and realizes how far he has fallen. He is in a distant country, absolutely broke, there is a famine going on, he is feeding pigs and is jealous about their food. He was so hungry that he was coveting the food of unclean animals that, at the beginning of the story, he would have absolutely nothing to do with. And it says, in verse 16, “nobody gave him anything.”
At the beginning of the story, he isn’t lacking anything. He probably has a pretty comfortable life. His self-centeredness causes him to destroy the relationships that were supposed to be the most important in his life, and he was given everything. And now, when his need is the greatest, when he doesn’t have anything at all, nobody gives him anything. He has hit rock bottom, and this is what it takes for him to “come to himself.”
Things will pile up on us in this world. They will gang up on us and beat us down until we can’t take it any more. And it is at that point that we often come to ourselves. We stop and realize that we are lost. Did you know that people never really know when they are in the process of getting lost? They know when they are lost, but I’ve never heard anybody say, “You know, I’m about to get lost here. I better stop before I do get lost.” We don’t realize that we are lost until we are lost.
But notice here, the younger son’s recognition that he is lost has more to do with self-interest than repentance. He realizes that his father’s hired hands live better than he is living right now. So, he starts to rehearse a story that he is going to tell his father when gets back home. It seems a calculated apology more than genuine repentance. But, it still leads him back to his father. Restoration becomes possible because he made the decision to go back to his father. So that’s what he does. He starts the journey home.
Now, I can just imagine the scene that comes next. It says that while he was still a long way off, his father saw him. This tells me a couple of things about the father. First, you don’t see something that is a long way off without looking for it. His father hadn’t given up on him, even though not single person would blame him if he did. Second, it says that his father was filled with compassion. In spite of all the bad stuff that the younger son did, his father still loved him.
If this isn’t a perfect picture of God, I don’t know what is. Because no matter what we do, no matter how bad we think we’ve severed the ties, no matter how lost we have become, God still doesn’t give up on us. In spite of all the things that we have done, God still loves us, and He will run to embrace us if we start to come back to him.
The people who hear that the father took off running after his son would be appalled by his actions because it was undignified for him to run, especially after a son who treated him so shamefully in the first place. But isn’t that how God is? It would seem undignified for the God of all creation to stoop to earth and send His Son so that we might be redeemed. But just like the father in the parable, God is not concerned with what people think. He is in the business of redemption, not public opinion. The father in this story sets the tone. The people cannot reject the son without also rejecting the father. And the father embraces him, not even giving him the chance to recite his speech. The younger son is restored into the family, and there is a great celebration. But that’s not the end of the story.
If we just stopped there, it would be a great story. We could make a Hallmark movie out of it. It’d feel-good drama of the year. But there’s more. There’s the older brother who comes in from the field only to be greeted by a great celebration going on in the house. It’s almost like he was forgotten in all the excitement. And, you see, this is where the beginning of Luke 15 is so important. Remember, Jesus is telling us this story because of the grumbling of the Pharisees and scribes. In the parables of the sheep and the coin, the focus is on that which was lost. But here, it’s not just what was lost, but also the response of the older brother.
And he is mad. He is so mad that he dishonors his father by refusing to go into the party. His actions here are just as disrespectful to his father as his younger brother’s request for his inheritance. And don’t miss the irony of what is happening here. The brother who was on the outside is now on the inside with the celebration, and the brother who was on the inside is outside refusing to join the party.
Just as the father came out after the younger son, he comes out to plead with the older to come in. The father’s joy at the younger son being restored is cut short by the older son’s anger. And what is the older son’s response to his father? He says, “Listen, I’ve worked like a slave for you. I’ve never been disobedient. And you’ve never given me a young goat so that I can celebrate with my friends.” Where is his focus? It’s not on the fact that his brother is back, but on the fact that he hasn’t received what he thinks he deserves.
You see, the Pharisees and the scribes are grumbling against Jesus because those who were lost are now being found, and they are on the outside of the party. They have this sense of entitlement that causes them to look down their noses at the very people who need God the most. And that is where we are left in this story. We are left with the older brother, standing outside the house, missing the party, missing the return of his brother because he is angry and thinks he deserves more. If this were a movie, people would be dissatisfied with the ending. There is no resolution to the conflict.
The younger brother wasn’t the only one who was lost in this story. It’s just easier to see how lost he was. The truth is, at the end of the story, it’s the older brother who has broken ties to the father. There are two types of brokenness here – the younger brother with his reckless living, and the older brother with self-righteousness and lack of concern for the redemption of his brother.
So, where do you land today? Are you the younger brother who has lived the wild life, who has gotten lost without realizing it along the way? Or are you the older brother? Does your separation exist not because you’ve lived poorly, but because you have loved poorly? It’s an open-ended parable, and quite frankly, we often find ourselves in both positions. But we have a Father, who will run out to embrace us if we just start walking back to him. We have a Father who will come out and plead with us to join the party. We have a Father who loves us and is just waiting to redeem us.
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