One of the most famous of Jesus parables is the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-23), and I heard it unpacked this weekend in a rather indicting way.
The basic story is that the younger son asks his father for his half of the inheritance, gets it, and proceeds to live a life of excess in a far off land. He runs out of money as the economy tanks and ends up working as a pig farmer’s hand (totally not ok for a Jewish guy to work feeding pigs). He repents of his folly and heads back home hoping to get a job working for his father. His Dad hears that he’s coming home, runs out to greet him on the road and throws him a huge feast because he has returned.
The elder son becomes indignant that he has never had a party thrown for him despite his years of service, and refuses to go in. The father says to him in reply: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”
I’ve had a few conversations with people about this particular story because it is such a succinct view into God’s grace and his embrace of the repentant sinner, but the other half of the story is the danger of living a religious life thinking that somehow you are more deserving of the love of God.
Both brothers are more in love with their father’s things than their father, the younger brother just has the stones to man up and say it to his face. Modern readers gloss over the younger brother’s request to receive his inheritance early, but he’s essentially saying to his father “I’m tired of waiting for you to die so that I can have your stuff, give it to me now.”
It is central to our fleshly nature to treat God like this, to trust in the things like wealth or relationships or drugs or anything else but Him, because God’s Stuff rarely makes the same demands of us that a relationship with Him does. One of the fun things about finite things though is that they run out and at some point you run out and are left wondering what to do next.
The younger brother runs out of food and turns back to his father in the hopes of living a life of service to his father in order to get more of his stuff, but the father has better plans for him. He will not live as a servant but rather as a son again.
The sinner turning to God is a beautiful and awkward thing. True repentance cannot come without an awareness of the depth of the transgression and an implicit understanding of the appropriateness of punishment. But the Father does not greet repentance with wrath but with rejoicing. Christianity is not a list of rules but a relationship and sin is that which hampers that relationship. Make no mistake, the God of Abraham is a jealous God and his discipline is one of the great confirmations of our adoption as his sons (cf. Hebrews 12:5-11)
But the greater fool is the elder brother. We all think we want to be the elder brother because he is faithful. He does not spit in his father’s face, he serves him in his fields, and tends his flocks. And all he wants to know is where his party is, why all this celebration over his brother being found when he, the elder, had never been lost in the first place.
How much more beautiful would the Body of Christ (the Church) look if we weren’t so busy being the elder brother, if our joy was found in our relationship with Him instead of being proud that he has allowed us to work his fields? How much less judgmental and more loving could we be if we actually rejoiced in the returning of our lost brothers instead of begrudging them the feast that we have the opportunity to join them in? Being a Christian isn’t about abstaining from the things of this world, it’s about partaking in the things of the next. There can be no pride in being a Christian because the things we do that matter at all were prepared for us to do (cf. Ephesians 2:10) and the other things we’re doing either don’t matter or are actively harming the most important relationship in our life.
Sometimes I forget that I am a great sinner and the only thing that I can boast in is having a great Savior.