The Father Who Runs
The Story
The word we hang on this parable — “prodigal” — does not mean wayward or lost. It means recklessly extravagant, spending everything with no thought of return. We pin it on the younger son, and fairly: he demands his inheritance while his father is still alive (which is to say, he wishes his father dead), converts a lifetime of love into cash, and burns it in a far country until the money and the friends are gone together and he is standing in a pig yard, envying the pigs their slop. But watch the setup. Jesus tells this story because the Pharisees are grumbling that He “receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:1–2). It is the third of three parables about lost things, and the whole point of the trilogy is who gets found. So when the boy “comes to himself” and trudges home rehearsing his little speech, the drama is not whether he will grovel well enough. The drama is what the father will do. And what the father does is undignified. He is watching the road — he must have been, to see the boy “while he was still a long way off” — and then a grown man in a robe hitches up his skirts and runs, which no respectable elder in that world would ever do. Almost before the son can even start his apology, his father all but piles onto his son with kisses on his head. No probation. No lecture. Instead, the robe, the signet ring and the fattened calf — full restoration; sonship handed back before a single amend is made.
What It Calls Us To
It is easy to read this as a story about how far a bad man can fall and still be welcomed home, and to leave it there feeling warm. But Jesus aims the parable at the men standing closest to Him — the elder-brother types, scandalized that grace is being spent on the wrong people. And so there is a second lost son, and he never left home. The elder brother has kept every rule, worked every year, broken no commandment — and he is every bit as far from the father's heart as his brother was in the pig yard. He will not go into the feast. He is angry that grace is free, because he has been trying to earn what his brother had simply being given. Here is the uncomfortable gift of the parable: there are two ways to be your own savior. You can run to the far country and break all the rules, or you can stay home and keep all of them — both are ways of using the father to get his things without wanting the Father himself. One son says “I will not obey you”; the other says “I have always obeyed you” and means “so you owe me.” Which son are you? The younger knows he needs grace. The elder is the harder case, because his goodness is the very thing hiding his lostness. And the father goes out to plead with him, too — the last we see of him he is standing in the doorway, begging his moral son to step into joy.
How Jesus Fulfills It
There is a hole in this parable, and Jesus dug it on purpose. In the first two stories someone goes looking — the shepherd tramps into the wilderness after one sheep, the woman sweeps the whole house for one coin, and each searches at cost until the lost thing is found. But in the third story no one goes to the far country after the younger son. Who should have gone? The elder brother. In that culture it was his place to go and seek his lost brother, to spend himself to bring him home. He would not. And into that silence steps the gospel: there is a true elder Brother who did go. Jesus left the Father's house, came down into the far country of our sin and pig yards and death, and spent everything — “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). To put the robe of righteousness on us, He was stripped of His own and they gambled for it at the foot of a cross. To buy back the ring of sonship, He was disinherited and cried out forsaken. The feast we are welcomed into cost the fattened calf its life, and cost the true Elder Brother His. So run home if you are the younger son; you will be met on the road. And come in from the porch if you are the elder; the party is not something you earn your way into, it is something you were bought into. Either way the Father is already running.
Father, we have wandered to the far country and we have sulked on the porch, and in both we were running from You. Thank You for the Son who came the whole distance to fetch us home — who wore our rags that we might wear His robe, and was shut out that we might be brought in. Meet us on the road while we are still a long way off. Put the ring back on, kill the fatted calf, and teach our hard hearts to come inside and be glad. Amen.