This Lenten Road

“Abba’s Delight—The Road Home”

Luke 15:11-32

Reminded of the heart of God—The Cross Family 

          -The son said, “Get this over with quick…”

          -“Happy time, really”

          Heard Abba ask me to “they need to hear that I love them…”

          -So I told them…

          -And afterwards, the same son came to me and asked for my card

          because something had touched him and reminded him of something

          he’d always known but needed help to recall.

          -Woven into the very fibre of our being is our identity as children of

          the Creator; humans instinctively know, though can’t always identify,

          they belong to Someone.

-But often it’s the thousand competing voices of earth, too loud and impressive for us to hear the voice of the One who continually calls us by name.

          -So we wander from the heart of God—Abba, ‘Dad’. 

          -And from the moment we wander away, Abba calls us back.  And

          every night He scans the fading horizon hoping to see us come over

          rise on our way back home.

          -And every morning he looks to see if the night has coughed us up

          onto the shore. 

          -That Abba’s delight is to have us home, close to his heart, says far

          more about His worth, His character, than it does ours.   

Two things struck me this week as I thought about the story we commonly refer to as ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’.  The first is that the story is really about two sons leaving. The other thing is that I think the parable is poorly named.  “The Return of the Prodigal Son”, though accurate in the description of the story’s detail, places the emphasis on the wrong character.  For the story, as I read it, is not about either of the two sons, ultimately.  The story is all about the heart of the Father.

Two Sons Leaving:

I think this is a story of two sons leaving.  We know the first one left and returned (the prodigal son); we’re not told what became of the other.  What we do know, however, is that the Father treated them the same—which is a father’s prerogative to do. 

What this story does not say is that the son who left and returned was any more worthy of the father’s love than the one who’d remained home working diligently.

Younger Son—

Left…

-Answered the slick, deceptive call of the Father of Lies and went away to find fame, fortune and freedom.

-Not all it’s cracked up to be—pig tender, slop-eater.

…and returned.

-Decided that his father’s servants had it way better than he did.

-Wanted out of the pig slop, so he started his long walk home

-All the while rehearsing the speech he’d give to his father about his sin and his unworthiness.

-As I imagine the reunion, the son wanted to sneak in the back way, maybe go right to the servant’s quarters and be there when his dad came to assess their work for the day.

-So I imagine the son, like he’d done all those months before, taking the hard road. 

-But what the son didn’t know was that the father’s heart constantly ached for his missing son.  So the father was always watching, looking, peering to every corner of his land because he didn’t want to miss it if his son returned one day.

-Notice that it doesn’t say that the father took away all the consequences of the son’s choices.  Maybe the son came back and he was infected with HIV or AIDS.  Maybe he’d become an addict.  Maybe he was a criminal.  There would be consequences for sure, but at least now the son would have someone to walk with him through them.

Older Son—Left, but we’re not told if he returned.  How did he leave?

-First of all I think he left long before his younger brother left. 

You see, even though he was physically present, he didn’t appreciate what he had, which was the Father’s closeness, and abundance.

-For the older son, which is the case for most of us firstborns, it was duty first, responsibility, it was Martha in the kitchen doing all the work hoping to get some appreciation, but not welcoming it even when it came.

-Now his wayward brother comes back and all of a sudden he’s made hero and given a lavish party.  All he sees is injustice: “I’ve been working all this time for you, dad, and you’ve never thrown me party!  He comes back and all of a sudden it’s New Years Eve in New York!”

-You don’t all of a sudden become bitter like that.  It takes some time, it takes some losses and hard-done-by’s accumulated and not resolved.  The older son can’t see the forest for the trees.  He can’t see that his whole life has been spent in the court of the king, in privilege and honour.

-He’d been dwelling in the father’s presence, but his heart was as far away from the father as his younger brother’s was.  He couldn’t rejoice with those who rejoiced, he couldn’t delight, like his father, at the return of his brother.  He couldn’t do it because he couldn’t see past his own out-of-joint nose!

-All these years he’d missed how lavishly loving and extravagant his father was, that there’d never be a time when he’d want for anything.  He’d completely missed intimacy with his father because he was too busy with his duties to invest in that relationship.

-Besides, now he’d been top-dog around the family business.  Things were good for him; he got to run the place.  His younger, foolish brother was nothing but a fly in the ointment.  But now all that changed!  The younger brother was going to mess up everything he’d worked so hard to achieve!  (Completely forgetting that he really didn’t do anything to gain all he had, that it was all because of his father’s goodness that he had anything.  And his father had plenty to go around.

-The difference between the two brothers is that one realized how far he was away from the heart of the father, but the other had no idea.

Father

-Imagine one day your young son, feeling restless and lured by rumour of fame, fortune and freedom, comes to you to ask for his inheritance money.

-Father gives his son what he asks for even though he knows what could happen.  Because he knows his son’s old enough to make this decision—even if the decision will break both their hearts. 

-And so the young son leaves with no indication he’d ever return.

-And the father lets him go.

There’s a horrendous oversight when we normally read this story; a detail so inconspicuous that it registers little more than the word on the page. 

“Give me my share if the estate; give me my inheritance.”

-Doesn’t someone have to die before you get an inheritance?  What the son is saying to the father is that, “dad, compared to the riches I’ve got coming to me in your will, you’re worth more to me dead than you are alive. 

But since I’m not going to bump you off and you’re fit as a fiddle, how ‘bout making like your dead so I can go off and so my wild oats?” 

-The father became as a dead man to the son.

But it had to be that way because unless he died, the son wouldn’t have gone away and realized how far from the father’s heart he was and returned. 

The father had to die to eventually get his son back.

-Even on the road home, the son thought nothing about the heart and mercy and grace of his father.  He thought only of himself and how he’d grovel his way back into the father’s life by becoming part of the servant staff. 

-But the father would have none of that!

-Imagine the scene when after all those many months the father recognizes the profile of his son ‘while he was still a long way off’.

-And in sheer delight goes running to meet him.

-The son doesn’t even get a chance to say his well-rehearsed speech before there’s a fine coat thrown over his shoulders and the weathered, suddenly mighty, arms of his father.

-When his eldest son comes home and throws a hissy-fit because he never got a party like that, the father involves him in the celebration by reminding him that this has always been his life!

-The father reminds the older son that he doesn’t care about how much work someone does or how skilled they are.  What matters to the father is that the son, who’d been missing and presumed dead, is back and is alive.

-The father says you take all my wealth and property and do and say all the right things, but in the end the only thing that matters is that you’re alive.  The only thing that truly delights me is your return.

-When Jesus tells this story he leaves us hanging.  Like a good teacher, he makes his hearers work a bit.  He doesn’t say what happens to the boys.  We’re left to ponder it because really, it’s not about the boys.

This story is to describe the character of Abba.  And this story, I believe, is intended to get us to think which of the two sons we are—because I think we’re in this story. 

Let’s pray.