THE PRODIGAL WHO NEVER LEFT
Luke
15:25-30 The older son was in the field. When he
came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the
servants and asked him what was going on. “Your brother has come”, he replied,
“and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and
sound.” The older brother became angry and refused to go in.”
The
parable of the two sons takes an extended look at the soul of the elder
brother, and climaxes with a powerful plea for him to change his heart.
Throughout the centuries, when this text is taught in
church or religious education programs, the almost exclusive focus has been on
how the father freely receives his penitent younger son. The first time I heard
the parable, I imagined Jesus’s original listeners’ eyes welling with tears as
they heard how God will always love and welcome them, no matter what they’ve
done. We sentimentalize this parable if we do that. The targets of this story
are not “wayward sinners” but religious people who do everything the Bible
requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral
insiders. He wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and
self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls
and the lives of the people around them. It is a mistake, then, to think that
Jesus tells this story primarily to assure younger brothers of his
unconditional love.
Jesus’s
purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories. Through this parable
Jesus challenges what nearly everyone has ever thought about God, sin, and
salvation. His story reveals the destructive self-centeredness of the younger
brother, but it also condemns the elder brother’s moralistic life in the
strongest terms. Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and the religious
are spiritually lost, both life-paths are dead ends, and that every thought the
human race has had about how to connect to God has been wrong.
The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller, pg. 9-10.