Whiteboard: Reconciliation

It is a story as familiar as it is shocking.

This Sunday in our Habits of Faith series we take on New Habits of Reconcilation, and we do so with the Parable of the Prodigal Son and His Brother.

Imagine it. The younger son walks up to his father and essentially says, "I wish you were dead...and I want to live my life as if that were the case." He wants his inheritance and he wants it now. In the first of many shocking twists in the story the father gives it to him. The younger son gathers everything he has, heads to a far away country, and squanders everything (property and all) doing all sorts of things that his dear old dad had raised him not to do.

He's broke and he's hungry and after he takes a job heaping slop for the pigs he realizes the error of his ways when he looks at that pig slop and thinks, "Boy, I wish I had some of that to eat." He remembers his father and the way his dear old dad used to treat his slaves -- they always had plenty to eat and even a little left over. The younger son decides he'll go back home and having wasted his birthright he'll just ask his dad for a job as one of his slaves.

Now, here is where our familiarity with the story gets in the way.

We skim past this first section. We don't have to take the "dissolute living" or "the severe famine" or even the slop-envying hunger of the younger son seriously because we already know how the story ends. In fact, we miss the startling nature of the way the son is received by the father because we're already at the end of the story where father and son are reconciled (though not so much with the brother) and the fatted calf is roasting and the dinner party is going on.

Just imagine that he didn't know the ending, though. Imagine that you were hearing the story for the very first time. A son has wasted his birthright, lost the property that still rightfully belongs to his father, and comes shuffling back home looking worse for wear than the boys from those Hangover movies.

How is his father supposed to respond?

How would you respond?

The story takes it most shocking turn when the father sees his son far off at a distance...and sprints out to him. The father won't even let his son get through his carefully prepared speech without interrupting him with the lavishness of his forgiveness. "Get the robe! Get the ring! Slaughter the fatted calf, we'll have a feast tonight! My son is home! He's not dead, he's home!"

It is a response so startling and unexpected that the older son can't even process it. "Isn't this the bum that just about ruined us? And you receive him with this kind of welcome and generosity?"

Yes. And Jesus says to us, and that is how it is with God's love too.