The Prodigal Son

Some of you guys will know by now that I'm an eighties kid, born in the fantastic decade of the eighties. And because of that, I have watched some incredible shows, incredible TV shows. One of them definitely is The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I'm glad you guys are so accommodating to these introductions. I'm very proud because I know the entire opening sequence or rap introduction by Will Smith of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

And I believe when I was young that gave me a bit of street cred even though I am so white and just lame. Anyway, the story is fantastic. Well, I really enjoyed it because you have the two dynamics of Will Smith, who is a guy from the streets of West Philadelphia, West Philly, who moves to Bel Air in Los Angeles, which is an upmarket, upscale place to live with his uncle who is a judge, a very wealthy man, but he's also a very uptight man. And so you have the dynamics between this very cheeky, you know, very disrespectful in one sense, young guy and very uptight and proper Uncle Phil. But apart from being funny, some of the most significant aspects of the show is actually where it's not funny, but where it gets very serious, very, very sober.

And there are a few moments like that throughout the series where Phil—sorry, where Will Smith, his character, who doesn't have a father, whose father walked away, like so many African Americans of that generation, shares a moment or shares moments with his uncle where it's as if his uncle is his dad. And it's just so significant to see that sort of love. And so to see how Uncle Phil cares for Will, not as a nephew, but something closer to a son. And there's something powerful as you reflect on that about the relationship and sometimes the struggle between a father and a son. Can you identify with that?

Maybe 50% of us can't because we're daughters and not sons. But can we identify, have we personally either experienced that or have you seen a situation where this special thing of a love between a father and a son exists? Despite the inherent struggle of power that can exist, the young and the old buck and that sort of thing happening. When there's a real love and respect, it is something profound.

Perhaps we haven't seen that. Perhaps we've seen the flip side of that, of a love broken down, of a relationship very strained between a father and a son. Well, this morning we're going to be looking at that sort of situation. A story where a father and a son's relationship is broken in very sad circumstances. And it's a part of scripture, a part of Jesus' parables that we are probably very familiar with.

It's the story of the prodigal son. And so this morning, I would love you to read with me that story in Luke 15. We're going to read a fairly good part of that chapter from verses 11 to 32. Luke 15, verse 11. Jesus continued.

There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, "Father, give me my share of the estate." So he, the father, divided his property between them. Not long after that, the youngest son got together all he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in the whole country, and he began to be in need.

So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, "How many of my father's hired men have food to spare? And here I am starving to death. I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.

I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired men.'" So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him.

The son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son." But the father said to his servants, "Quick, bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it.

Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found." And so they began to celebrate. Meanwhile, the oldest 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 is 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. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, "Look.

All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. You never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes here, comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him." "My son," the father said, "you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.

But we had to celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found." So far, our reading. The context of the story that we've just read, we see at the beginning of chapter 15 is where Luke recounts where two people, two different groups of people, were around Jesus at that time. And it's very significant that we understand this context.

We understand this point. We see on the one hand that Jesus was sitting there with tax collectors in verse one and sinners. Jesus was with tax collectors and sinners. But then in verse two, Luke says that they were Pharisees and teachers of the law. So we see these two groups here.

We see that there are two audiences that are listening to Jesus. The so-called group of sinners and prostitutes who lived on the margins of respectable society, and a second group of listeners, the religious Jews who held to the traditional morality of their upbringing. Two very different groups. Imagine that. That would have been an awkward dinner party.

And the question that I want us to begin with this morning is to ask, who was Jesus talking to when he was telling this story? Some have said that it is to both these groups, to both those who are wayward and rebellious and also to the morally upright and religious. But if we look at the text closely, we actually find that Jesus was addressing this parable and the other two parables before this one to the Pharisees and the religious leaders. The second verse of chapter 15 sets the scene for Jesus' teaching on these parables, things that were once lost but were found again. Verse two says that the Pharisees saw Jesus sitting there with these sinners and these prostitutes and tax collectors and said to one another, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."

And then in verse three, it begins, "Then Jesus told them this parable." The Greek literally means in response to this. Now Jesus doesn't turn to the prostitute sitting next to him and start telling them this story. Jesus directs it at these people that have said this to him, at the Pharisees. And Jesus wants to teach them, those people, something about God.

And so we find three back-to-back parables told by Jesus culminating in this beautiful one, this famous one of the prodigal son. But contrary to the previous two parables of verses three to ten, this parable of Jesus doesn't have simply one son who is lost. The story, if you understand it and read it, is actually of two lost sons. Two lost sons. Unlike the other parables which had a lost sheep who was found and a lost coin that was found, this story has a bit of a twist to it, a twist that in fact would pierce the hearts of those religious Jews, those Pharisees when they heard it.

The story begins with a shocking request. A son comes to his father and says, "Give me my share of the estate." Now the original hearers of this would have been appalled at this suggestion. In other words, this son was pretty much saying, "I want my inheritance now. The inheritance I will receive when you have passed away."

And the shocking thought of this is that the son is insinuating, "I kinda wish you were gone. I kinda wish you were dead." He wants, in other words, his father's things. He doesn't want his father. But what's more shocking is his father's reaction to this.

Any normal person would have understood if this father scolded him for saying something so absolutely atrocious. And especially in a patriarchal society of that Middle East, a request like this would have been met with ostracism. They may have been chucked out for having said something so ridiculous. But instead, verse 12 says the father goes about and sells that part of the property or divides the property and hands it over to his son. Now in those days, the youngest brother got a third of all the inheritance. The oldest brother got two thirds.

Anyone else after that would have shared the third between them. And so this youngest brother stands to get a third of the inheritance, yet the father must have been a very wealthy man if the son thought this inheritance now would be worth it. Most of Jesus' listeners would have never seen a Middle Eastern patriarch respond in this way. The father endures a tremendous amount of shame in complying with this. The Bible says then that the son goes off to a distant country in verse 13 and squanders everything on an out-of-control lifestyle.

Think of your James Packers. Think of your, you know, wealthy playboys that go out and blow cash on their horses and that sort of thing. This was what this guy was up to. And then he hits rock bottom after having spent all of this, and he has to literally go and resort to looking after pigs, something again that would have been so atrocious to a Jew to have done, looking after filthy animals, unclean animals like pigs. Verse 17 says when he is down and out, literally in the mud, he comes to his senses and he devises a plan.

He says he will return to his father. He will plead for his forgiveness, admit that he had forfeited the rights of being a son, but secondly, he will ask his father to make him like one of the hired men. He's not worthy of being a son anymore. He couldn't be considered his son because he had violated the community standards, and an apology would not have been sufficient in restoring any shame. The best he could hope for was to sell himself into almost this sort of slavery.

But then we come to this famous dramatic scene where the youngest son comes within eyesight of the father. And his father sees him from this long distance off, and he runs to his son. He runs to him. And again, we have to understand that something like this is so undignified. A gentleman never would raise his robe and expose his legs to go running after anyone.

It was a shame. Again, it was something undignified to do. But his father is so overwhelmed. He runs to his son, and he kisses him. And so the son begins his apology, and he plans to work his disgrace off. But before he can finish his story, the dad calls for his best robe to be put on him and calls for his servants to prepare a great feast for him.

It is a celebration. The fattened calf will be killed. And work quickly, and soon there are people there, and people I've heard, and people who have shared in this pain of the father are there, and all his friends are there, and everyone is rejoicing and glad. What a scene. A scene of a great restoration.

And yet this moment of astonishing grace and forgiveness and undying love, this powerful and magnificent moment, is not the clincher of the story. Because the story doesn't finish here. The older brother is in the fields and hears of the commotion when he comes closer at the end of the day, closer to home. And he asked one of the servants out in the field, "What's going on?" And they tell him this story.

They tell him of this great return, but he becomes furious. Now it's his turn to disgrace the father. He refuses to go into this great celebration. This celebration of the family and the extended family and all friends being together. He refuses to take one step inside the house.

He does the maths. By restoring this younger brother to the family and making him an heir again, the younger brother now has claim to one third of his now very diminished wealth. And the older brother starts burning up with rage inside. "I've worked myself to death. And this is the justice I get?

My brother has done nothing, and he is lavished with this wealth. Where is the justice? Where is the fairness?" But the oldest son, in fact, also disgraces his father in this way by refusing to go into the home to take part of the feast. Verse 29, have a look at that.

He addresses his father so scornfully. He says, "Look. Look. You're being ridiculous." And how does a father respond to his oldest son's rebellion?

A man in his time may have disowned him again like his youngest son, may have disowned him on the spot for something so incredibly rude. Instead, he again responds with an amazing tenderness. "My son," he begins. "My son, everything I have, everything I am is yours. But we have to celebrate the return of your brother.

He was dead, and he's alive again. He was lost, but he is found once more. Come into this feast and celebrate with us." This is the moment where the listeners would be on the edge of their seats. What happens now?

How does he respond? What does he do? Will the family be reunited in love? Will the brothers be reconciled? But with all these thoughts passing through their minds, Jesus ends the story right there.

He doesn't give a resolution. What does it mean? Why does he do that? Well, we said earlier that Jesus was addressing whom? The Pharisees.

The religious leaders. And here he was telling a fascinating story of the human heart. Jesus was driving home and emphasising it, are the two ways that people break their relationship with God. And Jesus is defining sin here. Jesus is defining what sin really is.

In the first half of the story, Jesus shows us with a younger brother a depiction of sin that many of us recognise. The young man who humiliates his father and his family, lives a self-indulgent, immoral life, who totally alienates himself from the father who represents God. And anyone who lives like that, we recognise, should and would be cut off from God. All the listeners to the parable would have seen this and recognised this. The second half of the story, however, focuses on the elder brother who is completely obedient to his father.

And by analogy to the laws of God, he is completely under control. He is completely self-disciplined. So we have these two sons. One bad by the normal standards and one good by the normal standards. Yet the story shows, if we really read it, that both are alienated from the father.

Do you notice that the story comes to a remarkable conclusion? Jesus leaves it deliberately in this alienated state. The bad son, the bad son is the one who comes into his father's feast. The good son refuses, and he still remains lost. And the reason, the reason the son doesn't come into his father's feast, the older brother, is "because I never disobeyed you.

I never disobeyed you." The elder brother is not losing his father's love in spite of his goodness, but because of it. It's not his sins that created the barrier between him and his father. It's his pride in his own moral record that is causing him to be alienated. It's not his wrongdoing, but his righteousness that is keeping him from sharing in the feast of the father.

How could this be? Well, the picture starts emerging that both the brothers' hearts are more alike than they first appear. What did the younger brother want in his life? Well, he wanted his father dead so that he could make and take all the benefits his own and make his choices and live with the wealth of his father. What did the older brother want in life?

Well, he wanted his father's goods as well, rather than the father himself. He was just as resentful of the father as the youngest son. However, the younger brother went far away. The older brother stayed very close and never disobeyed. This way, he stayed in control.

This way he ensured that he would get or guaranteed his father's wealth. And the conclusion is this: neither loved the father for who he was. Neither son loved the father for who he was. They were both using the father for their own selfish desires. And what Jesus does in this parable is to define very, very succinctly and powerfully a deeper concept of what sin really is.

Most people think of sin as failing to keep God's code of conduct, his moral code, but Jesus' definition goes further than that. Do you know that you can avoid Jesus as saviour by keeping all of the moral laws? How? Well, if you stake your claim on your moral conduct, then you have rights. You have rights, just like the older brother felt.

God owes you answered prayer. God owes you a good life. God owes you a wife, a husband. He owes you three kids. You don't need a saviour who pardons you by free, unconditional, ego-shattering grace because you are your own saviour.

You deserve everything that God can and should give. Why is his older brother so angry with the father? Because he feels that it's his right to have the robes, to have the ring, to have the fattened calf. In the same way, we can pretend to live very moral lives. We are judgmental at so many different things in other people's lives, in this lost and fallen country of ours.

But our goal might be to get leverage on God, to control him, to put him in a position where he owes us. Here then is Jesus' radical definition of what is wrong with us. Nearly everyone defines sin as a breaking of God's rules. Jesus, though, shows us a man who has violated virtually nothing of this moral behaviour, but is every bit as spiritually lost as his brother who did. Why?

Because sin is not simply breaking the rules. It is putting yourself in a place where God is saviour, or God is lord, or God is judge over your life. If you're the younger brother, it means that you don't want God to be your judge. You will make the decisions. You will choose what is right.

You will choose what is wrong. You replace God with yourself as judge. If you're the older brother, you don't want God to be your saviour because you have worked very hard to create an illusion to yourself and to others that your world is perfect, your world is holy, and even God honouring. Sin is not simply breaking the rules. It is placing yourself as God, as your saviour, or your judge.

That is what Jesus is pointing to. What this story needed, what this story needed in order to be a happy story, in order to have a great conclusion, was a faithful and a loving older brother. The one who loved the father deeply and truly, who stayed with his father because he loved him, and who loved the younger brother unconditionally. Edmund Clowney, who's a Christian writer, recounts a true story of a young man who in the Vietnam War had a brother who went to Vietnam and was MIA, missing in action. And the family could get no word of where he was and where he had gone and what happened to him through any official channels.

So the oldest son flew to Vietnam at risk of his own life, searched the jungles and the battlefield for his lost brother. It is said, in fact, that despite the danger, he was never hurt because those on both sides heard of his dedication and respected this quest. Some of them called him simply "the brother". This is what we would have liked to have seen the older brother have done. He should have said, "My brother has been a fool.

His life is now in ruins. But I will go to him and I will bring him home. And if the inheritance is gone, as I expect it will be, I will bring him back to my family at my own loss." Friends, the good news of the gospel is that we have an older brother like this. By putting a flawed older brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to yearn for a good brother.

And what we celebrate again today is the fact that we have him. Think of the kind of brother we need. We need one who doesn't just go to the next country to find us, but will come from heaven itself to earth to do so. We need one who is willing to pay not just a finite amount of money, but is willing to pay the infinite cost of His own life. And either as a rebellious and arrogant younger brother or as a manipulative, self-righteous older brother, we have rebelled against the father.

And we know deep down we deserve alienation for that. But the parable shows that true forgiveness and acceptance into the household of God cost God something. Someone had to pay. There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the father and the older brother paid something. But this parable pointed to a true story, to our older brother, Jesus Christ, who paid our debts on that cross in our place.

Because Jesus has paid the full price to restore us back into God's family, we may join in this feast, this very real feast that he will have with us, the return of the prodigal sons and daughters. Friends, are you a younger brother running, deciding for yourself what is right and what is wrong? Stop running. Come home. Are you an older brother?

Perhaps saying, "This is unfair. People should be behaving this way. I should be getting this." Put your pride and your self-reliance aside. Accept that you are also lost and receive God's free grace this morning.

We have to remember, we so desperately have to remember that God is a happy father. God is a happy Father who wants us, who desires for us, who wants to celebrate with us. Let's pray. Father, this message is one that we need to hear so often. Father, thank you that you have grace for all walks of life, all different backgrounds, whether lifelong church goers or very new Christians.

We thank you, Lord, that your grace is large enough for all of us. Father, this morning we come to you to confess that in one way or another we have rebelled against you and alienated ourselves from you, that we need your forgiveness again, and that we desire to spend time with you. Lord, change our hearts to love you more. Give us power to say no to the sin in our life, the things we have done wrong and have done that's not according to your will, but also the deeper sin in our life of simply wanting to have ourselves rule our own life. Father, as we celebrate the Lord's Supper, we pray that these things will mean something to us as well.

Fill us, Lord, with a sense of renewal of joy. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.