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What the Father Does

July 17, 2005                                                                                         Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

Luke 15:11-32 ~ The parable of the lost son

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 divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger 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 that 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.’ So they began to celebrate. Meanwhile, 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. 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. Yet 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 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.’”

This story is handed down to us to give us a little better view of who God is. I’ve told you as we listen to these parables that we ought to think about who the characters represent. Now I do want to be careful with that because there is not always a one-to-one, but in this case, we see a representation of the father, who I believe Jesus means it be a representation of God himself. These are to teach us the character of God.

What we see in this parable is a father who pursues his children. Of course this goes along with the entire witness of the Old Testament doesn’t it? Time and again the children of Israel wander off in one way or another and God sends prophets after them, He pursues them, He brings them back time and again. He pleads with them to repent. God does the same with us as well. So what about this story? We know the story; we’ve heard it many times. But let’s look at the father in it. I think the first picture we see of the father in this particular parable is a father who is actually silent in the face of great shame and hurt. You have a son who comes and says, “Father, I want my inheritance.” It wasn’t altogether uncommon for a father in the Middle East to sign over an inheritance to a son. But it was always that the father would have use of the property, the profits, until he died. But in this case what is so unusual is that the son comes, wants the property, in this case he’s the second son and he wants a third, and he wants it all. Scholars have gone and interviewed people in the Middle East and some of the villages are still the same as they have been for years and ask them whether this has ever happened – no. “What would happen if someone came with this kind of request?” “The son probably would have been flogged.”

But the father doesn’t do anything except grant the wish. You have to understand what is going on here; this is a son who wants his father dead. Something has happened and he has come to the place, either because of rebellion or whatever else, and he wants his father dead. He wants the inheritance now. It’s not just a matter of going to the local bank and signing over all the stock or the bank accounts. The father literally has to trot out all his property, a third of it, and have a yard sale or an auction. And the whole village comes and knows what is going on. Can you imagine his shame? His hurt? And not only is the son saying about the father, “You are no longer worthy to be my father” he’s saying this to the village too – “I hate you guys too.” So when all that is done, it’s not just a matter of one day wanting the stuff and the next day leaving, this is taking a few days, a few weeks to get it done. The son gets whatever wealth he has and trots off to a foreign country. This is an Israelite who is going to a Gentile country…another issue. He goes and lives a wild life. Maybe he has some stolen from him, but it disappears, it is gone. He finds himself without anything. He has to go work for a Gentile farmer. And of course, Israelites are not supposed to have anything to do with pigs but he has to feed them. But not only does he have to feed them but he is so hungry he wants to eat their food. Here’s the father, apparently passive but I really believe that the father certainly spoke to his son and pleaded with his son. “What is wrong? What do you need to do? What is going on?”

We look at God and wonder why He allows things in our lives, why He allows things in the world. We just got back from a mission trip and if you’ve ever been in Mexico or any other country that is lower than us in standard of living…it is a stunning thing to go and see. But here we were working with about a hundred orphans. I just have to tell you that orphans are a huge problem in this world. When I went to Uganda twenty five years ago, we worked with orphans because at that time Edi Amin had killed a half a million people over a ten year period. So there were orphans everywhere living in the garbage heaps and the dumps, having nobody but themselves, some of them five years old. It was amazing. In Tijuana, there are estimated at least three thousand kids on the streets. And we were dealing with a hundred kids. The question is “Why God? Why do you allow this? Why do you allow the things in our own lives? Are you passive? Are you going to sit back and let it all happen?” I don’t think God is passive. We don’t know the answers to those questions all the time but God does allow the freedom of human beings to do horrific things to one another. God gives us the freedom to say to you, “I hate you.” God gives us the freedom to create other weird religions. And there are a thousand of them. God gives us the freedom to do all kinds of things to one another. Some of those boys were there because of abuse; others were there because their parents gave them up because they just didn’t want them. Some of those boys were there because their parents had died. We worked on a house, this man who has this vision, we were building a house – it’s going to be beautiful – for girls because there is no house for girls in the whole city of Tijuana, no place for them to go. There are little girls on the street and you know what that means. God is not passive but He does allow us the freedom to reject Him.

So you can imagine this father allowing his son to do what he does.

The next picture of the father, I imagine in my own heart, is the father waiting. When I was a young boy, one of our rituals at Christmas, on Christmas day, is that I would wake up early of course being a little boy and wanting to open all the presents. Before we could do anything we had to go get my grandmother who was maybe seventy-five and an aunt that I had, who lived in different part of Memphis. For a little boy it was excruciating to wait. My dad would get in the car and he would go get these two ladies and only then could we begin to open presents. I would be sitting there pacing the floor; you can imagine what I was going through. I would go to the window to see whether they were there yet. I sort of imagine the father like this. Of course his son is gone for weeks but he’s always looking down the road, hoping his son is coming home. Maybe he is in the kitchen, looking out the curtain in the window, and then one day there he is! He sees him. I believe that is true for us as well. God is always looking for us to come back and yet we are always running off, aren’t we? We are always running off in one way or another. And God waits for us to come back. He allows us sometimes to reach the end of our rope or the end of whatever we have that we are pursuing at the moment and he waits for us to come back.

So he sees the son, the son is coming down the road. Again, you have to have the picture. This is an older man, probably very wealthy in a small village in Palestine some place. He is well-to-do, very dignified, wearing a robe that fits his rank and he literally has to pick up his robes and run down the road. He is shameless. You can imagine him, knobby knees and all, running down the road. This is literally what happens; he runs down the road to his son. Why does he do that? Obviously he is glad to see his son but there’s another reason. You see, that son if you remember, rejected the whole village and the village sees him coming too and they are lining up on the road, kind of a parade that’s not a very good one. Some of them might even have rocks in their hands or dust. You see, he said to the village, “I hate you.” He’s rejected his fellow Israelites, not only the country but this village. And so the father runs because he loves his son but he also does it to protect him. You see his son is about to walk the gauntlet. His father goes to protect him and demonstrate his own forgiveness for this wayward boy. Of course we know the story, the son has this speech. It’s a sincere speech but it is a speech; “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against earth. I’m no longer worthy to be called your son.” The father, it’s almost like he says, “Enough. Quick, bring out a new robe. Bring out shoes. Kill the food, the fattened calf. We are going to have a party. We’re going to celebrate because this son was dead and now he’s alive. We’ll worry about the rest of it later.”

You know I really believe this is the character of God. This is the character of God. It doesn’t mean there isn’t “tough love” in this character of God. The father has let his son go out. I like a book for teaching children called “Parenting with Love and Logic.” The whole premise of the book is that as parents, we should allow our children to be disciplined mainly by reality. Because we all know that children don’t listen to us very well but if you let consequences happen to your children, in a controlled environment, they will learn more and learn better. That’s what the father did to this son; he let reality teach him. Only then did he come to his senses. There is a lot of “tough love” in God. God is much more concerned about our character and about our relationship with Him than He is about our health and our wealth. But then there is the love, the shameless love, the love and humiliation that God gives. God is our Father. I was again thinking about these boys in Tijuana who were in this place for a variety of reasons and its quite likely that most of them had fathers who weren’t very good ones, who had abandoned them or died or abused them. And I thought of my own father and how wonderful I had it. I had a father who really loved me. He wasn’t perfect; as we grow up we think our fathers are perfect and then we begin to see along the way that they are not and then we get to be fifteen or sixteen and we think they are the dumbest people on earth…like the old quote from Mark Twain who said that at sixteen he thought his father was the stupidest person on earth but by the time he was twenty-one he was surprised at how much the old man had grown. We’re all kind of that way. But even in our culture, we become very disappointed in our parents sometimes. Some of us have wonderful parents. Others of us, many of you sitting here today perhaps, are disappointed in our parents. Regardless of where you are, we have a Father in heaven. God is the Father for these boys. Your Father in heaven loves you so much that He has shamelessly loved you by becoming one of us, by experiencing death on the cross. He continually holds out His hands to you and me and says, “Repent and believe and come back.”

The temptation for all of us, everyday, is to be a prodigal in one way or another. Some of us may have gone off the deep end, most of us are probably more like the older son who is very good but deep inside wayward. Part of repentance is seeing the love of God in our lives. Somewhere along the line I learned that the deepest kind of love, the most transforming kind of love, is love which sees all our warts and all of us, every bit of us, and still loves us. When someone knows you so well that they know everything about you, even the bad parts, and they still love you, that’s powerful stuff. God is just that way. You can’t hide anything from God. It’s okay, God loves you so much that He gave His one and only son, shamelessly He pursued you, He threw His arms around you and said, “Let’s have a party.” That’s how I want you to think about God this week. We’ll talk a little bit about the two prodigal sons next week, but we have to begin here. We have to begin with who God is. Certainly there is going to be judgment at the end of the world, there will be a lot of things that are not pleasant, but the character of God is one who pursues the lost, one who goes after those who sometimes shake their fist at Him. He does that for you. Think about your own life right and what is between you and God. “What is it like between you and me, Lord? All the other things going on, all other things equal, what’s it like between you and me?” I suspect that for most of us, it’s not that great or on a scale of one to ten it might be one or ten, but for most of us we can always improve. What does repentance for you? Spend time in prayer right now and just say to God, “Reveal to me what I need to do and how I need to change, how I need to come to my own senses to receive your love for me.”