Returning home

God made us to love God and be loved by him in return. Yet we wander far and wide in a heartbreaking search for the fulfillment that comes from God alone.

The Parable of the Lost Sons from Luke 15 is probably one of my favorite stories from the Bible. It is up there with another parable, the Parable of the Man Who Fell Among Thieves, because both stories distill the essence of the Christian message so beautifully.

If someone were to ask me what this whole “Christian” thing was all about, I would point them to this story: the story of a father’s deep and abiding love for his wayward sons that runs so strong, that he aches for their broken relationship, yearns for reconciliation, and abandons all conventional wisdom and pride to meet his sons in their arrogance and filth. The father does not ask for apologies, explanations, or even accountability. He sheds his dignity and runs out to meet his sons, who’ve already shed theirs. This parable is the whole Bible reduced to one story. Every time human beings abandon God by ignoring the covenant, dishonoring ourselves, exploiting creation, or oppressing and dehumanizing one another, God aches for our broken relationship, yearns for reconciliation, and abandons all conventional wisdom and pride to meet us in our arrogance and filth. And each time we return, God celebrates by shedding his dignity to restore ours.

Jesus offers the Parable of the Lost Sons in response to a criticism levied by the religious leaders in his community: the scribes and the Pharisees. They were scandalized because Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them.” In the first-century Mediterranean world, you were who you ate with. The company you kept determined your reputation in the community. Jesus’s association with “sinners and tax collectors,” those whose actions or profession placed them on the margins of the social community, seemed to confirm in the minds of the scribes and Pharisees that Jesus was exactly who they thought he was: a sinner who treated the Torah with disdain and thus could not possibly be the Messiah he claimed to be. Jesus tells this incredible parable about how jealousy and rivalry can cause us to abandon our true identity as children of God in response to the scribes’ and Pharisees’ attempt to draw a fence around God’s ever-expanding grace.

Every detail about the younger son’s journey highlights the distance between him and his father. The younger son demands his share of his father’s wealth and proceeds to waste it in a “distant country.” Jesus does not tell us why, but we can assume that the younger son thinks the grass is greener away from his father. After losing all his money, the younger son is reduced to poverty and must rely on the scraps served to pigs to survive a severe famine. He has traveled far from this house of his father, physically, spiritually, and emotionally, and yet, at his lowest point, his father’s generosity shines like a beacon in the night, drawing him home. “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare,” he says, “but here I am dying of hunger!”

In one of the most touching scenes in the Bible, the father sees his younger son coming miles down the road and, abandoning all dignity, runs to meet him. It’s as if he has been waiting for him every day since he left, praying for his safety, desiring his return. His father’s eagerness to welcome his son further highlights just how far the son has traveled. He acknowledges his diminished dignity by telling his father, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” His father does not see it this way. He embraces him, gives him a ring, a robe, new sandals, and throws a feast, effectively telling his son that his dignity, his very identity, which he hastily cast aside a few verses prior, had been restored. We typically stop reading the parable at this point, which is a shame. The preceding story of a father’s overwhelming generosity to an underserving son is undoubtedly worth sharing; however, the parable up to this point doesn’t answer the critique of the scribes and Pharisees. We have to keep reading to learn about the older son’s response.

When the older son hears how lavishly his father has welcomed his brother home, he withdraws from his father’s house, literally refusing to go to the party. When his father comes out to inquire about his absence, the older son demonstrates just how far he has wandered from his father's house. He refuses to claim his relationship with his brother, referring to him with his father as “your son” rather than “my brother,” and further denies his own sonship, saying, “For all these years I have been working as a slave for you.” The older son is an example of the dangers of self-righteousness. It is easy to do all the right things and to miss the point of doing them entirely. As the Rev. Joseph Yoo recently shared in a post on Threads: “[The older son] was faithful, but he was keeping score. And nothing kills grace faster than a scoreboard.”

The younger son’s departure from his father's house is more dramatic and often gets more attention. He left his father to go to a “distant country” and, in so doing, discarded the dignity of being his father’s son. The older son likewise abandoned his father and discarded the dignity of being his father’s son. He did so when he began keeping a list of all the ways he was doing everything correctly. He left again when he responded to his brother’s return with jealousy, thus severing his connection with his brother, his father, and his identity and dignity. Both sons leave, albeit differently, and both need the father’s generosity to restore what they carelessly discarded.

By telling this parable in response to the scribes’ and Pharisees’ critique, Jesus is effectively critiquing their view of God’s grace and generosity. The scribes and Pharisees, who followed Jesus around and constantly questioned his ministry, interpreted the Torah to suggest that God’s grace was only for those who kept the commandments the way they did. For them, the way to God was paved through keeping the commandments. There are lots of people who still think this, who believe that religion—even the religion that centers on Jesus Christ—is about judging others or drawing them outside of the circle of God’s everlasting lovingkindness: be they gay, trans, conservative, liberal, atheist, Muslim, immigrant, rich, or poor.

Jesus, a faithful, Torah-observant Jew, has a more expansive view of the Torah. As he reads the scriptures, Jesus sees the incredible weakness of humanity, our inability to walk in love, justice, and obedience. From the story of his own people, Jesus knows that we can never hope to find God apart from God’s willingness to search for us in our diminished dignity. God searches for us as we reckon with our own weakness; as we admit that, try as we might, we constantly fail, and fall, and stumble, and trip on our home; that we are more like the “sinners and tax collectors” we despise than we’d like to admit. We find God when we realize that it is not God who is hiding from us behind religious rituals, doctrines, and institutions; it is we who are hiding from him, either behind the walls we build to exclude the others we think are beneath us or within the false temples of our own self-righteousness.

The Parable of the Lost Sons ends without a resolution. Jesus immediately launches into a new parable without telling us how the older son responds to his father’s plea for him to come back. It’s as if Jesus is placing the listener in the place of the older son, resentful and jealous of God’s mercy towards the people we despise, asking us to decide for ourselves whether we’ll continue to stand outside or shed our jealousy and envy in order to dawn the robes of the children of God.

Scripture’s wisdom often offers a diagnosis for what ails our individual and collective spirits. Our society is filled with those who have abandoned the house of our Father by forgetting their identity and devouring their inheritance in a distant country. The younger son abandoned his father because of his carelessness or greed. The older son abandoned his father because of his self-righteousness and jealousy. We, too, abandon God in all sorts of ways. We fear or hate others and become careless, or callous, with our neighbors, especially the most marginalized. We grow indifferent to the injustices done in our name. We judge others whose paths differ from our own as deficient. We view God as a weapon to wield against undesirables, untouchables, and deplorables, rather than as a loving Father who wishes to bring all her wayward, wandering children home. We pray and go to church and do all the “right things,” but refuse to allow our connection to Jesus to permeate our lives and transform our self-righteousness into his righteousness. We hold on to our life-negating addictions and allegiances rather than set them aside for the true life that comes from God. We wallow in the pig pens of a society starving for community and love, surviving on the cheap admiration of social media likes and follows, or relationships that demand nothing from us and promise us less. If we look around us, we see a society far from our Father's house. Perhaps we see how far we are from God.

It is all too easy to forget that God loves us. Deeply. Profoundly. Abundantly. Prodigally. God does not love us because of what we can do, what we have, how good we look, our connections, our intelligence, or our achievements. God loves us simply because we are. In fact, God’s love is the reason we are in the first place. God made us to love God and be loved by him in return. Yet we wander far and wide in a heartbreaking search for the fulfillment that comes from God alone. Reflecting on his own journey to recognize this love, Henri Nouwen writes, “The real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father” (Return of the Prodigal Son, 107).

Losing touch with ourselves in a world awash with idols and false loves is easy. Like both sons in our parable, we forget that we already possess the most valuable thing of all: our identity as children of God. Nothing can take this reality away from us. Even if we cast it aside out of neglect, fear, rivalry, jealousy, or hate, God, who is “gracious and merciful,” is always waiting and willing to restore it and rejoice at our return home. The sense of “somebodiness” that accompanies our true identity as children of God is enough to carry us through the dehumanizing realities of our world and bear us safely home.