Prodigal's father

 

The story starts about a father, a man with two sons. He gave the son what he asked for. It was rare, apparently, to ask for an early inheritance. Jesus has the father give him a share of his life. The younger son has left the family, cut ties with them. In a way, the payment for the inheritance was redemption money for him to be free of his family and their rules. Everyone said he was too good to the young man. Perhaps the father feared that he were not gracious, he feared worse rebellion, insolence, maybe theft or ruining the estate.  Or worse, he'd become like the elder brother. Maybe he knew that he would get in trouble if given enough rope, but that he would have sense enough to return home. He would have to learn the consequences of his prodigal actions through experience, not a lecture.

 

We don't know how the father handled things in the interim. I'm sure he worried some. Maybe he was like Jinkins who speaks of a Zen Calvinism, of a calm assurance that the world is in "God's hands in the end, not his." We are told that the son "came to himself, or recovered his senses." Some suspect why he rehearsed the lines. Some suspect that he was practicing to manipulate his father with a show of repentance and offer to be treated like a servant. The father won't let him finish his speech.

 

When the prodigal returned the father did not act like a patriarch whose pride and reputation had been damaged.(Ken Bailey material)-  he celebrated. He brings him back into the family fold. He threw a party, a big party.

 

The father handled the elder brother with kindness, maybe how he needed to be handled. Maybe the father  did he take him for granted too much. He does tell him that all that I have is yours. I think it includes his heart. The elder son has as much emotional distance as the younger brother had in a far country. The father has to handle the distance now here. Again the father goes out to meet the son; he makes a move to close the gap. The elder son feels like a servant. He needs to learn to say brother Possibly, we see the essence of forgiveness, to be able to see someone not as an enemy, but as family, as close to us again.

 

This makes a story out of Paul's words where the father is an instrument of reconciliation. it is not always easy, as it causes strife with the elder brother. For the father, the past is finished and gone. His relationship with the son is a new creation I think of the movie The Straight Story, where an old man who has no license, gets on a lawn mower from Iowa to Wisconsin to patch things up with his brother.As Jeremias wrote "repentance is learning to say father or brother again." Trying to patch things up is worth going to extremes sometimes.

 

The word prodigal doesn't appear in the story. Prodigal means profligate, wasteful spending, to squander something. In this way, we could speak of the prodigal father, for he is abundant, maybe wasteful, in forgiveness and reconciliation, an ambassador for the soft side of parental love. Who are we to judge the loving reactions of someone else? Worse, who are we to withhold love and forgiveness when someone does not live up to our standards for them? Is it possible to ever squander love? In its very nature, isn't  love prodigal, profligate? Is it love when it isn't? Look at the exuberance of divine love in light of this story and Zeph. 3:17.