Most of us know the story as the parable of the prodigal son.
The younger son asks for his inheritance, leaves home, wastes what he has been given, and eventually finds himself with almost nothing. When things finally fall apart, he decides to go home.
But lately I’ve wondered if we sometimes concentrate so much on the son that we miss one of the most remarkable parts of the story.
The father who ran to his son.
The son is still coming down the road. He hasn’t made it home yet. He hasn’t finished his apology. He hasn’t demonstrated that he has changed.
And his father runs to him.
The Father Who Ran to His Son
Jesus gives us a detail that would have caught people’s attention.
“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.”
— Luke 15:20 (NIV)
I keep coming back to the words “while he was still a long way off.”
The father saw him.
I’ve heard it suggested that perhaps the father had been watching for him. Scripture doesn’t tell us that, so I don’t want to add something that isn’t there. But it does tell us that the father saw his son before the son reached him.
Then he ran.
That may not strike us as unusual today, but in the world Jesus was describing, a dignified older man wasn’t normally running down the road. With the long garments worn at the time, running would have meant gathering them up enough to move freely. It wasn’t the picture of a composed patriarch concerned about appearances.
And Jesus chose that picture deliberately.
The father didn’t stand at the house and make his son walk the final distance alone.
He went to him.
The Speech That Never Got Finished
There’s another part of this story that I think is easy to read past.
Before returning home, the son prepares what he’s going to say. He knows what he has done. He has sinned against heaven and against his father. He no longer considers himself worthy to be called a son.
His plan is to ask his father to treat him like one of the hired servants.
I’ve always understood that kind of thinking.
When we’ve made a mess of something, there is something in us that wants to figure out how we’re going to fix it. What can I do? How can I make this right? How can I earn back what I’ve lost?
I’ve spent much of my life believing in responsibility. Actions have consequences. I’ve seen enough of life to know that’s true.
But grace isn’t pretending our actions don’t matter.
Grace is recognizing that there are some things we cannot repair ourselves.
The son confesses what he has done. His father doesn’t deny it or tell him it didn’t matter. But the father also doesn’t negotiate a path for him to work his way back into being a son.
Instead, he calls for a robe, a ring and sandals.
Then he calls for a celebration.
The son came home hoping he might be accepted as a servant.
His father received him as his son.
When God Became Father to Me
For a good part of my life, I believed in God.
I believed there was a Creator. I believed there was right and wrong. I knew enough about God to believe that someday I would answer to Him.
But knowing there is a God and knowing God as Father are two very different things.
For me, that changed when I came to know Christ.
I wrote more about that part of my own faith journey in I Always Believed in God. But I Didn’t Know Him.
I began to understand something I had missed for many years. Christianity wasn’t a transaction where I brought God enough “good” things to balance out the bad ones. It wasn’t God standing at a distance waiting to see whether I could straighten myself out.
The relationship was possible because of what Christ had already done for me.
Paul describes it this way:
“The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’”
— Romans 8:15 (NIV)
That word Father means more to me now than it once did.
God is still holy. Sin is still real. Repentance is real too. Nothing in the story Jesus told minimizes any of that.
The son really did leave.
He really did squander what he had been given.
And he really did turn around and come home.
But when he did, he discovered what his father was like.
Maybe We’ve Been Looking Down the Wrong Road
There are plenty of ways to get far from God.
Sometimes it’s obvious. Other times it happens slowly. A person can spend years building a life that looks pretty good from the outside while still keeping God at a comfortable distance.
I understand that because I lived part of my own life that way.
Maybe that’s one reason this story means more to me now than it once did.
The older I get, the less interested I am in pretending that any of us comes to God with much to brag about. We come with our failures, our pride, our wrong turns and the things we wish we could do over.
Yet the Christian faith isn’t ultimately about how successfully we found our way back to God.
It’s about what God did to bring us home.
Paul makes that even clearer in Galatians:
“But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.”
— Galatians 4:4–5 (NIV)
God didn’t simply wait for humanity to figure things out.
He sent His Son.
Jesus went to the cross and did what we could never do for ourselves. That’s why becoming a child of God isn’t a reward for finally getting our act together. It’s something we receive through Christ.
That changes the way I see the road in Jesus’ story.
I used to notice mostly the son walking home.
Now I notice the Father running toward him.
Still a Son
The father in Jesus’ story didn’t celebrate what his son had done.
He celebrated that his son had come home.
“For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”
— Luke 15:24 (NIV)
This son of mine.
After everything that had happened, that’s what the father called him.
There are consequences to the choices we make in this life. Some things that are lost aren’t restored exactly as they were. Jesus’ story doesn’t give us permission to treat sin casually.
But it does show us something about the heart of the Father.
I don’t know how far someone can run in a lifetime.
But when I picture that road now, I’m not sure the most important question is how far away the son had gotten.
Maybe it’s this:
What kind of Father runs to meet him when he finally turns toward home?
In Jesus’ story, we get the answer.
And through Jesus Christ, we see just how far God was willing to go to bring us home.
More Straight Talk on Faith
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