This is a story and a teaching about one of the most common beliefs a person can carry, which is that love has to be paid for. Do enough good, stay clean long enough, keep your record tidy, and eventually you will have earned your place back. Plenty of people were raised on some form of it, in church and out of church both, and plenty of people are still quietly working off a debt they can never seem to shrink.
Jesus told a story to a group of religious men who had been grumbling about the company he kept, and in it a young man who had wrecked his life walks home with an apology and a repayment plan rehearsed and ready. His father sees him coming and runs, and the plan never makes it out of the boy’s mouth.
So let us listen to the whole story the way Jesus told it, starting with the complaint that made him tell it.
The grumble that started it
Jesus was eating with tax collectors and with people the religious teachers of the day called sinners. Tax collectors worked for Rome, taking money out of their own neighbors’ pockets and keeping a cut, and most people counted them as traitors.
The Pharisees and the scribes were watching. The Pharisees were a strict religious movement, careful men who worked hard at keeping the law exactly. The scribes were the scholars who copied and taught it.
And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.Luke 15:2
Jesus answered them with three stories in a row. A lost sheep. A lost coin. And then this one, about a man with two sons.
The younger son leaves
The younger son came to his father and asked for his share of the inheritance right then, while his father was still alive and well. In that world an inheritance came to you when your father died. Asking for it early was as good as saying out loud that you wished he were already dead and you wanted the money now.
The father divided the property and gave it to him.
The boy gathered everything he owned, sold what he could not carry, and traveled to a far country, well outside the reach of anybody who knew his family. He spent all of it there, living loose and free while the money lasted. Then a hard famine came over that whole land, and he had nothing left, and no one at home to send for.
He hired himself out to a man there who sent him into the fields to feed pigs. For a Jewish boy, pigs were unclean animals, so he had landed as low as the story could put him. He was hungry enough to want the pods the pigs were eating, and no one gave him anything.
Then Luke says he came to himself.
He thought about his father’s house, and how the hired workers there had more than enough bread while he was starving in a field. And on that thought he wrote himself a speech to say when he got home.
I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.Luke 15:18-19
The last line of that speech is a job application. Make me one of your hired servants. A hired servant was a day laborer, paid a wage, free to leave, nothing to do with the family. The boy was going home to work, to draw pay, and to slowly hand it back until the books balanced.
He got up and started walking.
The father on the road
The boy was still a long way off, a small shape on the road, when his father saw him.
And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20
An older man of standing in that time did not run. Running meant pulling up the long robe he wore and showing his legs, and grown men of position simply did not do it in front of the village. He ran anyway, the whole distance, and threw his arms around the boy’s neck and kissed him, before one word had been said.
Then the son started his speech.
And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.Luke 15:21
That is where it ends. The line about the hired servants, the wage, the repayment, never comes out. His father was already turning to the servants.
But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.Luke 15:22-24
The best robe in the house was what an honored guest wore. The ring carried the family seal. A man pressed that seal into wax to sign for the household. So the ring meant authority to act in the father’s name. Shoes were for sons, because servants in that house went barefoot. The fatted calf was the animal kept and fed for the biggest day the family would ever have, and it fed a whole village.
The music started, and they began to celebrate.
The older brother in the yard
The older son had been out working in the field the whole time, and he knew nothing about any of it. Coming in at the end of the day, close to the house, he heard music and dancing. He did not go in. He called one of the servants over and asked what was going on. The servant told him his brother had come home, and that his father had killed the fatted calf because he had gotten him back safe and well.
He was angry, and he stayed out in the yard and would not go in.
So the party carried on inside without him, and his father came out to the yard and asked him to come in.
And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends.Luke 15:29
These many years do I serve thee. He was counting. Years of work, a clean record, no order disobeyed. In his mind all of that should have bought him something by now. It had not even bought him a young goat for a party with his friends.
His father did not shame him and did not send him away.
And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.Luke 15:31
And there the story stops. Jesus never tells us whether the older brother went inside.
What the father did to the ledger
Both sons had a ledger. The younger one wanted to work off what he had spent. The older one thought his years of service had been building up credit. Neither of them was wrong about how the world usually works, and both of them were wrong about their own father.
Everything the older son had been trying to earn, he had held the whole time, for no reason other than being his father’s son. Everything the younger son came home to buy back had already been given to him on the road, before he opened his mouth.
Coming home still mattered. The boy did get up out of that field, and he did walk, and he did say he was sorry. What Jesus put in the story is the order of it. The father was watching the road. He moved first, while the boy was still far off, and the love got there ahead of the apology and well ahead of the accounting.
That is the God Jesus revealed. Not a keeper of accounts who lets you back in once the balance is settled, but a father who is already running.
If you have a speech of your own
Some people have been rehearsing one for years. The apology. The plan to make it up. The list of things you would do to earn your way back to God, or to a family, or to your own good opinion of yourself. Somebody taught you that love is paid down slowly. They may well have loved you, and believed it themselves. The belief still puts a weight on you that God never asked you to carry.
The father in the story is running. Not because the speech was finished and not because the record came back clean. He is running while the boy is still a long way off.
Those arms are already open, and there is nothing to buy.
Come walk with us through these old stories, slow and plain, with the hard parts left in. There is a robe waiting, and a place at the table, and it was never for sale.