As we've been going through the series in Luke, the past couple of weeks I've been reading a book about Jesus' parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15. Last I heard (although it's subject to change) our current study in Luke will be focusing on Jesus' Galilean ministry, and will take us through the end of chapter 9. So in thinking that we won't be studying this familiar parable during the current series, I wanted to share some of what I learned from this book, Tim Keller's
The Prodigal God.
You may be thinking,
The prodigal son? I've heard that story a million times. Son asks dad for inheritance, goes and spoils it, living a lavishly sinful lifestyle, comes to the end of the rope, comes home, and dad embraces him as if his dead son is alive again. I get it. God's grace is enough for any sinner. So what is there to learn here? That's pretty much what I thought, as for the most part, that's how I've heard it taught time after time. But after listening to Keller present much of the material in this book, I was intrigued to get it all carefully thought & written out. Bear with me as I try to do justice to material that Keller says he first learned from one of his mentors, the late Dr. Edmund P. Clowney (in a sermon since published as chapter 3, "Sharing the Father's Welcome" in
Preaching Christ in All of Scripture).
First, a couple paragraphs from Keller's introduction, as a sort of explanation for the book's title:
I will not use the parable's most common name: the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It is not right to single out only one of the sons as the sole focus of the story. Even Jesus doesn't call it the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but begins the story saying, "a man had two sons." The narrative is as much about the elder brother as the younger, and as much about the father as the sons. And what Jesus says about the older brother is one of the most important messages given to us in the Bible. The parable might better be called the Two Lost Sons.
The word "prodigal" does not mean "wayward" but, according to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, "recklessly spendthrift." It means to spend until you have nothing left. This term is therefore as appropriate for describing the father in the story as his younger son. The father's welcome to the repentant son was literally reckless ...
In order to avoid reproducing or paraphrasing the whole book (it's only about 130 pages in the hardcover, which is rather small at about 7.5 by 5.5 inches), I plan on sharing just a few notes from each chapter/section in order to whet your appetite. If you haven't guessed yet, I highly recommend this book.
Chapter 1 - The People Around Jesus
Keller points out that there are two groups of people there that day listening to Jesus tell this story. The first were "tax collectors and sinners," which correspond to the younger brother - leaving traditional morality and living wildly. The second were the "Pharisees and the teachers of the law," and they correspond to the elder brother - holding to the traditional morality of their upbringing. It's easy to identify the younger son as a sinner, but Jesus tells this parable to point out that the Pharisees (i.e. the elder brother) are no better off than the tax collectors (i.e. the younger brother).
Chapter 2 - The Two Lost Sons
The younger son, in asking for his inheritance, essentially tells his father that he wishes he was dead. He's choosing his father's things, but not his father. What's even more shocking is the fact that the father agrees to the younger son's wishes. When the younger son eventually returns, he acknowledges that he has asked out of the family, and hopes only to be taken back as a hired servant, in order to make restitution. Once again the father outdoes his son's shocking behavior by accepting him back as his son, throwing a big feast in celebration of his return.
The elder son, however, is mad at what has transpired. When the father welcomes the younger son back into the family, he is in effect putting him back into the will, meaning that no longer is the elder son the lone rightful heir, he now has to split the inheritance, which has been diminished by his younger brother, with the one who devalued it. He refuses to celebrate his brother's return and calls out his father for never allowing him to throw a party like that.
If one of us deserves a celebration like this, surely it's me, not my rebellious younger brother, he thought. How does the father respond to his elder son's explosion of disrespect and entitlement? By reminding him that he has always been with him, and that everything he has is also his son's.
But that's where the story ends. Jesus leaves us hanging - does the elder brother accept his father's invitation to come in and celebrate his brother's return? Jesus does this to demand a response from the Pharisees - how will they respond to his message? Will they continue to denounce Jesus for welcoming and eating with sinners, or will they celebrate God's grace to sinners?
Chapter 3 - Redefining Sin
"Jesus uses the younger and elder brothers to portray the two basic ways people try to find happiness and fulfillment: the way of
moral conformity and the way of
self-discovery."
Both the "bad" son and the "good" son are from their father, yet only the "bad" son enters the father's feast. Why doesn't the elder brother? He gives the answer himself - "I've never disobeyed you." I remember some time ago hearing Quintin preach on this parable and making the observation that the elder brother made the mistake of relating to his father as a hired worker rather than a son. He wanted to earn his father's love, or at least his inheritance, instead of accepting and delighting in his father's love. Says Keller, "The elder brother is not losing the father's love in spite of his goodness, but
because of it. It is not his sins that create the barrier between him and his father, it's the pride he has in his moral record..." Both sons wanted their father's things, not their father himself.
This paragraph hit me like a ton of bricks:
In her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor says of her character Hazel Motes that "there was a deep, black, wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin." This is a profound insight. You can avoid Jesus as Savior by keeping all the moral laws. If you do that, then you have "rights." God owes you answered prayers, and a good life, and a ticket to heaven when you die. You don't need a Savior who pardons you by free grace, for you are your own Savior.
Keller points out that while both brothers are wrong, both are loved by their father:
"The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism, or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles--it is something else altogether."
Keller also shares the following story:
When a newspaper posed the question, "What's Wrong with the World?" the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response: "Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton." That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus.
Chapter 4 - Redefining Lostness
This story comes after two other parables of the lost being found - a shepherd finding a lost sheep and a woman finding a lost coin. Then Jesus tells this story about two lost sons. The younger son's "lostness" is pretty obvious. The elder brother, however, is no better off, just lost in a different way. He became angry, as life didn't go his way. Elder brothers think if they live right, then they should have a good life, that God should reward them. They cannot tolerate suffering when they live up to their own moral standards.
Says Keller:
Elder brothers may do good to others, but not out of delight in the deeds themselves or for the love of people or the pleasure of God. They are not really feeding the hungry and clothing the poor, they are feeding and clothing themselves. The heart's fundamental self-centeredness is not only kept intact but nurtured by fear-based moralism. This can and does erupt in shocking ways. Why do you think so many churches are plagued with gossip and fighting? Or why do so many moral people live apparently chaste lives and then suddenly fall into the most scandalous sins? Underneath the seeming unselfishness is great self-centeredness.
Chapter 5 - The True Elder Brother
In the first two parables in Luke 15, someone goes out to find what was lost. But not here. No one set out to search for the younger brother. This leads us to ask who should have gone out looking for the lost son. Keller looks back to the first elder brother, back to Genesis 4, where he essentially tells Cain, "Yes, you are your brother's keeper." Likewise in this parable, the elder brother should have been the one out looking for his brother. The elder brother should have been moved by love for his younger brother to sacrifice part of his inheritance to bring his brother home. Instead of being so willing, the elder brother is angry at the thought of his reckless brother coming back and stealing part of his rightful inheritance. It is at the elder brother's cost that the younger brother is welcomed home, back into the family.
The Pharisees stand in the place of the elder brother of the story - the one who is unwilling to pay the cost to find what was lost, the one who is unwilling to leave his rightful place to do so, the one who is unwilling to rejoice at the lost being found, the dead becoming alive again. Instead of a Pharisee, we get the True Elder Brother:
Think of the kind of brother we need. We need one who does not just go to the next country to find us but who will come all the way from heaven to earth. We need one who is willing to pay not just a finite amount of money, but, at the infinite cost of his own life to bring us into God's family, for our debt is so much greater. Either as elder brothers or as younger brothers we have rebelled against the father. We deserve alienation, isolation, and rejection. The point of the parable is that forgiveness always involves a price--someone has to pay. There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself. Our true elder brother paid our debt, on the cross, in our place.
There Jesus was stripped naked of his robe and dignity so that we could be clothed with a dignity and standing we don't deserve. On the cross Jesus was treated as an outcast so that we could be brought into God's family freely by grace. There Jesus drank the cup of eternal justice so that we might have the cup of the Father's joy. There was no other way for the heavenly Father to bring us in, except at the expense of our true elder brother.
Chapter 6 - Redefining Hope
The parable stands in the Bible's repeated theme of exile and homecoming. The younger brother sought his own way, but soon found himself longing for home. Keller talks about how we all have this longing for home, but that all our experiences of homecoming in this life fall short of that longing. Anybody out there get disappointed when family get-togethers - think Christmas - don't live up to expectations, or don't match the memories from childhood? All of this reflects the widespread brokenness around us that began with the Fall of Adam and Eve into sin in the Garden of Eden. Just as the parable ends with a feast of celebration, so too does the book of Revelation. This feast - the marriage supper of the Lamb - will occur in the New Jerusalem - the perfected Creation of God with Him present. A place with no more disease or suffering or decay
or death or war or hunger or thirst or tears or mourning or pain. Says Keller, "Jesus, unlike the founder of any other major faith, holds out hope for ordinary human life. ... Jesus will make the world our perfect home again."
Chapter 7 - The Feast of the Father
In the final chapter, Keller returns to the idea of the feast, looking at 4 ways that our salvation in Christ corresponds to ways to experience a feast:
1. Salvation is Experiential
Rather than just believing that we can be saved by Christ, we can experience that salvation, like we experience the sights, smells, sounds, and tastes of a feast. Keller shares the following quote from Jonathan Edwards:
There is a difference between believing that God is holy and gracious, and having a new sense on the heart of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. The difference between believing that God is gracious and tasting that God is gracious is as different as having a rational belief that honey is sweet and having the actual sense of its sweetness.
2. Salvation is Material
Just as a meal is a physical experience, this world, which God created "good" is a part of our salvation and part of the renewal that Christ's work brings:
This world is not simply a theater for individual conversion narratives, to be discarded at the end when we all go to heaven. No, the ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering, and death. The climax of history is not a higher form of disembodied consciousness but a feast. ...
Christianity, therefore, is perhaps the most materialistic of the world's faiths. Jesus's miracles were not so much violations of the natural order, but a restoration of the natural order. God did not create a world with blindness, leprosy, hunger, and death in it. Jesus's miracles were signs that someday all these corruptions of his creation would be abolished. Christians therefore can talk of saving the soul and of building social systems that deliver safe streets and warm homes in the same sentence. With integrity.
3. Salvation is Individual
Just as a meal provides growth & nourishment for our bodies, so we grow in Christ by continuing to feed on the Gospel:
What makes you faithful or generous is not just a redoubled effort to follow moral rules. Rather, all change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out of the changes that understanding creates in your heart. Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting.
The gospel is therefore not just the ABCs of the Christian life, but the A to Z of the Christian life. Our problems arise largely because we don't continually return to the gospel to work it in and live it out. That is why Martin Luther wrote, "The truth of the Gospel is the principle article of all Christian doctrine. ... Most necessary is it that we know this article well, teach it to others, and beat it into their heads continually."
4. Salvation is Communal
When was the last time you were at a feast, and no one else was there? Feasts are by nature communal, giving people an opportunity to get to know each other. Likewise, our salvation brings us into the family of God, where we get to know each other, serve each other, learn from and teach each other - in short, to live life together.
Keller shares the following words from C.S. Lewis, reflecting on the unexpected death of his friend Charles Williams, an author who was a part of a group of friends, which included Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkein, known as the Inklings:
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's [Tolkien's] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him "to myself" now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald ... In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah 6:3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall have.
Keller adds:
Lewis is saying that it took a community to know an individual. How much more would this be true of Jesus Christ? Christians commonly say they want a relationship with Jesus, that they want to "get to know Jesus better." You will never be able to do that by yourself. You must be deeply involved in the church, in Christian community, with strong relationships of love and accountability. Only if you are part of a community of believers seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus will you ever get to know him and grow into his likeness.
Keller closes his book with one of my favorite passages from the book of Isaiah:
On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove the disgrace of his people
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken. (Isaiah 25:6-8)
