I'm sure you've heard the story about the Prodigal Son. Whether you grew up going to church or not, you've heard the tale of the wayward youth who took his inheritance, left home, and began leading a life of self-gratifying behavior, went broke, returned home, and was welcomed with open arms by his father.
Now, if you've read the story carefully, you'll recognize a third character in the story: the older son. This son stuck by the father through thick and thin. He worked the farm with everyone else just as he was supposed to, and never turned his back on good ol' Dad.
Without tooting my own horn too much, I'll admit that I've been a Christian my whole life, and a pretty good kid at that. But that's not to say I haven't sinned. I've told a few lies. Okay. I've told a lot of them. I've lost my temper. I've neglected to treat other people with the dignity and respect that are befitting the image of God. But when you compare that to being a Christian my whole life, it never seemed like anything. I empathized with that older brother! It wasn't fair! He was obedient his whole life, and he got no extra reward for it. For years, this never made any sense, and I struggled with the story because of it. Then I had a professor explain this to me:
The idea of Grace made me uncomfortable.
I know. It sounds really stupid. But it's true. You see, we understand justice. We grow up being taught justice. But grace? Grace changes everything.
Grace, to our human understanding, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. We like knowing that we are going to be forgiven for all the mistakes we've made and will make. It's the fact that God forgives everyone else too that makes us uncomfortable.
They hurt us. They need to be punished for it, and God is just going to forgive them for it?
It wasn't until college that I realized an important truth: even though I thought I was
the older son, I wasn’t. Nobody's the older son. We're all the Prodigal Son, and to consider ourselves any different is utter foolishness and arrogance on our part. To assume that our depravity does not run as deep because we sit in a pew on Sunday or sing a few praise and worship songs at a youth rally on Friday night is wrong. Thinking this way underestimates the twistedness and corruption of sin, and underestimating sin sells short the redemptive nature and miracle that is the Death and Resurrection of Christ. Have you ever thought about how evil sin is? Sin is so evil and so powerful, it took death on a cross by God himself in order to purify us and make us holy so that we could spend eternity with him.
The story isn’t even about us—it’s not about the sons at all. The story is about the father. What the younger son did is of little consequence. The fact is he left. He walked away. He high-tailed it out of there. The only reason the story tells anything of what he did on his self-exile is to highlight the grace of the father. The story isn't about the shame of the son; it's about how the shame of the son cannot stand up to the awesome power of the love of the Father. ◊
