Reflections on the Prodigal Son

 

Hey, it's me again. I know, I know... Kinda overdue for a blog post. It's been like a month and a half.

I guess I've been biding my time cuz I was waiting for inspiration to strike on what to write about. Then a very close sister of mine randomly suggested the parable of the prodigal son.

The idea was very random. But as I thought on it, the idea grew on me. So here we go.

The parable begins in Luke 15:11, and we've all heard it. A rich man has two sons. The younger demands his share of the inheritance, he goes to a far off place, and he wastes his money. Reduced to working a job feeding pigs, the son is so hungry that he starts craving the food that the pigs are eating.

So he decides to go home and become a servant to his father, deciding that he is ill-suited to be a son. But what he finds is that his father has been waiting for him. The father welcomes the son and throws a feast.

Now the older brother enters the story, upset that his selfish, wasteful brother is getting royal treatment when he, the responsible one, never got any such celebration. But the father tells him "Look, he had his inheritance. So at this point, everything I have left belongs to you. So why are you so upset? It's like I got a son back from the dead! We must celebrate his return!"

The implications are clear. The parable fits right in line with the woman who lost a coin and the shepherd who left 99 sheep to find one. The story bears themes of forgiveness, redemption, love, and mercy. It fits well with other teachings, like, "I require mercy, not sacrifice."

 *

And one might even draw parallels between this story and Jesus' teachings about the gentiles being admitted into the kingdom. We are sons of Noah, and also sons of Adam, just as much as the Jews, yet the Jews bore the word of God through the centuries and millennia before Jesus came, all the while the rest of the world made up their own religions and twisted morality. And yet, after all this, God sent the Gospel out to the Gentiles and welcomed them into the fold like the father in the parable welcomed a son who had wasted an inheritance and had fallen so low that he took work feeding swine (which to a Jew would be degrading humiliation).

And as a Gentile myself, how grateful I am that we were given the keys to the kingdom. Yet, one more object lesson can be drawn from this parable.

I think back on the life I have already lived. I grew up in a Christian home, the son of a preacher, and I sought Christ as my own when I was about eleven. In this story, I call the kingdom of heaven the inheritance that I received.

Now, the kingdom of heaven isn't an inheritance one can exactly squander and waste in the sense of running out of a finite thing. But one can waste one's earthly life. One can reject their kingdom inheritance and chase after the desires of their own heart like the prodigal child spent his money on parties and prostitutes.

And in this sense, I did wander astray. My early teen years were filled with doubting the authenticity of the religion I had been raised on. I questioned if the God of the Bible was the only God. If He was the true God. And my later teen years came with living after my own desires, with no thought to considering what God wanted. I struggled with severe depression, and in my early twenties, I contemplated ending my life. 

 I was a mess. An absolute disaster. Suicide, to me and my logic-oriented mind was as utterly deplorable as feeding pigs would have been to a Jew. Yet there I was, thinking about it at my rock bottom.

 Yet, even like the father in the parable, Yahweh didn't abandon me to that pit. He clothed me in his mercy and welcomed me into his grace. I've seen his hand over my life in so many ways even just in the last couple of years. It can still be a difficult road to navigate. Even when seeking the Lord's will, it can sometimes be difficult to know for sure the difference between his leading and my own thoughts. Yet having that desire to follow really does make a difference in the choices being made.

The takeaway has many different angles. We have the prodigal son, a lesson that we can not succeed in life apart from the Lord. But also, no matter how far you've fallen, if you regret your actions and want to try and make amends, DO IT.

There's the father, a picture of how far Adonai's love and forgiveness goes. When we come back to him, he forgives us and celebrates our redemption.

And there is the older brother, jealous and insecure, longing for the attention and embrace that the prodigal got, while lacking the faith to notice every blessing from his father every day. This can be taken as a warning against such behaviors and an invitation to join the celebration of each newly redeemed believer, no matter the background they came out of.

And that's all I have. Those are my thoughts on the parable of the prodigal son. So...

What are your thoughts?