The
Merciful Father

Luke 15: 11-32   

This is one of the most beloved, and often-told stories of Jesus. It is comforting because we know we are sinners, capable of sinking low, and needing a merciful Father-God.

But, it is more than a story, it is a Jesus Parable . We know parables are disturbing and draw us in with subtlety. They have been called “arrows of God” for they pierce us at a weak spot and make us painfully aware of the need to change. They invite us to enter into the parable despite being puzzled or even ‘put off’ by it.

Here, we are told of a father who does strange things. He is stupid in our terms, letting himself be used by his son, transgressing Jewish tradition, losing the inheritance and allowing the family to break up. .

When the younger son, the public sinner is at the end of his rope, knowing his father from experience, he dares to go home. The father humbles himself further, by running to meet him, giving him more than he lost –the ring, the robe, the fatted lamb. He re-instates him.

The private sinner is the elder son, a ‘righteous one’ who has stayed ‘all these years’ and slaved for the father. The elder son now is at the end of his rope, his patience has run out, he is bitter and excluded. He is invited to come into the celebration, to be different. He is invited to come to new life.

Parables don’t end happily; they bring us to the edge of a cliff. We are forced to choose.

In this one, when the father goes back to the celebration, the elder son is left to decide: he has the opportunity to be the reconciler, to unite both sons to one another and to father - not a strange, reckless father but a merciful and compassionate one.

One cannot but hope that he did go in and there find not simply a reward for all the years, but great joy; not a goat but the fatted calf; not with a few friends, but with many friends, and recognize freedom and mercy, and come alive as a son and brother and closer to the Kingdom of God.

June Peck OP