Finding What We’ve Lost
Luke 15:11-32
A couple of years ago, I was blessed to win tickets to the practice round of The Master’s golf tournament. The Masters is one of four majors in professional golf and is considered to be hallowed ground to golfers. It’s in Augusta, GA in the rolling hills and is surrounded by blooming azaleas during the tournament. Very few golfers actually get to attend the Masters without paying several 1000 dollars. I invited a golfing buddy to come with me. When we got to Mobile, he asked if I had brought our GPS. I said, I thought you were bringing it. He thought I was bringing it. He pulled out his iphone and we used that to guide us and let me tell you, it took us on every backroad and two lane hiway through AL and GA there was. At one point, we passed through a section of a town where there were rundown houses and empty storefronts. An uneasy feeling swept over me. I realized we were lost and had been for a while and we didn’t even know it.
That’s how it works in life as well. You take gradual steps and don’t think anything about it until you suddenly realize how far off path you’ve gone and you say, “Man, I’m lost” And once you realize that, a pit forms in your stomach. There’s no worse feeling than being lost. The Prodigal Son is the story of a younger son who was struggling like many young people do trying to find out of what he wanted out of life. He wanted to be happy and have purpose the same way we do. He wanted to find fulfillment the same as us. He just went about it the wrong way. What this younger son struggled with is what many of us struggle with. And if we’re honest, it’s the way that many of us have gone in our lives.
There are four things we need to know about this parable. First, parables often have a shocking element to catch the audience’s attention and that’s exactly what the father does in this story. He does the unthinkable: he divides up the property with the older son getting his 2/3 and the younger his 1/3. I want you to notice verse 12 when he says - “He divided up his livelihood.” The Greek word for livelihood is “bios” which is translated most of the time as “life.” The father didn’t have a retirement fund or stocks. All he had was his land which had been handed down through his family since the time the Jews took possession of the Holy Land and divided it up amongst the 12 tribes and its people. This land was their life. It not only provided for and sustained them but it connected them to God’s blessing and their identity as His chosen people. Why does the father divide the land up? Because it’s the only way he can leave the door open for reconciliation with his son. The other alternative was to hit him and excommunicate him from the family. So he accepts the humiliation and pain of his life being ripped apart and being unfairly judged by his community who wouldn’t have understood or approved of the way he handled this.
The Son took far less than the value of the land. Verse 13 says “not many days later” he left town with the cash.” While the younger son can gain possession of his share of the estate, according to Jewish law he has no right of disposal while his father is alive. Thus, to generate cash, the younger son can only sell the future rights to his part of the estate when his father dies. From a prospective buyer’s perspective, waiting for the father’s death significantly reduces the value of such a transaction. Therefore, the “purchase price” would have to be considerably less than it would be if the father was deceased. Hence, in order to quickly raise cash, the younger son would have had to significantly discount (lower) the purchase price to future rights of his portion of the land to “move it” quickly. This just pours salt on an already profoundly open wound. And when you consider that the buyer was likely a Gentile, or a representative for Herod’s extended family, who already controlled 68% of the land in Israel, this transaction becomes unfathomable to Jesus’ hearers.
All of this just adds to the outrageousness of Jesus’ story. Yet, this father is a picture of God, who gave His life so we could be reconciled because instead of shunning us and forcing us to pay the price for our own sins, He allowed his life to be ripped apart so we could be reconciled to Him. “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.” (2 Cor. 5:19)
Today, I want to focus on the question of “How do you find something that’s lost, especially if you’re the one that’s lost? First, I need to know what I’m looking for. The prodigal son leaves home in search of something: freedom. He wants to live life on his terms. He thought he knew best and that’s why he was willing to cause his family incredible pain, embarrassment and disappointment. You see when he asked his father for his inheritance, he was essentially saying, “I wish you were dead.” Because when do you get an inheritance? After someone dies. What a shameful insult to the father! What insubordination! It’s unheard of and unthinkable to shame your family in such a way. Jesus’ listeners would have assumed that surely this father will severely punish this insubordinate son (remember those family “honor” killings we read about from time to time in Pakistan.) In fact, the Law said the father was to punch his son square in the face and then drive him out of the house by giving him repeated blows. He was considered no longer to be a part of the family. It could also be handled by the community. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says, “if a man has a stubborn and rebellious son…bring him to the elders at the gate of his town…then all the men of his town shall stone him to death.”
The Scripture states that the younger son “left his own country to go to a faraway place.” 13b Most of us would probably surmise that this younger son went a 1000 miles away from home. But to a first-century observant Jew, any reference to a far away place would not so much mean a geographically distant place as it would to a morally distant place. In Jesus’ time, a day’s journey was an 18-mile walk, and there were a number of morally distant places that distance from Capernaum. Some of these were the cities of the Decapolis. The Decapolis was 10 Greek cities to the East and southeast of Galilee. Alexander the Great built them to import Greek culture, language, and philosophy to further subjugate the people he conquered. These cities were magnificent architectural venues. A grand main street (the cardo) was lined with columns and flanked on either side with temples to various gods, including those offering ritual prostitution. Also lining the streets were all the pleasures of Greco-Roman life – theatres, arenas, gymnasiums, and baths. These cities were populated mostly by Gentiles. Yet some were Jews who had bought into the Greek culture and participated in all the hedonistic pleasures of Greco-Roman life. If you wanted to immerse yourself in hedonism, the Decapolis is where you wanted to be! It was a place where no one would know who you are, let alone who your father is, and no one would care how you chose to behave or indulge yourself. And what happens in the Decapolis stays in the Decapolis!
Second, when I’m lost, I need to retrace my steps. “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.” So he got up and went to his father back the way he came. Have you ever had a moment in life where you ask, “How did I get here?” Here’s the son, a Jewish man feeding these pigs, which isn’t coshure. He’s hungry and thinking about eating the pig’s feed, carob pods which the body cannot digest and he asks, “How did I get here?” But the son “came to himself” in the pig pen. Now that phrase is a Jewish idiom for repentance. What is repentance? Repent in Greek is metanoia means to change your mind. When we’re on the wrong track, God will use circumstances and everything else at his disposal to get us to come to our senses and change our mind. In Hebrew, the word for repentance is ‘teshuva’ which refers to changing your direction and going back to God’s path. This is what the Proverbs writer refers to when he says, “Train up a child in the way he should go so when he gets older, he will, not depart from it.” Teshuva is coming back to the path your parents taught you when you were young. And that’s what the younger son does.
The prodigal son comes to his senses, he repents and it produces a desire to go home. 2 Corinthians 7:9-10 says, “For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death.” The young man decided to go home but what happens is not what he expected. He says, “I’ve sinned against heaven and against you. I’m no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.” This isn’t him saying, “Dad, I’m willing to be a slave.” Slaves didn’t get paid. Instead, he wants to get paid like a skilled craftsman so he can repay his debt. Craftsmen didn’t live on the land. They lived off property which meant the son could avoid some of the humiliation of what he did by not having to be around the scene of the crime all the time.
Many people think, “I need to get my life right with God, so I’ll clean up my act and God will accept me.” They commit to trying harder and doing better and then God will accept them. The prodigal son crafts this speech believing his father will not accept him as his son because he has disrespected him so severely. But what he doesn’t realize, and neither do we, is this: God isn’t waiting for you to clean up your act. By saying you’ll try to do better, you’re trying to be your own savior. You’re asking God to accept you based on your good works. In other words, you’re trying to earn God’s love and grace. God instead wants us to ask for grace because all of us are hopeless without it. That’s why by the time the son gets home, he drops the negotiation from the speech and simply asks his father for forgiveness and grace. “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.”
Third, when I’m lost, I need to receive God’s grace. I want you to notice something here: the younger son alters his speech. He doesn’t ask to be a skilled worker in his house. He realizes that he has screwed things up so badly that there’s only one thing he can ask of his father – grace. Grace means getting what we don’t deserve. And what does this son deserve? He wished his father dead when he asked for the inheritance and sold the father’s ancestral land to Gentiles. His father had every right to enact the Kezazah ceremony which is a ceremony of cutting off a son off from his people. After the ceremony, they’d have nothing to do with the wayward person. This was the father’s right but instead, he ran to meet his son, which older men never did in Jewish society. When he found his son, he kissed him - the word “Kissed him” in Greek literally means he kissed him again and again, symbolizing that this father was accepting his son and the relationship was restored.
When we come to our senses, God will come running. Notice what he says to the Father: “I need grace from you.” Instead of manipulating or dictating or trying to negotiate, he fell at his Father’s feet and said, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ I’m sorry. I need grace.” Because if you choose to come home and ask God to forgive you, He will come running and you will experience love, grace, forgiveness and mercy like you’ve never known. Amen.
