While Still Far Off

Luke 15 opens with a complaint. Tax collectors, widely seen as collaborators and cheats, and others known as sinners kept coming to listen to Jesus. The Pharisees, a strict and devout religious party, and the scribes, experts in the Jewish law, grumbled that he welcomed people like that and even ate with them. Jesus answered with three stories about lost things: a sheep, a coin and a son. This verse is the turning point of the third.

In the story, a younger son asks his father for his share of the inheritance early, travels to a distant country and wastes it all. When famine hits, he ends up feeding pigs, animals the Jewish law counted unclean, and he is hungry enough to envy their food. At last he comes to his senses and heads home with a speech prepared. He no longer deserves to be treated as a son, he will say. Perhaps his father will take him on as a hired servant.

Then this verse. The son is still far off, still carrying his speech, when his father sees him. He is “moved with compassion.” Luke’s Greek word for it comes from the word for a person’s insides: the kind of love you feel in your gut. And he runs. “Fell on his neck” is an old way of saying he threw his arms around him. He kisses his son before a word is spoken. When the speech begins, it stops short of the hired-servant line, and the father calls for the best robe, a ring and a feast.

The story doesn’t end at the feast. The older brother is angry at the welcome and refuses to go in, so the father goes out to plead with him too. He is a mirror held up to the grumblers from the opening verses, and Jesus ends the story before we hear his answer. Both sons are invited in.

Jesus’ first two stories end with joy in heaven when one lost person turns back; the third puts that joy on a father’s face. The younger son came home with nothing to offer but his return, and it was enough. However long the road looks from where you stand, in the story Jesus told, it is the father who runs.