Few stories in the Bible speak so clearly about love, compassion, forgiveness, and our refusal to accept grace as the story we call, “The prodigal Son.” I imagine that most of us are familiar with this text. Few parables in the Gospels are as well known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Over the years you may have heard this story in word and song. You may have seen thought-provoking and marvelous renderings of the scene when the father embraces his lost son or races towards the one he believed was dead. Of all paintings, none have captured my attention as much as “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-1669). Unlike other paintings that depict a grand celebration in the encounter, Rembrandt’s rendering offers us something else—something deeply personal, melancholic, expressing deep joy and yet sadness. A Rembrandt scholar described the painting saying, “The whole represents a symbol of homecoming, of the darkness of human existence illuminated by tenderness, of weary and sinful mankind taking refuge in the shelter of God’s mercy.”[1]

Mercy is at the center of this story. It is important that we are clear about this from the beginning—for if we believe that the story is about anything else we will miss what Jesus is trying to tell us. Though this parable begins with the words, “A certain man had two sons,” the story begins elsewhere. The Gospel of Luke offers us a unique presentation of Jesus, one that is truly unlike that what we encounter in Matthew, Mark, and John. Though all gospels agree that Jesus is the messiah, for this Gospel writer, Jesus is a Jewish prophet who entered the chaos of our existence to bring salvation to the whole world—not just to Israel, but to all people, thus fulfilling God’s plan for creation.[2]

The story begins with Jesus doing what he does best, welcoming those who are neglected, rejected, oppressed, and despised. Luke 15:1 tells us that “All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him.” But the religious folks were not too happy about it. So they said to themselves, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” In response, Jesus begins to tell parables: “Suppose someone among you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them (v. 4)… Or what woman, if she owns ten silver coins and loses one of them, won’t light a lamp and sweep the house, searching her home carefully until she finds it? (v. 9).” Jesus begins to speak to the people about the nature of God, which is love. He tries to help them understand that God’s desire for all those created in the image of the divine is redemption. So those who believed that exclusion, condemnation, separation, and segregation were God’s will for anybody, are given a lesson on grace: which is freely given merciful love, aimed at nothing else other than incorporating the receiver into the grand love of God we find in Jesus Christ.[3] But the lessons didn’t stop there.

It’s one thing to talk about sheep and coins, but Jesus gets really personal and shares another parable. He tells them, “A certain man had two sons.” We know that this is a story about family, and we may be well-served to remember that at times the family is a complicated business. As we heard in the reading, the young son tells the father, “I want right now what’s coming to me.” (v. 12a) This young son who clearly lacks in wisdom and respect flaunts the “norms of good living” (as my grandmother would call it) by affronting his father with an unthinkable request—“give me my share of the inheritance.” In the times of Jesus, like in ours, an inheritance is something received after the death of a parent. Those who heard Jesus tell this story would have been horrified by this behavior, but much more when they heard that the father obliged the request of the son. As the patriarch of the household, he could have said, “are you out of your mind? Or Who do you think you are to make so shameful request?” But no, he does as requested and partiti