And the Five He Did

I. The Share

A boy stands before his father, and the first word spoken in this whole story is "father".

"Father, give me the share of the property that is due to me."1

No answer is recorded. No reproach, no condition, no time to think it over. All that is recorded is what the father does: he divides among them the life — that is what the text calls it, not the money but the life.2 And not many days later the youngest gathers everything together and leaves for a far country.

There he runs through it, in a life without brakes.3 Then it runs out, and as if the country had been waiting for him, a severe famine comes over that region. He clings to a citizen of that country, who sends him into his fields to tend pigs. There he stands, among the animals, and he would gladly fill his stomach with the pods the pigs are eating — and no one gives him anything.4 In the country where he handed everything out as long as he had it, no one gives him anything.

And then he comes to himself, and the first thought of the one who turns back is not a prayer and not a confession. It is a sum:

"How many of my father's hired hands have bread in abundance — and I am perishing here with hunger."5

What gets him to his feet is not remorse over his life. It is bread. He works out that the food is better at his father's, and on that sum his feet start moving; whatever else still has to come, comes only on the way.6

For on the way he composes his speech. Three sentences, carefully put together, from heavy to workable: first the guilt, then the conclusion, then the proposal.

"Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me one of your hired hands."7

It is a good plan, measured by what he has earned. The son is forfeited; the hired hand is still within reach. So he sets out for his father, with three sentences in his mouth and nothing in his hands.

II. The Road

His father saw him while he was still far off.8

Whoever sees someone coming from far away was already watching. Scanning the road is not one of the things a person does by accident; someone has stood there, day after day, with his eyes on the point where the road comes over the hill.

His father — a dignified Eastern man who never hurried for anything — lifts his robe and runs, like a fool, out onto the road, and falls on his neck. Grace gets there before the boy does. Grace runs.9

The text itself says it in two verbs. When the father saw him, it gripped him deep in his inmost being; and he ran, fell on his neck and kissed him.10 The kiss comes before the confession. Not one word of guilt has been confessed yet, and already there is kissing.

And then, with his father's arms still around him, the boy starts on his speech.

"Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son."11

Two sentences. The third does not come. The next verse begins: "But the father said to his slaves [...]"12 He may recite his sin, word for word as he rehearsed it. He may say that he is not worthy of sonship. But his plan to become a servant never gets its turn. The proposal he practiced the whole way stalls in the mouth that is being kissed.

What the father says to his slaves is about clothes and about food:

"Bring out the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And fetch the fattened calf and slaughter it; let us eat and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and is found."13

This son of mine. The boy had wanted to ask for a post as a hired hand; he receives a title he no longer dared to bear, spoken out loud to the staff he had wanted to stand among. And they begin to celebrate — the boy who this morning was still craving pig feed sits at his father's table, with a ring on his hand.

III. The Storyteller

This story comes from a mouth, and around that mouth stood a double ring.

In front, the tax collectors and the sinners, who had come close to hear Him. Behind them, the Pharisees and the scribes, and they grumble: "This man receives sinners, and He eats with them."14 It is meant as an accusation, and there is no denying it — at that moment He is sitting at table with the wrong people. He offers no defense. He begins to tell: a shepherd who has lost a sheep, a woman who has lost a coin, and then, as the third: "A man had two sons."15

Whoever paints the father of this story paints his own Father.16 And with this Storyteller it does not stop at painting. Of the prayer He taught us, He prayed four petitions himself, and for one He never asked.17 But there is a third thing, and it is the greatest: He did them.

The Name He made known. The kingdom He announced. The will of his Father He called his food. The bread He broke. The forgiveness He pronounced. And the last two petitions He underwent: He went into the wilderness and up onto the cross; the evil one He had already driven out before. No evangelist adds it up this way; I lay the passages side by side, nothing more.

The Name first. On the evening before his death, eyes raised, He tells his Father what has become of the first petition:

"I have made your Name visible to the people You have given Me out of the world."18

And the very last sentence of that long prayer is again about the Name, and it stands in two tenses at once: "I have made your Name known to them — and I will make it known."19 A perfect tense and a future, in one breath. Whoever speaks like that does not regard the first petition as settled; He is still at work on it, to this day.

Then the kingdom — the petition He never prayed. He did something else: He proclaimed it. The first sentence Mark records from his mouth is an announcement, not a request:

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news."20

And when the people of Capernaum want to hold on to Him, He says what He set out to do: "To the other towns too I must bring the good news of the kingdom of God, for that is why I was sent."21 What we ask to be allowed to come, He carries around as news that is already here. So He walks from town to town, with the answer to the second petition as luggage.

IV. Take, Bless, Break, Give

The third petition He gave a name that no one else has ever given it.

Noon, a well in Samaria. The disciples have gone into the town to buy food; when they come back, they urge Him: "Rabbi, eat." And He: "I have food to eat that you do not know." They look at each other — has someone brought Him something? Then He says it:

"My food is that I do the will of Him who sent Me, and that I finish his work."22

Thy will be done — for Him that is not a duty to be swallowed down. It is what keeps Him going; He calls it food. The disciples stand there with the groceries still in their hands.

And the bread, the fourth petition — the only one of the seven for which no prayer of His is recorded23 — He answered with his hands. On a grassy field, toward evening, five loaves and two fish against 5,000 men: He took the loaves, looked up to heaven, blessed them, broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd.24

Four verbs: take, bless, break, give. On the last evening, at table, the same four: He took bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them.25

And on the third day, at a table in Emmaus, one more time — two men who had not recognized Him by his face or by his voice recognized Him by those four movements: they saw Him for exactly one gesture's length — and it was enough.26

Give us this day our daily bread. Whoever has ever repeated that petition should know what kind of hands it lands in: hands that take the bread, bless it, break it and give it — and that can be recognized by this, even by someone who does not recognize Him.

V. Child

Capernaum, a house, and the house is too small. Not even at the door is there room left. Four men carry in a paralyzed man, cannot get through, climb onto the roof, break it open and lower the bed until it lies right at his feet. And Jesus, seeing their faith, says to the paralyzed man — who had come for his legs — as the very first word:

"Child, your sins are forgiven you."27

Child. That is how the fifth petition opens when He handles it: not as a formula but as a form of address, to someone who came for something else. And in the house of a Pharisee, to a woman who kissed his feet and kept kissing them — the text uses for her kiss the same intensified word as for the father on the road28 — He said it again: "Your sins are forgiven."29 What we ask to receive, He hands out; in his mouth forgive us has become I forgive, and the first word with it was "child".

The last two petitions He did not do in that way. Those He entered.

"Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tested by the devil."30

What He teaches us to ask to be spared — lead us not into testing — is where He was led, for 40 days, on purpose, and with the adversary named in full. And from the evil one He delivered: not himself, but everyone they brought to Him, one occupied life after another.

One afternoon brings it all together. It is the day on which a disciple asks: Lord, teach us to pray — and He gives them the prayer for the second time, with "thy kingdom come" in it once again.31 Further on in that same chapter He drives out a demon that was mute, and the mute man begins to speak. There are bystanders who ascribe it to the ruler of the demons, and to them He says:

"But if I drive out the demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you."32

The petition He had put in their mouths earlier that afternoon — let it come — is answered here by pointing to what has just happened: it is here. In that single verse the second petition and the seventh touch: where the evil one goes out, the kingdom is in.33 And the proof stands beside Him, and it is talking: a man who says something for the first time in his life. What he says is not recorded — that he speaks is the news.

VI. The Music

Back to the house of the parable, for the story is not over yet. Inside sits the boy with the ring; outside, evening is falling.

The older son is in the field. As he comes near the house, he hears music and dancing, and he calls one of the boys over and asks what this means. "Your brother has come, and your father has slaughtered the fattened calf, because he has him back safe and sound."34 Then he becomes angry, and he will not go in.

And for the second time that day the father leaves his house to meet a son.35 This morning he ran; now he stands outside in the evening air pleading with someone who will not come in. And this is what the son says:

"Look, all these years I have been serving you, and never have I passed over a command of yours — and to me you never gave a young goat to celebrate with my friends. But now that this son of yours has come, who has eaten up your life with whores, you have slaughtered the fattened calf for him."36

He answers his father — the text adds this emphatically — and the word "father" does not fall. Not once in the whole complaint. What does fall is another word: I serve you — the verb of a slave.37 And "this son of yours", he says; "my brother" he cannot get out of his mouth.

Now the two sentences of this day stand side by side, and they are mirror images of each other. The one son wanted to ask whether he might come and work as a hired hand, and did not get the chance to say it. The other has been working like a slave for years, and has not said it in all those years — he says it now for the first time, and he says it as a reproach.

And the father answers the son who did not say "father" with a form of address:

"Child, you are always with me, and everything that is mine is yours. But to celebrate and be glad — that had to be; for this brother of yours was dead and has come to life, he was lost and is found."38

Child. To the son who had declared himself a servant without ever asking, just as he did not let the other son declare himself a servant when that one did come to ask. And "this son of yours" he gives back as "this brother of yours" — in one sentence he restores two kinships at once.39

There Luke stops. The music plays on; the father stands outside, with the child who will not come in; inside sits the child who is back. Whether the older son crossed the threshold, no one tells — the parable ends with a father who has come outside and stands pleading, and with an answer that is not written down.40 That is how the Storyteller let it end that afternoon, with the grumbling men within earshot, and that is how I let it end.

The first word of the prayer — Father — is the cheapest word in this whole parable — a boy said it while claiming his inheritance, and he was allowed to say it again when everything was gone — and it is the word that the son who did everything right could not get across his lips in years. The Son who told the parable put that word at the front of our prayer. And everything that follows in that prayer, He did himself first.