The Lost Son and the Descent

A knot of Pharisees stands grumbling. The rabbi from Nazareth is once again sitting at table with the wrong sort of people: tax collectors, prostitutes, swindlers, the riffraff every respectable Jew kept at arm's length. This man welcomes sinners and eats with them, they mutter, as though that were the worst thing you could say about anyone. Jesus answers with three stories, about a sheep, a coin and a son that are lost and found again. The third is the most famous story He ever told, and it is less about a lost boy than about the Father who loses him. This is what the heart of God looks like when it loses something.

It begins with a stab wound. The younger son comes to his father and asks for the share of the inheritance that is coming to him. You only receive an inheritance once your father is dead. Whoever claims it now is effectively saying: as far as I'm concerned you're already dead; give me my share and let me go. The father gives it to him. He divides his estate (the text literally says he divides his "life," his livelihood, between them) and lets his boy go. No lecture, no threat, no bolt on the door. He watches his son until he disappears beyond the horizon, with a third of the family fortune in his pocket and a heart full of contempt.

The boy wants the gift without the Giver. Once, at the mountain, God had offered Israel the promised land without His own presence, and Moses had refused to go. The lost son seizes that same offer with both hands and leaves the Giver standing. He will never get his money back. The feast at his homecoming will be about one thing only, that they are together again.

This father could have stopped his son. He could have refused the inheritance, locked the door, sent servants after him to drag him back. He refuses to force his child, because love that is compelled is no love at all; a son in chains is a prisoner. Only a heart that is free to leave can truly come home. That is what God is like: engaged enough to let go, and sovereign enough to know that He can bring His child home, however far it wanders.

Now the waiting begins. It is hidden in one small phrase further on: while he was still far off, his father saw him. A speck on the road, and the father sees it. So the old man had been standing there watching, day after day, season after season, in the morning and again in the evening, his eyes on the point on the horizon where his boy had disappeared. The unmoved god of the philosophers, high and safe above all emotion, would not take that trouble. This Father has a heart that breaks a little every empty day at that empty stretch of road, and that keeps watching anyway.

One day the speck is there. The boy is coming, starved and broken, with a rehearsed speech on his lips and the stink of the pigsty still in his clothes. While he was still far off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and he ran. Luke uses a word that hardly lets itself be translated: splanchnizomai. It comes from splanchna, the bowels, and it means to be struck to the gut, overcome with pity, unable to hold it in any longer; it is the same inmost being that turned over in Hosea and was in turmoil for Ephraim in Jeremiah. What breaks loose inside the father sets his legs moving. A dignified man of standing in the East did not run. Running meant hiking up your robe, baring your legs, throwing your dignity into the dust in full view of the whole village. This father does it anyway. He hitches up his robe and runs down the road, his honor in tatters, past the doorways where the neighbors are already watching. He has to get there first. The village has its verdict ready for a boy who squandered the family capital among the gentiles, and the father catches that shame in his own running body before it can strike his son. He throws his arms around his neck and kisses him, and keeps on kissing him; he can smell the pigs and kisses him anyway.

The speech gets halfway out: father, I have sinned against heaven and against you, I am no longer worthy to be called your son. That is as far as he gets. The line about the hired hand, which he rehearsed so often on the road, never comes out, because the father is already calling to the servants: bring the best robe and put it on him, put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet, kill the fattened calf. This son of mine was dead, and he is alive again; he was lost, and he is found.

The older son is coming in from the field, and near the house he hears music and dancing. He asks a servant what is going on, and when he hears, he gets angry and refuses to go in. All those years he has worked, never broken a command, and never once was he given even a young goat to celebrate with his friends. The father goes outside for the second time that day. He leaves his guests sitting, walks out into the yard, and pleads with his son to come in. The text says parekalei: he kept urging him, the way you urge someone you cannot bear to lose. Child, he says, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. To the younger he runs; with the older he keeps pleading. His love seeks both sons, the one who vanished into a far country and the one who got lost at home without ever leaving the house. There Jesus breaks off the story. Whether the older son went in, He does not say. The Pharisees standing there grumbling had to write the ending themselves.

That running is more than an image. God Himself makes that movement, down into a depth no parable can reach. Years later a man with a chain on his wrist sits in a cell and writes to the church in Philippi. In the middle of his letter Paul reaches for a song the first Christians were probably already singing before a single gospel was written down:

He, who existed in the form of God, did not regard being equal with God as something to grasp, something to cling to, but He emptied Himself, and took the form of a slave, and became like human beings. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.

The staircase goes down, step by step. At the top stands the form of God: glory, the worship of angels, a throne above every throne. He did not need to clutch it like loot; it was His own, and so He could let it go. He emptied Himself, poured Himself out the way you tip over a jug until nothing is left inside, and took the form of a slave, a possession, someone with no rights. He goes lower still and becomes obedient to death; the Source of life enters into death. As if the bottom had not yet been reached, one more step follows, down to death on a cross, the most cursed death Rome could devise, reserved for slaves and rebels.

What that descent cost can be read from a single night. An olive grove at the foot of the city, late, the full Passover moon above the Kidron. The friends are asleep. A little farther on a Man lies with His face in the dust, and He prays with a voice that breaks: My soul is deeply grieved, even to death. Abba, Father, all things are possible for You; take this cup from Me (Mark 14:34–36). It is the cup the prophets spoke of, filled with God's wrath against evil (Isa 51:17; Jer 25:15). That night the holiness and the love of God meet: the holiness that cannot let evil stand, and the love that drains the cup to the bottom. His sweat falls to the ground like great drops of blood. Every step down hurts, and He knows what waits at the bottom. Yet He gets up and walks toward the torches. John, who was there that night, knows only one reason: having loved His own, He loved them to the end (John 13:1). Paul dares to say it in the first person: He loved me and gave Himself for me (Gal 2:20).

Someone else is present in that night, though no one sees Him. Centuries earlier an old man had climbed a mountain with his son, Moriah, with wood and fire and a knife. Your son, your only son, whom you love, God had said. When the hand was already stretched out, a voice rang out: Abraham, Abraham! Do not lay your hand on the boy. On that mountain the son was spared. On the hill outside Jerusalem no voice called out. He who did not spare His own Son, Paul writes, with the verb the Greek translation uses at Moriah (Rom 8:32). What Abraham was spared, God was not spared. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son (John 3:16). That gift was no cool decision taken somewhere high in heaven. It was carried by a love that bled, in the Son on the ground of the olive grove and in the Father who did not raise His hand to stop it. For the joy that was set before Him, the joy over you, He endured the cross (Heb 12:2).

At the bottom the song from the cell turns and rises just as steeply as it fell. Therefore God has highly exalted Him and given Him the Name above every name, so that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. God had sworn those words over Himself centuries earlier, in the courtroom against the idols: I am God, and there is no other; before Me every knee shall bow (Isa 45:22–23). The worship He granted no other now rests on a Man who hung on a Roman cross. He did not steal it. It was always His, and He showed it by seeking out the lowest place.

At the start the Pharisees stood grumbling: this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. It was meant as an accusation, and without knowing it they summed up the gospel. The gods of the philosophers stay in their heaven, too exalted to descend and too respectable to sit at table with tax collectors. This God hitches up His honor like a robe and runs, down the village road and down the stairs, to the lowest step. In the Father's house the music plays on. The door is open, even for whoever is still standing outside.

*A note on the source text. The three parables of the lost, introduced by the grumbling Pharisees: Luke 15:1–2; the lost son: 15:11–32; the claiming and division of the inheritance (bios, livelihood): 15:12; the rehearsed speech: 15:18–19, broken off in 15:21; "while he was still far off [...] was moved with compassion [...] ran [...] kissed him" (esplanchnisthē, katephilēsen): 15:20; the older son, the music and the dancing: 15:25–32; "he pleaded with him" (parekalei): 15:28; "Child, you are always with me": 15:31. The gift without the Giver: Exodus 33:1–3, 15. Splanchnizomai: Luke 15:20; cf. Matthew 9:36; 14:14; 18:27; Mark 6:34; Luke 7:13; 10:33; the inmost being in the prophets: Hosea 11:8; Jeremiah 31:20. A man's gait: Sirach 19:30 (19:27 in editions following the Vulgate). The hymn of descent and exaltation: Philippians 2:6–11; "emptied Himself" (ekenōsen): 2:7; "every knee will bow" quotes Isaiah 45:23 ("I am God, and there is no other," 45:22). The driving force of the descent: John 3:16; 13:1; Romans 8:32 (cf. Genesis 22:12, 16); Galatians 2:20; Hebrews 12:2; Gethsemane: Mark 14:32–36; the cup of wrath: Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15; Luke 22:44; Moriah: Genesis 22:2, 11–12, 16. The divine Name as YHWH.*