Tim Keller (3:40)
Tonight we're going to look at a text that's been crucial in my life and crucial in the life of Redeemer. And by the way, if I sound hoarse whenever I come back after doing all the study and all the vacation in the summer, my voice is a little out of shape. For two weeks I'm hoarse and I get back. So I'm fine. But, you know, I'm just getting back in shape. The voice is a muscle, you know. This parable that was just read to you is famous, and for centuries it's been called the parable of the prodigal son, the son. But it's a great mistake to think that this is a story about one son. It's a story of two sons. It's a story of a younger and an older brother. You are meant to compare and contrast them. And if you don't compare and contrast them the way Jesus wants you to, you're going to miss the radical message of this parable. And it is radical. Jesus is saying here this. Every thought the human race has ever had about how to connect to God, whether East or west, whether in the ancient modern postmodern era, in every religion, in all secular thought, it's been wrong. Every human idea of how to connect with God is wrong. Jesus is here to shatter all existing human categories. A historian once said that if you. It's hard for us to grasp this, but when Christianity first arose in the world, nobody called it a religion. It wasn't seen as another religion. It was called the anti religion. It was seen as anti religion. The Romans called the Christians for 200 years atheists. And the reason for that was the Romans understood that what Christianity was saying about God was so different than what any other religion said, that it really shouldn't be given the same kind of name. It's in a whole other category altogether. And they were right. And this passage tells Us why they were right. Let's tell the story. First of all, let's make sure that we understand the story, and then let's draw out the three things I think Jesus is trying to tell us in this story. First of all, let's take a look at the story. The story is in two acts, actually. Act one, Title, the Lost Younger Brother. Act two, title, the Lost Elder Brother. Now, in act one, act one begins with a speech. And the younger brother comes to the father and says, father, give me my share of the estate. Now, the original hearers, when they heard this, would have been absolutely astounded. See, if you had two sons, then when you died, the estate would be divided 2/3 of the elder, one third to the younger. The reason for that was because the rule of thumb was that the oldest got a double portion of what all the other children got. So if there was only two, the eldest got two thirds, the youngest got one third. But that happened when the father died, when the son came and asked the father for his share of the estate. Now, the original hearers would have been astounded. One of the commentators, a scholar who knows something about the history and culture of the time, put it like this. To ask for the inheritance while the father is still alive is to wish him dead. What the younger son is saying is, I want your stuff, but I don't want you. I want the father's things, but I don't want the father. My relationship with you has just been a means to an end and I'm tired of it. I want my stuff. Now, unheard of, but even more unheard of is the second half of verse 12. Because if the original hearers were amazed at the speech in 12 verse 12A, they were absolutely astonished by what the father did in verse 12b. Because this commentator goes on and says, again, the commentator, who knows something about history and culture at the time, says a traditional Middle Eastern father could only respond in one way. He would be expected to drive the boy out of the house with verbal, if not physical and violent blows. But this father doesn't do that. What does it say? So he divided his property between them. But, you know, the translation uses the word property, but the Greek word that's used here is the word bios from which we get our word biology. And it really says the father divided his life between them. Why would he say that? We do not understand the relationship that people in the past had to their land, to their land. This father's estate was his land, his wealth was his land. He would have had to sell off a third of his land to give his son that part of the estate. Now, if you really want to understand this, you could always read a whole lot of books, like Wendell Berry has written a lot of books about this. But if you would like a little bit briefer glimpse, you can always look at the musical Oklahoma, Rodgers and Hammerstein. And there's one of the lines in the theme song that goes like this. Oh, we know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand. But did you notice what it says, the land we belong to? It doesn't say the land belongs to us. We belong to it. And we don't understand that. But they identify with the land. Their very identity was bound up with the land. To lose your land was to lose yourself. And to lose part of your land was to lose your standing in the community, which was tied to how much land you had. This son is asking this father to tear his life apart, to tear apart his standing in the community, to tear himself apart. And he does. The hearers had never seen a Middle Eastern patriarchy respond to such an insult like this. You know what this father is doing? He is enduring. He is enduring the worst thing a human being can endure. Rejected love. See, when someone treats us like this, what we do is we get mad and we retaliate and we reject and we do everything we possibly can do to diminish our affection for the person so we don't hurt so much. But this father maintains his love for his son even under these circumstances, and endures the agony of rejected love. So the son goes off and he squanders everything he has. And when he's literally down in the mud, literally down in the pig sty, he realizes how stupid he's been and he comes up with a plan. And his plan is, first of all, I realize I've been stupid. I will go home and confess to my father. But notice there's another part to his plan. He says, I will go back and say, father, I've sinned. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me one of your hired men. Now, that's not the same thing as asking to be a slave. A slave or a servant worked in the estate, lived on the estate. But a hired man was a craftsman and lived in town and had to be apprenticed to learn a skill and therefore made a wage. And most commentators think that what the young man was doing was very simple. The rabbis taught that if you had violated the community mores, the only way back into the community was not just an apology, but you had to make restitution. And what the son is probably doing is he's coming back with a plan and saying, father, if you will apprentice me to one of your hired men and teach me a craft, I know I can't be your son. I know I can't come back into the family. But this way at least I could begin to pay you off, pay you back a little bit for what I've done to you. So he has a plan. So he comes back and the father sees him far off and he runs. Middle Eastern patriarchs did not run. Children ran. Youth ran. Women would run. But not fathers, not owners of estates. You'd have to pick up your robes and bare your legs. And you didn't do that sort of thing. But this one does. Many commentators have said that this father doesn't act like a father, he acts like a mother. Here, Middle Eastern fathers did not act like this. Mothers did. He runs to his son, he shows absolute emotional abandon and kisses him. And the son tries to roll out his restitution plan. You can imagine he gets out of PowerPoint and he says, dad, I've gotta, you know, he starts to roll out his compensation plan. Father won't even hear it because he says, get the best robe. The best robe would be the father's robe. And this is what he's saying. I'm not gonna wait for you to clean up. I'm not even gonna wait for you to take a bath. I'm not certainly going to wait for you to prove yourself. He says to his servants, cover my sons nakedness and rags with the robe of my office and honor and we are going to feast. You're not going to earn your way back into the family. I'm bringing you back. When the elder brother hears about it, he's furious. And as you see here, he's particularly upset about the cost. Well, now, they may not be as obvious to you as it will be in a second. Did you notice that the big deal here is this calf? You know, the elder brother says to the servant, what's going on? And the servant says, your younger brother's back. And the father gave him the calf. And the elder brother comes to the father and says, you gave him a calf. And you know, we're sitting here reading this and saying, I know this means something, but I don't know what it is. And you know, the brother says, you never even give me a goat and you give him a calf. What is this all about? Well, Middle Eastern People at the time, in that time and place, you almost never had meat for a meal. It was a delicacy. And if you ever had meat, it was a party. But the greatest delicacy and the most expensive possible thing to do was to. Was to slay a fatted calf. The whole village would have been there. It was the sort of thing that most families wouldn't do as a private party, ever. It was so expensive. And therefore the older brother is saying, how dare you use our wealth like this? I have obeyed you. I should have some say in this. In other words, I. I have some right over your things. How dare you do this? And he insults the father because down in verse 29, he doesn't say father. He says, look, which is a kind of English translation that gets across the fact that this is a deliberate insult. He doesn't give any address to his father at all. He's basically saying, look, you. It's the most incredible insult. He publicly humiliates his father by not going into the greatest feast his father's ever thrown. Makes his father come out. He publicly humiliates him by refusing to call him father. But what does the father do? He responds with a very tender word. He says, my son actually could be translated, my child, my child, I still want you in the feast. Almost everybody else, every other father I know, would have disowned you already for what you've just done, but I still want you in. And as we're on the edge of our seats asking the question, will in the end, the family come together in unity and love? How will the other brother respond? Will they all come together in the end? And Jesus ends the parable, never tells us cliffhanger. Now, why and what is Jesus trying to get across? I told you. Jesus is telling us three things, and they are so radical. Jesus redefines God. Jesus redefines sin. And Jesus redefines salvation. Yeah, first of all, most briefly, he redefines God. There's an awful lot, I mean, an awful lot of people who really struggle with this idea, this concept of. In the Bible, that God is a father. I've shown you, however, that Jesus, who more than anyone in history, called God Father. He was the first person to ever address God as Father. And every single time he ever addresses God in the Bible, except one, he calls him Father. And this idea of God as a father in the Old Testament is very, very rare, fairly rare. But Jesus lifts it up. But here he defines what he means as father. See, people struggle because a lot of people say, I Just hate this idea of God. It's too patriarchal. Father, I don't like the biblical idea of God as a father. It's patriarchal. Fathers are hard and they're harsh and they're condemning and they mean rule and control. And I want a loving God, a sensitive God, a God who cares, a forgiving God, a God who longs for reconciliation in relationship, a sensitive God. You know what Jesus is saying here? Jesus Christ gives us a father unlike any father of that time. His emotional abandon, his generosity, his willingness to receive the agony of rejected love. And here's what Jesus is saying. He says, really, I'm sorry, I know a lot of you had fathers like this, but my father's not like that. For all of his power and majesty, he's all of these things, too. He is loving, he is suffering. He is longing for your love. He loves you. Jesus brought together traits and attributes, the meekness and majesty of God, the power and tenderness of God, and said, that's who God is. And no one's ever described God in those ways. He redefines God. Secondly, he redefines sin. The brilliance of the rhetoric of Jesus here is that in the first act, the younger brother act, Jesus gives us a picture of sin that is very traditional. Any Pharisee, any religious person, anybody, you could look at that and say, yeah, that's sin. You know, prostitutes, right? Insulting his father, pigsty down in the gutter, you know, dissolute, self indulgent. That's sin. But then in the second act, he turns the table. Because when you get to the end of the second act, this is what you're left with. There are two sons. One is very, very good, one is very, very bad. And they're both alienated from the father's heart. Each one of them wanted the father's things, but not the father. Each one of them. Listen carefully, used the father to get what they really loved. They didn't love the father. They used the father to get what they really loved. The status, the wealth, the things they really loved. But one of them did it by being very, very good. And one of them did it by being very, very bad. They're both lost. The bad one is lost in his badness, but the good one is lost in his goodness. And in the end, it's the bad son that's saved. And the good son, as far as we know, that's lost. And that goes against what anyone's ever believed. The lover of prostitutes is saved, and the man of moral rectitude is lost. And it gets worse. Because when you see why the good son was lost, he was not lost in spite of his goodness. He was lost because of it. He says it. He says, here's the reason I won't go into the Feast of the Father. Here's the reason I reject you, Father. I have never disobeyed you. It's not his sins keeping him from the Father. It's his goodness. He's proud of his goodness. It's not his sins that are keeping him from the Father. It's his righteousness.
