Day 61, Luke 15
Spoiler Alert: this is one of my favorite chapters in the whole Bible!
The emotion and significance of these stories are hard to match anywhere else.
These are very familiar stories, and I want to encourage you to be alert to new insights as you read them again. This chapter comes near the climax of Jesus’ ministry, and this heightens the significance of the metaphors He uses, and the conclusions He describes.
Luke starts the chapter recording how attractive Jesus is to notorious sinners (unlike many well-known Christians today). It is precisely these sinners desire for hope and help from God that enrages the religious elites, who have invested all their energy and effort into creating the appearance of righteousness and perfection. Jesus exposes their blindness by using the example of a man losing one of his sheep. The crowds of sinners could identify with the passion of the sheep owner to find his lost lamb; a passion the religious leaders had long abandoned to save their energy for self-righteous effort.
God’s heart is that leaders emulate the woman in the second parable: rather than carefully hoarding what we have left, we care about what we have lost and diligently hunt for it, employing extra light to aid the search, until we can celebrate its return. (Note the footnote in the Passion Translation that the coin bore the image of the Roman government, just as we bear the image of God even when ‘lost’).
And then Luke records one of Jesus’ most famous (and significant) stories. The Father’s two sons are the crowd who know they are sinners (in the pig pen, far from God) and the religious “sons of Abraham” who have lost sight of their Father’s loving heart and replaced it with dutiful “obedience”. These two errors are like the ditches alongside the road. We will not reach our true home if we fall into either. Whether we find ourselves in the self-righteous ditch or the stinking failure ditch, our true home is back with our Father: restored, cleansed and celebrating. Only those who will not recognize their fault (the older brother in the story) will miss out on God’s joyful celebration. And that exclusion is self-inflicted. For the older brother to refuse the hospitality that he should have been co-hosting was a great insult in that society, equal to the younger son’s “I wish you were dead” earlier in the story.
These stories show us how much our Father God loves us, longs for us, and wants us to be restored to relationship with Him. Focus on the descriptions Jesus gives of His Father (and our Father). He lets us sin, rather than forcing us to obey. He runs to meet us when we choose to value relationship more than self-determination. He pleads with us when we choose self-righteous indignation rather than celebrating restoration.
Wherever you are, God longs for you to return to Him.
Again.
And again!
Have a great day!
Mark.