a drop of water

There are a handful of books that take a well traveled bible story and dive deeper, beyond the standard conclusions and understandings to open up a wealth of life giving discoveries and connections for the reader.   A Shepherds Look at Psalm 23 is one of those books.  The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller earns this tag too.

The familiar conclusion from the parable of the prodigal son is that God is a loving father who will welcome us with open arms, regardless of the mistakes we have made.  Keller digs further, encouraging us to look at the parable as a story of two lost sons.  Since the parable was originally directed at the Pharisee’s the observations of the elder brother was intended to speak to them.  Keller proposes that the elder and younger brother represent two ways of life.  The elder brother represents the lifestyle of living by the law in order to get what he wants; the younger brother represents the lifestyle of ignoring (breaking) all laws on a path of self-discovery in order to get what he wants.  Both want the father’s assets instead of the father.  They just have opposite methods of getting what they want.

A beautiful realization that Keller writes about, addresses one of the argued points over this parable.  Some scholars point out that the grace shown to the younger son did not cost anything.  However, Keller notes that there was a real cost that the elder brother had to pay, since it was out of his inheritance that the party for his younger brother’s celebration was financed.  Through the parable, Jesus is showing the deficiency of the elder brother and juxtaposing himself as the true elder brother who paid the price for us.  In the two previous parables, (lost sheep and lost coin) the person who has lost something searches for it unceasingly until it is found.  That attribute of unceasingly searching for the object lost (the younger brother) is absent from the parable of the prodigal son and allows us to realize that Jesus has that characteristic of unceasingly searching for us until we are found.

It gives us a calling to turn our “elder brotherness” that makes us feel like we’ve earned something in God’s eyes by working hard in ministry or following his rules to become the person who is willing to unceasingly search and pay whatever is needed to find and welcome the people who have rejected God.  It helps us realize that our “elder brotherness” is very often the same type of sin as the younger brother’s and that we are both in great need of the Father’s invitation into his house.