Finding My Way Home

There are stories we outgrow. There are stories that outgrow us.

Like with the first three J’s (Joseph, Job, and Jairus) I have been also spending a fair amount of time pondering the story of the Prodigal Son. It is a story that has been outgrowing me for as long as I have been willing to be changed by it. Every few years it hands back something I was certain I had already understood.

Here is my latest position on this fabulous passage.

The parable is a mirror, not a museum

I have had a realization that as I have continued to be transformed over the years, the meaning of this story has been transformed as well. What used to seem like a simple parable about a rebellious young man and what appeared to be an all allowing Father has slowly continued to take on a completely new meaning in my life.

Today it is not so much what the story says happened that captures my attention. It is what the story never says. The years before the leaving. The silence in that house. The apparent absence of a Mother. The conversations no one recorded. Having left those familiar points behind, it is the parts that are unspoken and never directly mentioned that have begun to take shape within my heart.

Scripture, I believe, leaves those rooms unfurnished on purpose as we are meant to walk into them, it we dare, and find our own lives waiting there.

The God of the ledger

As one who understands Jewish culture fairly well these days, after living in Israel for over ten years, I see more than ever why the people who originally heard this story wanted to kill Yeshua. You see, for them God was no more than a transactional being. One who was distant and at best only interested in what people did or did not do like a keeper of accounts normally is.

A God like that can never produce a spiritual life in a person. He can only produce a careful one. This is precisely what would have enabled the original audience to capture what Yeshua was trying to share with them, and it was the very thing their framework had made impossible.

This is what a literal approach to faith always does to us. Someone lifts a finger toward the truth, and we spend our lives studying the finger. We memorize its shape. We defend its position. We even build institutions in its honor. Yet, the truth stands there the whole time, unnoticed, in the direction no one is looking.

He was never running from the Father

Today, as I have been given the grace to move past the familiarity of the finger, I can see something that undoes my original reading of this story. The son never left the home because of his disgust with the Father. He left because of his older brother.

Read the older brother's words at the end of the parable. Hear the resentment that has been maturing for decades. Hear a man reciting his own years of service like a receipt. Then ask what it would do to a child to grow up underneath that.

Now as any younger brother will know, an older brother is always the one that one looks to follow and emulate. Whether it is what they wear, how they speak, what they look like or what they subscribe to, it is all seen as the way to do things and the standard to live up to.

On the surface this is understandable. However, as with all of our choices in life, they eventually begin to produce a type of persona and character, and in time, if we are not careful, we end up becoming a copy and paste of those we look up to as the older brother becomes both the standard and the ceiling.

At first what looks like guidance, over years, becomes a cage.

A house where the heart was not welcome

Clearly in the case of the older brother in this story, as we can once again see at the end of the parable, his approach to life did not take much consideration of what his heart desired as much as it did in making sure he did what was apparently right.

One can only picture the times when the younger boy wanted to do things in a certain way but was stopped each time and told to straighten up. Picture the mistakes met with punishment instead of presence. Picture rules mattering above everything else, because rules were the visible proof of allegiance to the household, or perhaps to the older brother himself.

Like with everything that does not eventually lead to life, it created an environment where a heart grew tired of waiting for the only two things it was ever made for.

Love and fulfillment.

The asking

Naturally the younger son does not understand the nature of his Father any more than the older brother does, as he is limited by the experience that his older sibling has led him into. We see this when the time comes for him to leave. Instead of asking for his Father's counsel, he lets him know, according to Jewish tradition, that as far as he is concerned he would really like to see him dead. In no uncertain terms he announces his total disgust for the home experience he has been a part of.

Never mind that much, if not all, of what he seems to perceive is more the product of his dysfunctional older brother than his loving and graceful Father. Consider the tragedy hidden inside that moment. He is walking out on a Father he has never actually met. Now I could say much more about the Father here, however we will have to leave that for another time.

The desert has a mercy of its own

As the son goes out and away from home we see the kind of life he turns towards. Watch the speed of it. He does this with a ferocity that often accompanies those that have had their heart suppressed by a relationless journey with the rules.

This is because a pendulum always swings as far as it was pulled.

This, in time as it happens with all of us, leads him to the end of himself and his apparent freedom. Every counterfeit freedom eventually does.

Then the famine comes, and the famine asks the question that no one in his old life would ever have dared to ask him. 

Is there another way to see all of this? 

Perhaps his home was not such a bad place after all, and the one who owned it was not who he had been told. Maybe, just maybe, the problem was that he had never taken the time until now to see that love and grace are meant to facilitate life and not dominate it, much the same way his older brother dominated him and he then went on to try and dominate himself.

What only the leaving could teach him

Now we all know what happens from here and much more could be said. However, as I bring this letter towards its end, I want to invite you to consider a few things with me.

Consider that he could only find his home by losing it in the first place.

Consider that this adventure was what allowed him to finally understand that the presence of his Father went a lot further than an estate, a geographical place or a family name. He had to stand somewhere none of those things reached before he could sense their presence within him.

Consider that the Father's behavior was always consistent with the younger boy. It had to be. No other kind of love would have made a return imaginable from that distance.

Yet, here is the one that still costs me the most. It was because of someone else who was in authority and supposedly knew better, that he not only misunderstood who his Father really was, but at the same time missed something about himself. He came home believing he was just another brother in the house and in the process missed that he had been a son the entire time.

Their frontier is your door

Perhaps many of us reading this today have been sensing deep within us that there must be more to this journey of life, yet we are very scared to divert or even leave what has been familiar to us for a very long time.

Most of that fear has a name. Approval.

We are worried about losing the endorsement of those we respect and who have gone ahead of us. Never considering the fact that the best way to show respect and value for those that have gone before us is to continue the journey where they left off and go further.

Where they stopped is not a boundary. It is a door.

Only in this space beyond their frontiers do we encounter any real chance to discover God and experience him for ourselves, instead of through the filter of their understanding. Only there does He stop being an inheritance of information and becomes an encounter. Nothing in this world will ever satisfy us like having our own experience with God, no matter how different this might be from the one that has gone before us.

The younger son saw and experienced the embrace of his Father in a way that the older brother never did, but not before leaving the shadow of his older sibling behind. He saw that all his Father had was, and had always been, his. He saw that none of it had ever been for sale even though his brother had spent a lifetime trying to buy it.

Plain and simply put, the saving grace of the younger boy was that he left home. The older brother's undoing was that he never did.

One last thing

Consider with me today that very often what you have called home is the place where you stand furthest away from your real home, and the only way to see and discover this is for you to leave it behind.

God, like the Father in the story, is happy to give us permission to go on our own journeys, even if that means leaving what we think is home. 

He is not threatened by it. He watches us go the way a Father watches a son cross the edge of the field, knowing that the road away is the only road that ends in his loving arms.

With you on the journey,

PS See you next week.