Read e-book The Prodigal Father

The father is lavish in that he had his servants get a robe, a ring, and sandals for his repentant son. His decision to kill the fattened calf could be called a wasteful expenditure.

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The feast had yielded an abundance of food. When the son who had been such a disgraceful, disrespectful jerk returned home, the father spared no expense with his bountiful display of mercy and grace. This is not so much a parable about the son as it is a parable about the Father. God, our Father, is the preeminent Prodigal.

He is extravagant with his love.

He is lavish with his grace. In Luke 15 , Luke gives a series of three parables in response to the criticism of the scribes and Pharisees that Jesus received unbelieving people and even ate with them. Evidently, His love and vulnerability attracted lost people from all classes and lifestyles. He was bringing them to a meaningful relationship with God. These were people who had no regard for the Torah or for religious traditions. Jesus had made it clear that He came to save people like this, not self-righteous people Luke 5: Watch the father in this story. Rivet your attention on him.

Observe his actions and reactions. Feel his heart break. The spotlight is never off him.

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He is at the center stage the moment the curtain goes up. The two sons are but supporting characters. He speaks both when delivering his eloquent lines and when he silently waits in the shadows. It was the father who threw himself into the prodigal land of extravagance and unrestrained love for his sons. His love knew no limits, his forgiveness no boundaries, his joy no restraint.

So watch the father. I decided that I would watch the great Michael Jordan the entire game regardless of where the ball was on the floor. He played an important role even without the ball because he set up the other players. In this story, watch the father. Who is the father in this story?

Jesus was hoping that you would ask. The father is God…and He is a Prodigal God! What must the father have been like for a younger son to approach him and even ask for such an outrageous request? If the father had been anything other than approachable, he would have never asked! My coming there was important, and so it was spoken of in that way.

Notice what register of language people are using with you, I used to tell my students at university. Is it ceremonial, familiar, official, frivolous? Without realizing it, I had been studying Africans my whole life. Every bit of information was engraved there, never to be forgotten. My father, I suspected, might be the same as them, so what were they actually like? That subconscious storing away of facts, of unsubstantial details, of absolute trivialities was consistent, whatever the occasion we met and in whatever country.

Whenever I was introduced to anyone from Africa, a recording device started up, taking down everything meticulously. To a certain extent, of course, it was part of a phenomenon that every prose writer goes through. Namely, that phase of boundless observerdom which every beginner is condemned to initially, at least until he finds his own voice, his own themes, until he discovers what his writing is actually about. George Orwell wrote that true literature begins when the author breaks free of the first person and enters the third. For highlighting the psychological gap between narcissism and literary tradition, dating at least as far back as Balzac.

In any case it was clear from my first encounters with Africans that African Americans or Afro-Brits were of no use to me. There was no point observing them, or storing away information about them in my memory, since they were the same as any other American or Brit. Africans from Africa were different. Sometime around , I was introduced to a few African students in Prague.

It was the first time I tasted fufu and the first time I realized that Africans were different. I came to realize Africans had a different system when it came to relationships.

Including the fact that, even on the steamiest summer day, no native Roman, for example, would be caught dead in shorts. The only people who would do that were those funny foreigners from America, Germany, or Bohemia. I was aware of the fact that when my Congolese relatives spoke about my visit to Kinshasa they spoke in the language of the Bible, a language of respect and dignity.

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Familiarity with the Book of Ecclesiastes was practically a requirement. Yet it was while talking with them that the New Testament parable about the return of the lost son sprang to my mind. Today it would certainly earn any copywriter a bonus, or at the very least a day off. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the story of two brothers.

Grow in Grace

One asks his father for his future inheritance, sells it, and travels abroad. He squanders all the money and ends up in poverty, even stooping so low as to herd pigs, which for a Jew in ancient times was a major disgrace. At last, realizing the error of his ways, he goes back to his father, despite the deep sense of guilt he feels for having abandoned him. But the father says: He was lost, and he has been found. It is stories like this that make me glad religion exists. Any religion at all. As if there were no text in the Bible that could be used to draw an analogy.