The Tale of Two Sons
Rev. Richard A. Bolland

Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
(March 21, 2004 Sermon Transcript)

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        Grace mercy and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

        The text on which we meditate this morning is, of course, the gospel lesson, the magnificent story of the prodigal son with which we are all so familiar.

        The parable of the prodigal son is not only divine teaching coming from the lips of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is also been rightly called the most beautiful story in all the literature of the world.

        But it is not merely about a prodigal son. Rather, this story is about two sons. This is the way the text begins, and it’s very important.

        Dear friends in Christ, it is true that rebellion against our Heavenly Father can lead to the abandonment of faith. We do not teach, and rightly so, that once you are saved you are always saved, because the scriptures teach quite otherwise. And this parable is one of those teachings.

        This son of mine, the father concludes, was dead. He had no life in him, and now we rejoice because he is alive. Well, his rebellion was the result of his deadness. At our baptism, God graciously calls little (or large) lost Christians to life through the washing of the water with the word and the applying all the blessings Christ brings to us through His suffering and death and resurrection. They become the possessions of the baptized person.

        At a funeral of such a person, or child, those promises ring with absolute clarity and certainty. There is no doubt that God has saved us. And salvation is always and only the act of God Himself, not an act of man seeking Him out. Rather, quite the opposite.

        But beware, dear Christian parents especially, that this baptismal grace may be lost through spiritual neglect. Beware, parents, that that baptismal grace is not snuffed out by parentally imposed spiritual starvation by withholding from that precious child that God has given to us, the means of grace which nourish and sustain faith, that keep it alive.

        Life without God’s word and sacrament has an obvious conclusion. For without the means of grace, life is doomed. It is doomed to death by neglect, and the result is inevitably spiritual rebellion.

        The parable of the prodigal son has a younger son. And that son clearly makes some decisions. He clearly decides and willfully plans to live a life in opposition to his father’s will, and in opposition to all that his father had taught him. This has occurred from no neglect of the father, at least from what we can tell from the text. It is simply willfull rebellion. There is no hint that the father did anything but raise his son rightly, teaching him to be godly, true, honorable, and proper.

        But what do we find? Rebellion!       

        Let it be known, dear friends, that there are many parents today who have truly made every effort to raise their godly children in ways which they should go, to be godly and upright, to teach them the things which are right and wrong, and moral and immoral, and honorable. By all means, let it be known also that they sometimes still suffer poor decisions and poor judgments on the part of children who reject what they’ve been taught.

        Children can sometimes simply decide to be ungodly sinners. Even when they have good and godly parents. They are, after all, able to exercise the free will God gave them. But please remember of what that free will consists. It consists only in the right to tell God that you are not interested in Him. That you are not interested at all in following His law, that you reject Him and want to do what you want to do. That is the nature of human free will.

        The fact that we have been called to faith is not an act of human free will. Quite the contrary, it is an act of God’s divine and gracious will. Jesus reminds me in scripture, I chose you. You did not choose me.

        We have not been exercised, if you will, of that negative free will.

        And this son, this younger son, proves it. The son selfishly demands one third of his father’s entire estate. He then liquidates it and turns it into cash, and then purposely sets out to live a life in accord with his desires and his passions. He does it because he wants to do it. Simply as that.

        I admit, sin has it’s attractions. Sin always looks enticing to our pride and to our passions. Indeed, it might be said that we all have a perfect father, a perfect Heavenly Father, whose will and ways we have rejected, not only in our unborn belief cancelled in our baptism, but continually as we choose willfully to violate the will of God. We knowingly do it. We do it on purpose.. And each and every one of us do it with some regularity.

        And in saying that, we must say that we sand in the sandals of that younger and rebellious son.

        Yet, also in the parable, there’s another son who seems to do what is right. He stayed at home. He worked hard. He did not seem to rebel at all against the will of God. In fact, this guy is the son that you would like your daughter to bring home as her fiance. He’s Mr. Upright, Mr. Dependable, Mr. Honorable, if you will. What’s more, he has a problem. And it’s the same problem that Jesus is addressing in the first two verses I read to you in the beginning. That there were some there who were listening to Jesus who were aghast that Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them!

        This son believes that he deserves his father’s goods, for after all, he has behaved rightly. He has been dependable. He has been the good guy, and he thinks his self-righteousness to be superior to his brother’s sin. In reality, and I might add, to our surprise, this older son is as great a sinner as his brother, only worse, because he does not indicate any repentant for his self-righteousness and sense of moral superiority.

        As we did with the first son, we must also identify with the second.

        What is our motivation for doing the good things that we do? What is our motivation when we act honorably and godly? If we are honest, we must confess that our motivations are usually mixed. And the minute we begin to behave well, when we begin to think of ourselves as being "right with God", doing well today! We might say to ourselves, "You know, I’ve been struggling with this one particular sin for so long, and today, I’ve managed to get along quite nicely without it. How good for me! I’m so glad I’ve managed to struggle so successfully against that sin!"

        Bingo... We’ve now just taken credit for what God alone does.

        St. Paul writes, in his epistle to the Phillipians, it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good pleasure. We do not, in any way, shape, or form, have any credit with respect to the good works we are doing. But rather, they are grace of God working itself out in our lives. Just as we have nothing to do with our justification, our standing justified before God as righteous, neither do we have any credit coming to us for our sanctification, that is, the way in which we live according to the will of God.

        Indeed, all the credit, every last bit of it, belongs to God, who in grace works through His word, and through His sacraments, to motivate us and to energize us, both, as St. Paul says, to will and to act according to his good pleasure.

        Suddenly, when that doesn’t happen, like we did before, we find ourselves standing in someone else’s sandals. In this case, the very sandals of the older, compassionate, smug, angry brother in this parable.

        Well, seems like we can’t get it right either way, does it? Well, how then can we possibly have fellowship with our father, and live in His house forever? For after all, He is holy, and righteous, and just. And we are but poor sinners, doing, it seems, the wrong thing at every turn, and for the wrong reason.

        Then listen well, to the remainder of this parable, my brothers and sisters in Christ. And give thanks to God that He welcomes and He forgives sinners.

        One of the things we are not told in this parable are the activities of the father while the younger son is gone. I am absolutely certain of this, in my speculation, however. That the father’s heart was genuinely broken by the rebellion of the younger son, and was then broken by the self-righteousness of the older son. While the younger son was away, I would speculate, I think rightly, that the father continually kept that son in his prayers.

        I’m a father. I know what that’s like. Don’t you?

        He was undoubtably praying that indeed it would be so, that somehow, somewhere, someone would come to that son and help him come to his senses. By the way, that word, in the Greek, is synonymous with insanity. In fact, it’s an interesting thing. Throughout the scriptures, both in the Hebrew and the Greek, it seems that the word "unbelief" is tantamount to madness, insanity. It’s crazy! It is no wonder, then, that the son who is rebellious is in the pigsty, suffering the results of his sins, he comes to clarity. He comes to sanity. He comes to his sense. And thank God he does.

        I guess word had gotten back home about the way the young man had been living. For in the verse we read, his older brother said, "He’s been down there living with prostitutes and spending your wealth". We don’t know what far country he was in, but apparently it wasn’t that far.

        I would suspect, however, that the Lord heard the righteous prayers of the father in this parable. And He answered them in an interesting way. He answered them with the anvil of the consequences of sin. And indeed, that anvil is used by God to call this foolish young man back to sanity. Back to reality. Starvation can do that! Here is a good Jewish boy, and now he is the keeper of swine. Unclean animals. And he pleads for the pods that the pigs are eating, which apparently weren’t all that appetizing to begin with. And not even that was given to him.

        He had wealth. But now it’s gone. He had the friends that inevitably come with wealth, but once the money was gone, well, needless to say, they were gone too.

        And now, he’s hungry. And now, he says of himself that he is starving to death. There is some question whether or not he will even survive this famine.

        Please examine your own lives, as I will my own. How many times have we been in the pits of spiritual reality in our own lives, having come to the end of our rope, having done foolish things and have found ourselves suffering the consequences of our own actions. Is it not true, that on the anvil of hardship, God recently and frequently reorders our priorities and our understandings? Isn’t it true that we learn more in the valleys of life than on the mountaintops?

        And I would suggest then we might know precisely how this young man felt. In the end, God graciously even uses our foolishness. He even uses our sins to draw us back to Him.

        Luther said it clearly and plainly. He said that God will sometimes permit people to follow their appetites into sin so that they might be saved by the consequences of those sins. That we might come to our senses.

        And then, remember what happens when the son, having confessed his sin against heaven and against his father, goes home. It is interesting that the human temptation here, if you were the father, would be, "This man has squandered my wealth. He has disobeyed me. He has abandoned everything I taught him. He has rebelled against me and against my will. And he has done so blatantly. I never want to see him again. You are no longer my son!"

        That’s our temptation. That’s certainly where the older brother was at. "You are no longer my brother."

        But instead, what do we find? May I suggest that I don’t know to which far country you have run to indulge your appetite for sin, but I do know that we have all been there, and done that. And perhaps some of you still are. You’ve decided to do things your own way and to seek your own happiness. And in that futile pursuit of happiness, you’ve discovered something. That it wasn’t all that you expected it would be. Indeed, you’ve found nothing but disappointment and doubt and despair and fear. It just wasn’t as much fun as you anticipated.

        Then hear well the words of this text. And let me read them directly to you. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. "The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' "But the father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate.

        The Greek of this text makes it even sweeter. It says that the father ran with all of the haste which he had left in him, that he literally threw himself on his son and repeatedly kissed him, over and over and over again. The feast was on! The part was to begin. And the son who was dead was made alive. Through God’s gracious working, even through the foolishness of that son, to bring about repentance and faith.

        The madness of sinful rebellion against the one who truly loves us. The one who was abandoned Himself by God’s grace on the cross, who said, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? knows what it means to be forsaken and welcomes those who want no part of it any more, by God’s grace and calling.

        Sanity was restored, and he came to his sense.

        If we had been privileged to be with our Lord on the day of His speaking this to the teachers of the law and the Pharisees, who were appalled that Jesus was associating with tax collectors and sinners, I have no doubt that at the end of this parable, He must have turned to those teachers of the law and Pharisees and looked at them with the deepest look of compassion and grace that God in human flesh could muster. And I would pray God that that look translated into their realizing that He was indicating that they were playing the part of the older, compassionless son.

        Dear friends, let us give thanks. Let us give thanks that our heavenly father welcomes us home. HE wipes our slate clean. He forgives us through the blood of His son, through His suffering and death, and grants us the victory of His resurrection of the dead. And through that resurrection, you and I, all of us, have a passport home. In Jesus’ name, Amen.