God's Search Party: Luke 15:11-32 - Third Sunday in Lent

I was twelve years old the first time I flew on an airplane. We were flying to Florida, and when we checked in with the ticket agent, she informed us that we’d been upgraded to first class free of charge! So, we got to enjoy a full meal, along with all the drinks and snacks we could eat.

The second time I flew was four years later when I attended the national youth gathering in Colorado with my church youth group. We weren’t upgraded to first class seat, but the bus company we’d hired to transport us from the airport to the retreat center ran out of buses. So, they sent limousines instead.

Since it was the nineties, some in our group rolled down the window any time we were stopped at an intersection to ask the driver in the car next to us, “pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?”

These were the only occasions I’d ever traveled first class, and probably ever will, not only because of the high price tag, but also for the fact that I’d feel like one of the Beverly Hillbillies the whole time.

The family in Jesus’s parable wouldn’t have felt out of place going first class, however. This is not a real family, but the parable suggests that affluence does not prevent family dysfunction. 

By Bartolomé Esteban Murillo - Web Gallery of Art:   Image Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5905078

The youngest of two sons brazenly asks his father, “Give me right now what I will get when you die.”

As the second-born son, he was entitled to one-third of all his father’s assets: land, livestock, money, and other valuables. But the son wasn’t interested in farming; he wanted to go off and live like a rockstar. So, the father sold off a third of his assets, which diminished his capacity to generate future income for the family. 

Click here to read the Scripture text

With the money in hand, the son travels to a foreign country and lives the high life until the money runs out. This coincided with a famine, and now he’s starving. He hires himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sends him out into his fields to feed the pigs—something no self-respecting Jew would ever do. He quickly realizes that the swine are living better than he. Therefore, with nothing left to lose, he concocts an apology and heads for home.

He was still a long way from home when his father suddenly finds him. He runs to him, embracing and kissing him. He takes him home, then orders his slaves to clean him up, dress him in the best robe, kill the fatted calf, and prepare the celebration of a lifetime.

One thing he doesn’t do is invite his elder son to the celebration. He’s still in the fields while everyone else is feasting. When he finds out what’s going on, he’s enraged, and it's not hard to understand why.

But let’s not forget who called for the celebration, and it wasn’t the lost son. It’s the father who’s celebrating, because he had been searching for his lost son and found him. For even though he dishonored his father, disgraced his family, and debased himself, he was still his father’s son. He still had value.

The elder brother, on the other hand, felt that he was more valuable to his father because he was trustworthy and obedient, whereas his brother was greedy and rebellious; his foolishness fueled by a massive sense of entitlement.

Yet, the elder brother also had a massive sense of entitlement, and he dishonored his father just the same by scolding him for celebrating having found his lost son.

Nothing leads a person away from God like a sense of entitlement, and these two brothers show us how it happens. The younger son, instead of trusting and obeying his father, chose instead to gratify the desires of his flesh. “If it feels good, do it.” But he quickly finds out that this life leads to ruin. He was devoured by the very pleasures he sought.

The elder son was hardworking and obedient, so much so that it got to his head. Righteousness and self-righteousness are not the same thing, for it is the self-righteous who do evil by devaluing, debasing, and excluding those whom they have judged as unworthy and undeserving.

At the end of the day, neither son was entitled to any inheritance from their father. The father could, potentially, sell off all his property, distribute the proceeds to the poor, and leave his sons to fend for themselves after he died. It’s his property, his choice.

Just the same, none of us is entitled to anything that God has already given us: our lives, our bodies, our time, our possessions. The fact that we are sinners, rebelling against God by our very nature, entitles us to nothing except to perish in our sin and mortality. But God won’t have any of that.

Have you ever heard the saying, “religion is humanity’s search for God, but Christianity is God’s search for humanity?” This parable is proof positive of that saying. God came to earth in Jesus Christ to search for humanity. The Church is the search party, the Gospel is what calls and gathers us in. It’s not a fatted calf but the blood of Christ that we drink and the bread that is his flesh which God sets before us in celebration that you are found.

As a Christian, your faith and obedience are not complete, unless you are doing what the elder in the brother should have been doing, and that is searching for his lost sibling.

The fact that our spirits ache on Sundays when attendance is low, and because our churches aren’t as full as they used to be, demonstrates that as long as the lost stay lost, we ourselves are incomplete. We are God’s search party, and while seeking out the lost is hard work, it’s worth it for the joy of celebrating a child of God coming home. For that is the occasion not to gloat in ourselves, but in the simple fact that God says, “you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” For once you were dead but now you are alive; for you no longer lost but forever found. You are forgiven. You are at home. You are mine.