A Parable For Father’s Day

“It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad…” —Luke 15:32

There was a Jewish son in Luke 15 who got tired of waiting for his father to die to get his inheritance. So he asked his father for the inheritance now. His father gave him his share of the inheritance and the son left home shortly thereafter for the far country. Did this father know his son would fail. Sure, he did. But his son had a free will and the father let him go his way, knowing he had a plan to receive him back later.

While among the Gentiles in the world the son wasted the family fortune on “prodigal living.” Left destitute, a Gentile business man gives him a job feeding his pigs. The pig feeding business didn’t pan out for him, and was left without any options. He decided he’d return home. He devices a “humble speech, he thinks will soften his father by addressing the root of their estrangement—The loss of the inheritance. He’ll save himself by working as one of his Dad’s servants to repay the inheritance he lost.

The father knowing his son would someday return home, was watching for him. When he saw him coming over the horizon, he ran out to meet him. Before the son could request a job as a servant to pay him back for the money he squandered, the father received him back as a son, not a servant

This parable is the third leg of a three-fold parable of a shepherd who looks for a lost sheep and finds it… a woman looking for a lost coin and finds it… now a father looking for a lost son, and finds him! The son attempts to buy his redemption to repay the father, but the father will not allow him to work his way back to the status of son. He receives the prodigal back by GRACE (much to the chagrin of his Pharisaical brother).

The father throws a celebration! This celebration is not the “son’s day,” but it is the “Father’s Day.”

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!!!