The larger poem on which the hymn is based has a couple of other stanzas that are not included in the hymn.  They point a bit more sharply at the ways we often narrow God’s vision for us and for the world.  These are the poet’s words not included in the hymn: But we make His love too narrow/By false limits of our own;/And we magnify his strictness/With a zeal He will not own./Was there ever kinder shepherd/Half so gentle, half so sweet,/As the Savior who would have us/gather at his feet?

This is the vastness and depth of the love, grace, compassion, and justice of God that lie behind Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son.  This beloved parable points to God’s deepest desire, greatest yearning, and passionate dream for all of God’s children and the whole of God’s creation.  But it is a dream often distorted even by those who are passionate about their love for God.  Perhaps it’s partly in their zeal that the urge to hold that love tight and exclusive of others is born.

That was as true in Jesus’ time as it is in ours.  We know that because Luke tells us how some of the religious leaders around Jesus were taking issue with his generosity in sharing God’s love with others: This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.  Now the category of sinners in those days was quite broad.  Sinners would have included not only the obvious – people who led an immoral life – but also those who held an occupation often associated with dishonor.  Tax collectors for Rome were included in that category, but so were peddlers, tanners, and shepherds.  Remember that it’s Luke who tells us in the birth narrative of Jesus that there seemed to be a direct line from God’s angels to the shepherds, for the shepherds on the hillsides were the first to lay eyes on the Christ child.

Later in the story, then, it’s Luke’s Jesus in particular who reaches out to those who are marginalized and categorically excluded by the establishment.  As well known and as beloved as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, it’s only in Luke that we can find it.  And Luke has Jesus tell it in response to those who complain that he is just too accepting of people to be a person of God.  He’s not discriminating enough.  He’s too soft on sin, we might say today if he were running for office.

But Jesus turns to his detractors and tells them not only the parable of the Prodigal Son, but also two shorter parables that we also know but will consider some weeks from now, the parable of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to look for the one who is lost and the parable of the woman who searches for a coin she’s lost until she finds it.  All three parables conclude with exultant joy and a party to share with friends.  God’s like that, Jesus seems to say.  God looks and looks for what has been lost, and when God finds the lost, God throws a party out of inexpressible joy.  And God invites us to do the same.

You see, God has a dream that will not die.  God made us to be in loving relationship, harmony, and communion with God, each other, and all creation.  Wherever these relationships are broken, God seeks to restore them.  That’s the basis for the father’s scandalous behavior in today’s parable in forgiving his lost son and welcoming him home with a party.  No self-respecting father in Jesus’ Palestine would have acted the way the father in the parable does.  When the younger son asks for his portion of his father’s inheritance even before the father’s death, he insults both his father and his older brother.  It’s as if he wishes his father an early death and does not trust the older brother, who would have been the executor of the will, to treat him fairly.  The younger son’s abrasive insult to father and brother are, as we might say, unforgivable.  But the parable tells us that God’s behavior is quite different.  Dare we call it scandalous?  Or, placing ourselves in the place of sinners needing God’s forgiveness – which is not that great a stretch – do we say it’s amazing grace – and fall to our knees in gratitude?

We have come to call today’s parable The Parable of the Prodigal Son, but as the story unfolds we begin to realize that the parable is more about the determined, compassionate, infinite providence of God than it is about the way of God’s prodigal children.  In the end this parable points to the great embrace and deep, expansive love, compassion, and justice of God – all deeper, wider, and higher than our imaginings.

In his work God Has a Dream, Archbishop Desmund Tutu writes: I have a dream, God says.  Please help me to realize it.  It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts, when there will be laughter, joy, and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing.  I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that My children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family.  My Family.

A father had two sons.  In a world that does not live God’s dream, families are apt to experience brokenness.  In a world in which we are afraid that we will not have enough, we look for ways to get our own first.  One strategy for doing this is what the younger son decides to do.  He takes the blessing from his father and spends it on himself.  His is the “eat, drink, and be merry” approach to life.  But that way doesn’t lead to a real party, for his way of life cuts him off from the true source of life.  He ends up wallowing in the pig sty, having not even the rudiments of life to sustain him. 

But there, in the far country, he “came to himself,” the parable says.  That is, he realizes the profound disconnect between the person he has become and the person he was created to be.  Think for a moment of someone in your life who has loved you, as we might say, unconditionally.  That is not to say that that person has loved or approved of everything you’ve said or done.  Quite the contrary, actually.  The people who love us the most and want us to be the best that God intends us to be are often exacting in their discipline of us.  They keep us to the straight and narrow path.

So think of such a person in your life.  Perhaps it’s a parent or grandparent, a spouse or partner, a coach or mentor of some sort, a loving friend of inestimable worth to you.  Someone alive or dead, for such people never die to us.  Now ask yourself this question: What would that person think of me now?  Have I wandered off to a far country from which God’s nearly “magnetic” pull encourages me to come home again and throw myself into God’s arms?  Am I living a nightmare when I’m meant to be living God’s dream?  You are not meant for this.  And when you “come to yourself” in such recognition, then you are on your way back to God.

Most of us either know or have known such a place as the younger son came to know in leading a hedonistic life style of “riotous living,” as the old King James called it.  We call it “dissolute living,” and that makes the point as well.  It can take on all kinds of forms, not just those specifically named and implied in Jesus’ parable.  There are lots of wagons to fall off of, not just the obvious ones we accord to others.

The older son had a strategy, too, though we don’t learn about it until by deduction later on.  What we learn is that the older son takes the blessing of life from his father for granted – even though he accuses his father of having taken him for granted – and hoards it for himself.  He grows self-satisfied and self-righteous.  Because he has not done anything so vividly wicked as his brother has done, he can stand aside and feel pretty justified in judging him.  Unaware of the blessings he has, resentful of his father’s love for his brother – not realizing that he loses nothing in his father’s extravagant love for both sons – he misses the party, or so it would seem.  We’re never quite sure what becomes of the father’s plea to his older son.  Does he join his neighbors and his younger brother for a banquet, marking the restoration of proper relations among the members of his family and the wider community?  Jesus’ intent in the parable, of course, is to implore the Pharisees and scribes to join him in welcoming and eating with those they call sinners, unworthy of God’s grace.

Most of us, I’m sure, if asked where we fit in the story would identify, reluctantly perhaps, with the older rather than the younger brother.  The question, then, for us is this: Do we begrudge the younger brother or sister in our life, the poor, the broken, those who are confused in life, those who are different from us, those . . . others?  Can we be as gracious as the father?  In a couple of weeks we will hear the story again of how Jesus, hanging on the cross, turned to the thief next to him and offered a place for him in paradise.  Can we do likewise?

A father had two sons.  But God as loving Parent has many, many more children than that.  And among them is a child who found a way to engage the world in ways quite different from those of either the younger or older child in the parable.  This child heard the blessing of God in baptism and entered the brokenness of our world with the rest of us, giving himself in love to all of us, trusting always in God as a never-ending source of life.  As we follow Him, so, too, are we re-connected to that same never-ending source of life, “eternal life,” as we have come to know it. 

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,/like the wideness of the sea./There’s a wideness in [God’s] justice,/which is more than liberty.

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

Thanks be to God!