When Keeping Score Replaces Love

Jesus told a story about a father with two sons. The younger son asked for his inheritance early, left home, and spent everything on reckless living. When a famine hit the country he was living in, he took the only job he could find, feeding pigs, and got hungry enough to envy what they were eating.

That’s the moment this passage picks up. Starving and out of options, the son finally comes to his senses and decides to go home.

The son’s plan, when he finally decides to go home, is to be hired, not forgiven. He’s rehearsed a speech asking for nothing more than a job and a roof, since that seems like the best he can realistically hope for. He isn’t counting on his father’s love. He’s counting on his father’s need for cheap labor. That says something honest about what guilt does to a person’s sense of what they’re allowed to hope for.

What the son doesn’t know, walking up that road rehearsing his speech, is that his father has been watching for him the whole time. The text says he saw his son “while he was still a long way off,” which means someone was looking. Not glancing occasionally. Watching, the way an older parent watches for a grown child who left and never fully stopped hoping they’d come back. John Wesley, commenting on this very verse, wrote that the father “pities, meets, embraces him, and interrupts his acknowledgments”* before the son ever finishes explaining himself. Grace gets there first. The father doesn’t wait for the apology to be delivered. He runs, which was not a dignified thing for a man of his age and status to do in that culture, and reaches his son before a single word of the rehearsed speech is spoken. His compassion moves faster than his son’s shame.

• The son rehearsed exactly what he would say before he ever faced his father. Think about something you’ve been afraid to bring to God, a confession, a request, an honest complaint, because you weren’t sure how he’d respond. What’s kept you from bringing it to him?
• The father’s compassion reached his son before the apology was even finished. Think about a time someone extended you grace before you had fully explained yourself or made things right. How did that change what you believed about their love for you?