1. Read Luke 15:11-32
2. Reflections
1. prod•i•gal — (1) spending money or resources freely and recklessly; wastefully extravagant: prodigal habits die hard. (2) having or giving something on a lavish scale: the dessert was crunchy with brown sugar and prodigal with whipped cream.
2. Misnamed
1. "The Lost Son"
2. "The Forgiving Father"
3. "The Father Who Lost Two Sons"
4. "The Prodigal God"
3. A festival of death
1. right at the beginning, the father, in effect, commits suicide — the younger son tells his father to put his will into effect, to drop legally dead right on the spot
2. what the father gave away and what the son wasted was not just some stuff that belonged to them; it was their whole existence, their very being, their lives
1. his lost sonship is the only life he had: there is no way now for him to be anything but a dead son
2. the father simply sees this corpse of a son coming down the road and, because raising dead sons to life and throwing fabulous parties for them is his favorite way of spending an afternoon, he proceeds straight to hugs, kisses, and resurrection
3. the crucial death in the story: the killing of the fatted calf.
1. the fatted calf is actually the Christ-figure in this parable
1. what does a fatted calf do? it stands around in its stall with one purpose in life: to drop dead at a moment's notice in order that people can have a party. if that doesn't sound like the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world - who dies in Jesus and in all our deaths and who comes finally to the Supper of the Lamb as the piece de resistance of his own wedding party - I don't know what does
2. the fatted calf proclaims that the party is what the father's house is all about, just as Jesus the dead and risen Bridegroom proclaims that an eternal bash is what the universe is all about
3. creation is not ultimately about religion, or spirituality, or morality, or reconciliation, or any other solemn subject; it's about God having a good time and just itching to share it
4. repentance involves not the admission of guilt or the acknowledgement of fault but the confession of death
1. the boy never gets his confession out of his mouth until after the kiss, until after the embrace
2. the father has called for the party to celebrate the finding of the lost and the resurrection of the dead
3. Confession is not a medicine leading to recovery. If we could recover - if we could say that beginning tomorrow or the week after next we would be well again - why then, all we would need to do would be apologize, not confess. We could simply say that we were sorry about the recent unpleasantness, but that, thank God and the resilience of our better instincts, it is all over now. And we could confidently expect that no one but a real nasty would say us nay. But we never recover. We die. And if we live again, it is not because the old parts of our life are jiggled back into line, but because, without waiting for realignment, some wholly other life takes up residence in our death. Grace does not do things tit-for-tat; it acts finally and fully from the start. ~Robert Farrar Capon
4. confession is not a transaction, not a negotiation in order to secure forgiveness; it is the after-the-last gasp of a corpse that finally can afford to admit it's dead and accept resurrection.
5. the only live character in the parable — the Elder Brother — Mr. Respectability
1. “The only thing that matters is that fun or no fun, your brother finally died to all that and now he's alive again - whereas you, unfortunately, were hardly alive even the first time around. Look. We're all dead here and we're having a terrific time. We're all lost here and we feel right at home. You, on the other hand, are alive and miserable - and worse yet, you're standing out here in the yard as if you were some kind of beggar.”
2. At the end of the parable—suppose you saw it in a film—you have the music and the sounds of the feasting and the laughter inside the house. You have the father and the elder brother standing in the courtyard, and the way the film ends is, it ends with a freeze frame: father, elder brother, joyful music over in the back. And for two thousand years this has been read in the church, every year people have read it in the Bible endlessly, endlessly. For two thousand years, that's where the story has ended. It has never ended. The father always seeks the lost son, and the lost son is not just the prodigal, it is at the end, the prodigal's already found now, he's home free, but the other one is not, because he won't come into the party. Consequently, the other thing you could say about this, it's not only for two thousand years that that parable has stood with that freeze frame, it will stand there forever because God will forever stand. We say Jesus, between when he died and when he arose, descended into hell. He descended to the lost. This is the last truth of the parable of the prodigal son, that for all eternity God still seeks those in hell. If I go down into hell, Thou art there with me. We cannot get away from the love that will not let us go because God, who in all these parables represented by the shepherd, and the woman, and the father, never ceases to seek and to find the lost. ~Robert Farrar Capon
6. Questions
1. when the prodigal came home, he did two things right. what did he do wrong?

    

2. what does prodigal mean?

    

3. we can't earn it, can we?