Luke 15:18-21 — I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

The verses above are the climactic point of perhaps the most touching of Jesus’s parables. Charles Dickens called it the greatest short story ever told. One of its wonders, to me, is the number of ideas that it launches that are quite separate from its main theme. One of those ideas seized my attention today.
The younger son has chafed under the constraints of living at home. The elder son, it turns out at the end of the story, had only been dutifully, joylessly, obedient. So how is it that the father had been so unsuccessful with his sons?
I don’t have an answer to the mystery of how the loving father of the prodigal had the sons he had. All I know is that the story is compelling in its reality. I am sure that, like me, you know many good men who have been quite unsuccessful as fathers. In fact there are many examples in the Bible — starting with Adam. Abraham let one son be driven into wilderness, Isaac’s two sons couldn’t live together, most of Jacob’s sons conspired to murder Joseph and one of David’s sons was a rapist. Those, of course, were the good men!
That leads me into the deeper mystery that I’ve been wondering about today.
We were made in God’s image. So much of our lives are, in some way, types of heavenly realities. How is it that we do such a poor job in making father-son relationships a copy of the Heavenly Father-Son relationship? How many earthly father’s can (and do) say “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” I suppose it’s just one more way in which the corruption of sin pervades our lives. Even Solomon, author of so much wonderful advice to his own son in the Book of Proverbs, didn’t do all that well. Rehoboam, his son, was so foolish that the kingdom was torn in two and the greater part ripped out of his hands. Father-son relationships … the poorest of our copies!