Part 24 (1/2)

”A certain man had two sons:” one of the greatest difficulties meets us in the first line. It is evident that G.o.d, as specially manifested in the Gospel, is represented by the father; but who are represented by the two sons,--the elder, who remained at home, and the younger, who went away? On this point three distinct interpretations have been suggested: the two brothers of the parable may represent angels and men, Jews and Gentiles, or Pharisees and publicans. I do not think it is a profitable method to send these three into the field to fight until two are destroyed, and one is left in undisputed possession. I am convinced that we shall more fully and more correctly ascertain the mind of the Lord by employing them all than by selecting one.

In representing the human figure, an artist may proceed upon either of two distinct principles, according to the object which, for the time, he may have in view. He may, on the one hand, delineate the likeness of an individual, producing a copy of his particular features, with all their beauties and all their blemishes alike: or he may, on the other hand, conceive and execute an ideal picture of man, the portrait of no person in particular, with features selected from many specimens of the race, and combined in one complete figure. The parable of the prodigal is a picture of the latter kind. It is not out and out the picture of any man; but it is, to a certain extent, the picture of every man. This prophecy of Scripture is not of private construction; and therefore it is not of private interpretation. As the ideal portrait is in one feature the likeness of this man, and in another the likeness of that man, while it is not throughout the likeness of any; so the elder and younger sons of this parable find at one point their closest counterpart in angels and men, at another in Jews and Gentiles, at a third in Pharisees and publicans, and indefinitely in as many pairs of corresponding characters as have been, or may yet be, found in the world.

In the first act of the drama,--the departure of the younger son, the case of angels and men, presents by far the most exact counterpart to the case of the two brothers. Man is the youngest child of G.o.d's intelligent family. Elder and younger remained together in the house awhile. You may observe sometimes in human families that the children who have reached the years of understanding at the birth of the youngest rejoice over the infant with a fondness second only to that of the mother. Thus the elder brother angels of our Father's house,--the morning stars of creation, sang together over the advent of man. But the younger son did not remain in the house: having become alienated in heart from the Father, he was uneasy in his presence, and sought relief by going out of sight.

In the description of the younger son's conduct, we find a picture both of the first fall and of the actual apostasy of each separate sinner.

”The younger said to his father, Father give me the portion,” &c. Only his words are preserved in the record; but we know that thoughts unseen in his soul were the seeds whence these words sprang. He desired to please himself, and therefore grew unhappy under the restraints of home.

Bent on enjoying the pleasures of sin, he determined to avoid the presence of his father: alienated in heart, he becomes vicious in life.

The same two elements go to const.i.tute the character and condition of the sinful before he is reconciled to G.o.d. There is a lower and a higher link in the chain that binds the slave. There is a body of this death, and a soul: there is a spiritual wickedness in high places, and a bodily wickedness in low places. The one is guilt, the other sin: the heart is at enmity, and the life is disobedient.

The younger son did not humbly sue for a gift from his father's bounty: he claimed a share of the property as of right. The terms are significant; ”Give me the portion of goods that _falleth_ (t? ?p??????

????) to me.” The phrase faithfully depicts the atheism of an unbelieving human heart; the fool hath said in his heart, ”No G.o.d.” He has become brutish: as swine gather the acorns from the ground, heedless of the oak from which they fell; alienated men s.n.a.t.c.h G.o.d's gifts for the gratification of their appet.i.tes, and forget the giving G.o.d. This seeing eye, and this hearing ear, and these cunning hands, the irreverent son counts his own, and determines to employ them in ministering to his own pleasure.

The father might justly have refused to comply with his son's demand: although a certain part of the property might by law ”fall” to the younger son at the death of the father, there was no law or custom that gave the youth a right to any of it during his father's life. In this case, however, the father saw meet to let the young man have his own way; he threw the reins loose upon the neck of the prodigal. Although the father of his flesh could not see the end from the beginning, the Father of his spirit, in permitting his departure, already planned the glad return.

”Not many days after:” weary of paternal restraint, he made off as soon as possible. He gathered all; for he needed all as a price in his hand to pay for his pleasure. He went into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. Even a large substance may in this manner soon be consumed; money and health waste away quickly when they are employed as fuel to feed the flame of l.u.s.t. An interesting parallel to this portion of the parable occurs in Luke xii. 45. A servant to whom much had been intrusted thought his master was at a great distance, and would remain a long time away; then and therefore he began ”to beat the men-servants and maidens, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken.”

It is when a man is, or imagines himself to be, far from G.o.d that he dares to indulge freely his vicious propensities: and conversely, those who are secretly bent upon a life of sin, put G.o.d far from their thoughts, in order that they may not be interrupted in their pleasures.

The crisis came. The ”season” of pleasure did not last long; and the man who had ”sowed to the flesh” was compelled to fill his bosom with an early harvest of misery. The hunger, nakedness, and shame that acc.u.mulated on the head of this wayward youth aptly represent the bitter fruits which sin, even in this life, bears as an earnest of the full wages in the second death, which it promises to pay its servants.

His sufferings did not in the first instance turn him from his sin: human sorrow is not all or always G.o.dly sorrow. Although the prodigal was in want, he did not return to his father. Convictions and terrors in the conscience seldom bring the wanderer at once to the door of mercy: he generally tries in succession several other methods in order to obtain relief. As the prodigal attempted to keep body and soul together by the most desperate and loathsome expedients, rather than throw himself on his father's compa.s.sion; so an alienated human soul, conscious of having wantonly offended a good G.o.d, and therefore hating deeply the Holy One, will bear and do the will of the wicked one to the utmost extremity of misery rather than come home a beggar, and be indebted for all to a father's love. The picture, although drawn by the Master's own hand, is necessarily drawn in the colours of external nature, and therefore it comes far short of the original, which is a spiritual wickedness. The cherished son of an affluent and honourable house in Israel has become the swineherd of a stranger in a famine-stricken land: the transition is as great as could be displayed on the limited stage of the present world; but when he who was made in G.o.d's image and treated as G.o.d's child is bound by the chain of his own pa.s.sions, and indentured as a slave in the devil's service, the fall is greater, as heaven is higher than the earth, and the world of spirit deeper than the world of flesh. ”No man gave unto him:” when a son deserts the Father of lights, from whom every good gift comes down, his soul cannot be satisfied from other sources: the world's b.r.e.a.s.t.s are dry, or yield only poison to the eager drawing of the famished child.

There is a blank in the history here. The later stages of the prodigal's misery are not exhibited in the light: fully exposed, they might have been shocking rather than impressive. Every height has its opposite and corresponding depth: as eye has not seen nor ear heard in all its fulness the blessedness that G.o.d hath prepared for them that love him; so neither can our faculties measure the miseries of sin, in their foretastes here and their fulness hereafter. How the prodigal fared under that veil, as his misery day by day increased to its climax, we know not; but at length he suddenly emerges another man. ”He came to himself:” the wild foul stream that had sunk into the earth and flowed for a s.p.a.ce under ground, bursts to the surface again, agitated still indeed, but now comparatively pure. We learn for the first time that the man has been mad, by learning that his reason is restored. It is a characteristic of the insane that they never know or confess their insanity until it has pa.s.sed away: it is when he has come to himself that he first discovers he has been beside himself. The two beings to whom a man living in sin is most a stranger are himself and G.o.d; when the right mind returns, he becomes acquainted with both again. The first act of the prodigal, when light dawned on his darkness, was to converse with himself, and the second to return to his father.

A man can scarcely find a more profitable companion than himself. These two should be well acquainted, and deal frankly with each other; in the case of the prodigal how disastrous was the estrangement, how blessed the reconciliation between them! The young man, during the period of his exile, was as much a stranger to himself as to his father. His return to himself became the crisis of his fate; from the interview sprang the burning thought, ”I will arise and go to my father,” and the resolute deed, ”he arose and went.”

When he had determined to return, he returned at once, and returned as he was. Emaciated by prolonged want,--naked, filthy, hungry, he came as he was. He did not remain at a distance until by efforts of his own he should make himself in some measure worthy to resume his original place in the family; he came in want of all things, that out of his father's fulness all his wants might be supplied. The signification of this feature on the spiritual side is obvious; it exhibits a cardinal point in the way of a sinner's return to G.o.d.

But while the repenting youth did not pretend to bring anything good to his father's house, neither did he presume to bring thither anything evil: his poverty and hunger were brought with him, but the companions and instruments of his l.u.s.ts were left behind. This is a distinctive discriminating feature of true repentance. In the act of fleeing to his father the prodigal leaves his a.s.sociates, and his habits, and his tastes behind: and conversely, as long as he clings to these he will not--he cannot return to his father.

In the narrative it is made evident that a return to his father was the son's last resort; he did not adopt it--he did not even entertain it, until all others had failed. The grief which he must have known his unnatural exile caused in the bosom of the family at home did not move him: even want, when it came upon him like an armed man, failed to overcome his stubborn spirit. He will be the servant of a stranger rather than his father's son; he would live on swine's food, if it had power to sustain a human life, rather than sit at his father's table. It was not till death stared him in the face that he consented to return.

He encountered all extremities of privation rather than come home; no thanks to him, then, for coming at last. Yet he was received with an ardent welcome, and without upbraiding. The son's sullen, obdurate, desperate resistance becomes a measure and a monument of the father's forbearing, forgiving love. It is thus that sinful men return to G.o.d in Christ to-day; and thus that G.o.d in Christ to-day receives sinful men.

Prodigals returning deserve nothing, and yet obtain all. Of even the last rag of merit that the imagination can conjure up--the merit of being willing to receive favour--they are utterly dest.i.tute. Though we do not come back to our father until all other resources have failed--although we come, as it were, only when we cannot help coming, he receives us with open arms; he takes the sin away, and does not cast it up.

”When he was yet a great way off his father saw him.” He must have been looking out. Often, doubtless every day, his eye turned and strained wistfully in the direction of his son's retiring footsteps. While that son was starving in a foreign land, his father was weeping at the window, longing for his return; when at last the prodigal appeared, the watchful father caught sight of his form in the distance, and ran to meet him. Behold again in this gla.s.s another feature of redeeming love!

Jesus, looking down on Jerusalem, wept for sorrow, because its giddy mult.i.tude would not turn and live; if they had with one accord come forth to accept the pardon which he offered, he would have wept again for joy. In his tears, as well as in his teaching he showed us the Father.

The reconciliation is immediate and complete. The parable reveals an extraordinary outburst of paternal tenderness. The son, melted, and in some measure confused by the undeserved, unexpected warmth of his reception, bethought of the speech which, at the turning point of his repentance, he had resolved to address to his father, and began to recite it as he had conned the words in exile:--”Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son;” but there stopped short, omitting the portion about being content with the position of a hired servant. Bengel suggests that the father may have cut the prodigal's speech short by giving aloud an order to the servants for the kind and honourable reception of his child; but another thought, also suggested by the same acute and experimental expositor, brings out, I think, more truly the deep significance of the omission:--The son lying on the father's bosom, with the father's tears falling warm on his upturned face, is some degrees further advanced in the spirit of adoption than when he first planned repentance beside the swine in his master's field. There and then the legal spirit of fear because of guilt still lingered in his heart; he ventured to hope for exemption from deserved punishment, but not for restoration to the place of a beloved sen. Now the spirit of bondage has been conclusively cast out by the experience of his father's love; the fragments of stone that had hitherto remained even in a broken heart are utterly melted at last, as if by fire from heaven. He could not now complete the speech which he had prepared; its later words faltered and fell inarticulate. He could not now ask for the place of a servant, for he was already in the place of a son.[83]

[83] The paraphrase of this Scripture, in a selection employed in most of the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland, stumbles at this point, and misses the meaning of the text. Overlooking the mighty step of progress which the prodigal had made between the time when his acc.u.mulating convictions turned the balance first in favour of repentance, and the time when the last fragment of distrust melted away in the flood of a full reconciliation, the hymn represents the son as still pleading specifically to be sent away into the place of a servant, after the embrace, and the kiss, and the tears of his father had bestowed and triply sealed his sons.h.i.+p.

”He ran and fell upon his neck, Embraced and kissed his son: The grieving prodigal bewailed The follies he had done.”

”No more, my father, can I hope To find paternal grace; My utmost wish is to obtain A servant's humble place.”

No; after the meeting the youth did indeed say that he was not worthy to be called a son, but he did not say he had abandoned the hope or the desire of being reinstated. Yet, notwithstanding this and other errors that have crept into the collection, and the superior character of many that are excluded from it, no vigorous effort has been made to obtain a revision in order to exclude the faulty and introduce better in their stead. Conservative inertia--an instinct to keep unchanged what has descended to us from our fathers--is a great and curious power in human nature, operating both on Church and State. Although not creditable to the wisdom and courage of men, it is doubtless overruled for good by the providence of G.o.d.

The father's command regarding the son's reception represents the complete reconciliation of the Gospel--the total oblivion of the prodigal's past sins, and his admission into the favour and the family of G.o.d, as a dear child. Even the details at this point have been framed after the pattern of spiritual privileges as they are elsewhere represented in the Scriptures; and they admit, consequently, of being minutely examined and applied. The best Robe points to the Redeemer's righteousness which the believer puts on, and wherein he is justified; the Ring is the signet of a king, the seal of the Spirit in the regeneration; the Shoes suggest that the sinner, forgiven and renewed, shall walk with G.o.d in newness of life; the Feast indicates the joy of a forgiving G.o.d over a forgiven man, and the joy of a forgiven man in a forgiving G.o.d.