Jesus was aware that there are people who are lost, not only in terms of the kingdom of God, but in personal terms: they don’t even know themselves. A person can get so caught up in a kind of activity that he doesn’t even know who he is any more.

One of the greatest abilities we have as humans is the ability to deceive ourselves, to rationalize, to make up excuses. Some of us continue to delude ourselves, postponing that painful moment of honest self-evaluation. But this young man woke up to the reality of what he was doing. That awakening is, of course, the most critical point in his life.

The image of running, falling on one’s neck, and kissing in forgiveness occurs only once elsewhere in Scripture: in Jacob’s reconciliation with Esau. The younger son in the parable has offended both father and older brother on the issue of inheritance, as Jacob offended his father (Isaac) and older brother (Esau) on the same issue. Like Jacob, the younger son faces a day of reckoning: he “comes to himself” and goes back home. Jacob had reason to fear Esau, whom he defrauded; the younger son has reason to fear his father, whom he disgraced. Both fears were mistaken. Esau “ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him” (Gen 33:4). The description of the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau is unmistakably similar in theme, vocabulary, and syntax to the reconciliation of the younger son and the father. It is not difficult to imagine that this redemptive key in the parable, perhaps the entire parable itself, was fashioned by Jesus on Jacob’s inimitable meeting with Esau. So remarkable was Esau’s response that Jacob believed he had seen “the face of God” (Gen 33:10). So it is with the younger son: both he and Jacob have been accosted by grace, and grace is the face of God.

The older son is like many people who have enjoyed a long relationship with God. His love for the father has grown cold, he has become callous and complaining, he harbors bitterness about the life that passed him by. He has been faithful over the years, and he imagines that the father owes him a reward. Having not received what he imagines, he thinks himself justified in his bitterness. So bitter is he that he will not address his father as such. The father nevertheless speaks more tenderly to the older brother than to the younger, calling him teknon (v. 31). English translations (incl. NIV) usually render the word “son,” but that is a disappointing approximation, owing to the fact that English does not have a term of endearment for a grown male. Teknon literally means “child,” connoting the affection, nurture, and protectiveness of a parent for a child, or even “of a hen that gathers her chicks [Gk. teknon] under her wings” (13:34). To the accusation that the father “never” threw a party for the older son (v. 29), the father asserts, “My Son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours” (v. 31). The description in v. 31 of the relationship of the father to the son—yes, this disgusting elder son—is formulated in the most absolute and unconditional way possible. The only description in the NT analogous to it is that of Jesus and the Father, “All things have been committed to me by the Father” (10:22); “All that I have is yours, and all that you have is mine” (John 17:6, 10).

In this speech [15:29–30] the elder brother shows that he also has, all along, been an unworthy son, serving his father not out of love but in the spirit of a hireling. The fact that he would have liked to enjoy himself ‘with his friends’ and away from his father, proves that he too was at heart a prodigal! And at heart the Pharisees and Scribes (v. 2) were also wanderers from God” (Weymouth 1912:207).

Only one thing is missing: the older son has yet to learn that “righteousness” is not achieved by his worthy obedience. It is a gift conferred by the father’s love, and it is received by joining the banquet. In so doing, the son not only bears the family name, he joins the father’s mission. His righteousness is not his own, the result of obedience to the law (v. 29!), “but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:9). This description is intentionally drafted in Pauline terminology, for Saul of Tarsus was the quintessential older son, whose self-description (“a Pharisee whose righteousness according to law was faultless,” Phil 3:6) is practically interchangeable with the older son’s (“all these years I continued serving you and never violated your command,” v. 29). According to the virtually unanimous witness of early Christianity, Luke was a protégé of Paul. It seems very possible to imagine that Luke did not intend the stories of Simon the Pharisee, the fig tree, the Pharisee host, and yes, the older brother, to be understood as stories with open or unfinished endings, but rather with delayed endings. The intended completion comes in the Acts of the Apostles in the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, whose acceptance of his father’s love for him on the road to Damascus enabled him also to accept the Gentile mission of Christ and join the Father’s banquet!