SERMONS
THE PRODIGAL’S RETURN
Text: Luke xv. 18, 20. “I will arise and go to my 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.”
The Saviour, by a beautiful and affecting story, illustrates the natural and inevitable result of a sinful course, a course of ingratitude and disobedience to God. We have placed before us the life of a Hebrew patriarch. In that land now so barren beneath the curse of God and the curse of a despotic government, but once so full of beauty and blossoming, when the Chosen People clothed its now barren mountain peaks with clambering vines and its valleys with waving grass and grain, dwelt a Hebrew, a righteous man among the kindred of his people, to whom God had given goodly land, and flocks and herds in abundance, whose tents stretched far over the plains, and who had servants born in his house. This man had two sons, one of whom was much older than the other. It was a pleasant household; the father was kind and affectionate to his servants and to the poor,—a just man, fearing God and tenderly attached to his children.
As the two brothers were different in their age, so were they in their dispositions. The elder son was sober, industrious, and found in the care of the flocks and the quiet enjoyments of rural life enough to occupy and interest him. The father could put confidence in him, could go away from home and leave all his business to his care, sure that it would be completed as if he himself were present. But though sober, industrious, and trustworthy, and held by the restraints of his education, yet he was not of an affectionate and generous nature, but penurious and severe in his temper, and much more feared and respected than beloved by his servants and his equals. But the younger son was the very opposite. He was full of life and energy, but fickle and restless, and directed his energies to no good purpose. He cared nothing for business nor for cattle. He would not remain at home, but wandered from tent to tent and from vineyard to vineyard and into the distant city; the farm life was dull and distasteful to him. His father could put no trust in him. If so be that his father went from home and left him in charge of the flocks and the servants, he was sure to find on his return that the flocks had strayed, that some of them had been lost or devoured by the wolves, or to find his son frolicking with the servants instead of directing their labor. Thus while he could trust the elder son with everything, he could trust the younger with nothing, and must always watch him with constant anxiety.
Yet, with all his faults, the younger son was generous and affectionate, keen to perceive and understand, and of great determination to accomplish when he was so minded. The father often said to himself: “Oh, that my son would only do well! How much comfort and honor would he be to me! And how much good he might accomplish!” Indeed, it seemed ofttimes that the boy could not help his wrong-doing; his wild, frolicsome, headstrong nature did so hurry him along. Afterward he would be sorry and even shed tears, and then go straightway and do the same again. Yet was the heart of the father more after this wild slip of a boy than after the other.
There is in the heart of the parent a principle, not possible perhaps to be explained, which leads him to be more attached to and indulgent of the youngest child. There is something also in the very anxiety that the follies of the disobedient child occasion which calls out and fosters the affections of the parent more strongly for him than for the one who never gives that cause for uneasiness. The father also felt that the boy, though carried away by the impulses of his own imaginations and the romance of his nature and spirit, was after all of deeper affections and nobler impulses and greater capacity than the other son, and had in him all the raw material of a noble, useful character, could this impetuous spirit and these burning impulses be subdued, not destroyed, and these energies wisely directed. Many a bitter tear he shed, and many a prayer he put up to God for this child of his love and his old age.