Luke 15:20 His father ran and embraced him

In Luke 15, Jesus was criticized because He was welcoming some people whom the religious leaders despised.  They were tax collectors and sinners.  This is not to say that tax collectors weren’t considered to be sinners.  They were just noted, because they had a special place of disgust among the Jewish people, even non-religious ones.

And that wasn’t the first time.  Earlier in Luke (Luke 5:29-32), Jesus was in a similar situation, eating with tax collectors and sinners.  A little later they called him a friend of tax-collectors and sinners. (Luke 7:34)

Who were the sinners? 

I would say that they were those who were known not to be not particularly religious.  At least outwardly.  In Luke 7, a woman was described as a sinner, whom I’m guessing was probably a prostitute.  She came into a dinner where Jesus was and proceeded to anoint His feet with perfume.  In those days, they reclined on couches to eat rather than sitting at a table, so their feet were sticking out around the table.

In Luke 5:8, Peter had an encounter with Jesus and told Him: “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!”  The Greek word ‘sinner’ here is actually an adjective used as a noun, so when you read it in Greek, you see the connection here with the other uses of ‘sinner’ in Luke in a way you don’t see in English. 

But no need to worry, Peter, because just a little later, Jesus said: Luke 5:32 “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

But Luke 15 is the passage that concerns us here.

In the response to the criticism that Jesus received because He welcomed sinners and ate with them, He told three parables to make a point.  One point. 

In the first parable, He tells of a shepherd who has a hundred sheep and one gets lost.  He will leave the rest and go look for that one.

In the second, a woman lost a large coin.  People didn’t have checking accounts or credit cards in those days, and no government inflation from massive government borrowing and spending.  So they kept their money under their mattress.  She looks for it until she finds it and tells all her neighbors about it.

But in the third parable, the thing that was lost was a person, a man’s son.  And when the son finally returns home, it turns out the father had been constantly looking and waiting for him.  He couldn’t go to His son and make him come home.  After all, he was the one who left the father.

And when the father saw his son coming in the distance, he ran to meet him, fell on his neck and kissed him.  Then he called for a huge feast and celebration. 

YOU are that son, and God is the father who longs to hold you and kiss you.  Now it’s true, that in most relationships, it often takes a bit of a crisis to bring out the full extent of our feelings.  The father had another son who didn’t feel the love, though all that the father had belonged to him as well.

Feelings are elusive things.  We may not always feel that God loves us in that way or even that much.  I often tell people that that’s one reason why God built the experience of having children into our lives.  When we are the father, or mother, we know the love we have for our children, and hopefully we can understand a bit then of how much God loves us.