A Feast of Grace

They were muttering again.

The religious leaders, the scribes, and the Pharisees couldn’t help themselves. “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them,” they say (Luke 15:2). Their disdain curled at the edges of every word, as if mercy were a stain, as if love had gone too far.

Jesus responds, as He so often does, not with argument but with story.

He tells three stories, but they’re really one. A shepherd loses a sheep. A woman loses a coin. A father loses a son. Each is a parable of pursuit. And in each, the one who has lost does not wait for return. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine. The woman turns the house upside down. The father?—he runs.

In Henri Nouwen’s beloved reflection on this parable, The Return of the Prodigal Son, he writes, “I am the younger son; I am the elder son; and I am on my way to becoming the father.” Nouwen knew what many of us forget: that this story…