“Jesus told some wonderful stories, but the one in today’s Gospel reading, Luke 15:11-32, is perhaps his best-known and best-loved. It’s the parable of the Prodigal Son, and in so many ways it reveals the heart of Christianity,” begins Jim Somerville, pastor of Richmond’s First Baptist Church and co-founder of A Sermon for Every Sunday. Somerville says, “It’s a story of reconciliation, a story about how God loves us no matter how much we’ve sinned, and how he is always ready and willing to welcome us home…For the longest time I thought that’s all there was to the story: that reconciliation between Father and son. But Jesus begins this story by saying that a certain man had two sons…I get the feeling that Jesus is not only trying to help the scribes and Pharisees understand that God loves sinners, he’s trying to help the scribes and Pharisees love sinners, to understand that if God is the father of all of us we are all members of the same family, and he does it by telling the story of the older brother.”
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