But it was appropriate to celebrate and be glad, for this, your brother, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found.’”
Luke 15:32 (WEB)
in its setting: Luke 15:25-32
1 Where we are
Bernadette is fifty-two, and the table at her mother's flat in Katong seats six at a push, so with nine of them the sugee cake sits on the ironing board with a tea towel under it. Her husband is carving the chicken badly, holding the fork like he is apologising to it, and her mother is telling the cousins the wrong version of how they met, the one with the bus stop in it. Twenty-five years, and three and a half of them through a glass panel. Bernadette laughs and does not eat much. She is thinking about the year she nearly went, and she will not let herself be plainly glad, because gladness is how you get caught out.
2 What the passage is doing
Jesus tells this story to religious men who are muttering about the company he keeps at meals. The music has started, the fattened calf is on, and the older son is standing out in the yard refusing to come in, doing the arithmetic of his own years of service. The father comes out to him. He does not defend the party as a soft-hearted lapse. He says the celebrating was necessary, the one thing that had to happen, because someone counted as dead is at the table breathing.
ἔδει
edei · it was necessary, it had to be
English turns this into "we had to" and it sounds like reluctance, a duty someone got stuck with. In Luke, this verb carries the weight of what God has decided must happen; it is the same kind of must used of the cross. So the father is not saying the party is unavoidable. He is saying the celebrating is the necessary thing, the one thing that had to occur, because his son is home.
3 Taking it with you
You have learnt to keep one eye on the door. When something you nearly lost is sitting across from you, eating, joking, alive, it feels safer to guard it than to enjoy it, as though your watching is what keeps it there. It is not. What kept it was never your vigilance. Christ went to the cross so that God's response to people who came back would be a feast and not an inspection, and that decision does not rest on your next good year. So put the knife down. The gladness at that table is not a risk you are taking. It is given to you, and you are allowed to eat.
A prayer you can pray
Father, I have been standing in the yard a long time, counting. Thank you for what you kept when I could not keep it. Teach me to sit down and eat, to be glad without checking the door. Where I still fear losing what I love, hold it for me. And thank you that the celebrating was your idea, not my reward. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
