Daily Worship

Wild Son Absconds With Family Fortune

James Cathcart October 20, 2025 5 1
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Luke 15: 11-13 (NIV)

11 Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

13 “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.

In Luke 15 Jesus tells a wild story. An explosive, intimate, and challenging story that got under the skin of his audience in the first century and still gets under our skin today.

A younger son wants to cash in his inheritance early and burn it on wild living, no thought for tomorrow or for the rest of his family. The story is deliberately sensational, Jesus wants to draw his audience in for the twists and turns that are to come. 

Imagine the newspapers covering this story with its timeless themes of rejection, betrayal and anger:

SON ANNOUNCES HEIR-RAISING SCHEME 

DAD CAVES IN SUCCESSION SHOCKER — BIG BRO SPEECHLESS 

‘DAD YOU’RE DEAD TO ME’ DECLARES DEADBEAT

HEIR TODAY — GONE TOMORROW!

‘THAT’S THAT’ — SAYS EX-PAT BRAT

In this parable Jesus is going to tell a story about two sons and about two different ways we can reject God and choose to go our own way. But for now the older brother is off screen. Right now he’s speechless, but we will hear from him later. 

Just now Jesus wants us to feel the heartbreak — the son rejecting the father and the father graciously letting him go. It wires straight into our heads and our headlines as it’s a familiar story. Part of growing up is wrestling with what we want to hold on to and what we want to reject. At various times and situations in our lives we will all act out, bail, disappear, check-out, drop off, burn a bridge.

Because we’re human.

And to be human is to hold a lot of contradictions and emotions in our heads. We long to fit but long to be free. We want to be recognised and want to be anonymous. We want to plan for the future and also to live in the moment. We want to be masters of our own fate, and we want to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

And God knows all this about us and has a way back for each of us regardless of how and why we reject.

 

Prayer:

 

Father God,

Help us to live with 

the contradictions that make up the human soul

with wisdom and grace.

Amen.