Revd. Mike Coe, Vicar - All Saints, Ilkley

I’VE just experienced a parental moment you know will happen from when your children are born - the day when your last child leaves home! Our youngest moved last week to student accommodation in Bradford - close enough for us to be able to see her regularly but far enough away for her to be independent. It’s a mixture of positive and negative emotions but the strongest one has been one of sadness. I’m obviously thrilled and proud that she is moving on in life, with the confidence to live independently, but the house is emptier without her!

There’s a famous Bible story (Luke 15:11-31) where Jesus uses that sense of parental sadness at a child leaving home to teach one of the most important things we need to know about God. He tells of a son who leaves home, not in a sad but joyful way as I’ve just had, but in a ‘can’t-wait-to-be-rid-of-my-family’ way. He is tired of the ‘restrictions’ placed on him by his father and he wants to do his own thing. So he asks for his share of the family inheritance (effectively saying that he wishes his father were dead) and then leaves immediately for a ‘far away country’. You can read what happens when he gets there in Luke 15 (SPOILER ALERT – it doesn’t go well for him) but he ends up a broken man coming back home to ask for forgiveness.

There is a minor detail in the story which I’ve always found very moving and challenging. When the son returns Jesus says his father ‘sees him while he was still a long way off’. Think about that for one moment! When the son had left months before he wasn’t coming back. He was done and dusted with his family in a way where even ‘Long Lost Family’ wouldn’t be able to find him.

Yet the moment he appears unannounced on the horizon, his father ‘sees him’. How is that possible? A lucky coincidence or a servant comes & tells him? The way Jesus tells the story has a different explanation.

Despite all that the son had done, his father still missed him and was longing for him to come home, even though he had no idea when, or if, that would happen. But he scans the horizon 24/7 in the hope that one day he would see a familiar silhouette coming over the hill. He had no guarantees that would ever happen, but he kept looking and longing regardless.

I think that’s one of the main reasons why Jesus tells the story because it shows us what God thinks about us. The father is God and we are like the son because we turn away from God wanting to live life without His ‘restrictive’ guidance. God loves us so much He lets us walk away but just like the father in the story He longs for us to return to Him and ‘scans the horizon’ waiting and longing that we’ll come back.

And when that happens, God reacts the same way as the father in the story does – but I’ll leave you to read that for yourself (SPOILER ALERT – It’s a very good ending!)