Not All Prodigals Come Home: The Blessings of an Ordinary, Non-Prodigal Life + Glen Hansard in his own words before his death
We should undoubtedly rejoice in the kindness of God in bringing satan-bound sinners to the foot of Jesus; to the Father’s house.
There are many wayward sons and daughters in the church, and many of these wayward children never return home. The parable of Luke 15, applied covenantally, functions as an eschatological reality of the return of God’s people from exile. It signals the deliverance of God’s repentant people, while exposing the envy and self-righteousness represented by the older brother—most immediately, the Pharisees and scribes. There is also a good application to the personal reality of many parents who have witnessed their children chase the world, the flesh, and the devil. Again, it bears repeating that the return of prodigals is not a common refrain in the life of the church. Many who go do not return to the father’s embrace.
I have said, humorously, to my congregation and in other contexts that every parent should pray that their children share a boring testimony as they age. And of course, I mean it facetiously to get their attention. In other words, they should be content and thrilled that their offspring never experience the bitter taste of unbelief; the unsavory feast of unrighteousness, and the fellowship of demons. Their testimony should be that Jesus is good, life is good, and fellowship in the community of Jesus is good. No history of drunkenness. Drugs. Multiple sexual partners. Just ordinary faithfulness and ordinariness in the house of the Lord.
We should undoubtedly rejoice in the kindness of God in bringing satan-bound sinners to the foot of Jesus; to the Father’s house. But Luke 15 should not be treated as a statistical paradigm guaranteeing that those who abandon Christ will eventually return. Instead, they show a redemptive historical reality of God’s people finding refuge in his fatherly care after their exile and wilderness wanderings. And again, at a personal level, they do serve to comfort the grieving parent whose child has been excommunicated, but it should not be seen as the norm.
Evangelical culture loves a dramatic story. It has romanticized the prodigal, turning him into a hero who squanders his inheritance only to return home triumphantly. Revivalistic religion prioritizes the testimony of the alcoholic, the four-times-married individual, the drug-addict who comes to Jesus, because such stories make good headlines.
But the covenant child who was baptized at First Presbyterian, catechized from his earliest days, killed the dragon, got the girl, raised a tribe of little hobbits, and now serves quietly as a deacon in his local church receives no red-carpet entrance. His story has little dramatic appeal and attracts no front-page attention. I am not saying that it should. I am saying that the steady life of ordinary faithfulness is often minimized in favor of the spectacular. The ordinary is set aside for the extraordinary, even though the ordinary is itself an extraordinary work of grace.
Blessing the Ordinary, Non-Prodigal Life
Recently, we had one of those stories of a prodigal coming home. It was splendid. There was much rejoicing. Believe it or not, a Reformed congregation cheered out loud at the occasion! We brought out our inner Pentecostal and rejoiced that a sinner who was lost was now found. Thanks be to God.
But on the other hand, the repentant covenantal member who lives, moves, and has his being in God needs also to be encouraged by the regularity of feasting at his Father’s house. The prodigal returns to a great feast, but the son who never leaves should receive the regularity of the good life. He too needs to be exhorted to live faithfully before God and man—to continue the good fight of faith towards the upward prize. He needs to be urged to action and godly ambition.
The nature of such steadiness needs three additional encouragements:
First, they need the well-done remarks from older saints. They need to be reminded often to continue in the path of righteousness, and to pursue and delight in the ordinary. They need resources, wisdom, and affection from those whose lives may not have seen the ordinary, but instead came through the eye of the needle. Those who have suffered violence to enter the kingdom of heaven should urge the sons and daughters of God to avoid that tumultuous route.
Second, pastors should be aware of such testimonies of loyalty among their young men. Not only should they be cultivated, but also urged towards diaconal functions in the church. The young married man may be too young to become a deacon, but he is not too young to be a diaconal assistant in various duties. Put him in positions where his faithfulness is harvested as an example among all.
Finally, encourage them to urge others in the goodness of the Christian life. Remind them of the blessings of hospitality, songs, worship, fellowship, festivities, Church Calendar, liturgies of the morning and the evening, obedience, and benedictions. Make the ordinary heavenly and the heavenly life to be the ordinary life.
While we all rejoice when the prodigal comes home from the den of pigs, there is even much more to rejoice in the ordinariness of a Christian life—the faithful and true baptismal life.
Such experiences ought to be the norm. We should not hope to see extensive cases of apostasy within the church. We should not have to experience the pain of an excommunication as a regular feature of the Church’s life. Instead, we should expect that from the font to the table and to the grave our children grow in the wisdom and knowledge of God all their days. So that, looking back over their lives, they cannot remember a day when they did not know God’s fatherly care.
Notations
As I walked the beach in Outer Banks this past week, I did something I rarely do: listen to an entire funeral service. In this case, it was the funeral of the late Glen Hansard. I had delved into Glen’s canon after wandering happily into Falling Slowly, which I still think is one of the finest ballads ever written.
The service was a mix of Catholic liturgy and Ireland’s greatest artists (including Bono). I cannot tell you how moved I was by the service and the vast eulogies. The song composed by his older brother, Gary (I Can See God), was an emotional masterpiece.
In these last seven days since Hansard's death, I have worked my way through most of his albums and found a wild collection of gems, including The Song of Good Hope, which I have listened to liturgically. All of this leads me to the interview below, recorded three months before Glen’s motorcycle accident in Dublin. The interview is warm and almost like a living-room setting, with Glen speaking candidly about his writing process, growing up with a broken father, his collaborative work with blues icons, and the appearance of his little boy, Christy, on the screen. I was handling the interview with intellectual strength until his little one showed up. At that moment, the agony of knowing that the little lad would grow up without his father really hit me.
Anyway, here’s Glen; a man I never met, but a man I hope to meet.