Found While Still Far Off

Open Luke to chapter 15 and you find Jesus surrounded by the wrong crowd. Tax collectors and notorious sinners are pressing in to hear Him, and the respectable people are muttering: “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Instead of defending Himself, Jesus tells three stories in a row – a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son – and every one of them ends the same way: something is missing, someone goes looking, and when it is found there is a party.

The shepherd does not wait for the sheep to find its own way home. He leaves the ninety-nine and goes after the one “until he finds it,” and when he does he hoists it onto his shoulders and throws a celebration. The woman lights a lamp and sweeps the whole house for one coin and then calls her neighbors to rejoice. And the father – the father does the most undignified thing of all. He has been watching the road. He sees his son “while he was still in the distance,” and a grown man in a culture where elders did not run picks up his robe and sprints down the lane to a boy who has not yet finished his rehearsed apology.

Then turn to chapter 24, the last chapter Luke writes, and notice that the gospel ends the way it has been teaching all along. Two disciples are trudging away from Jerusalem toward a village called Emmaus, about seven miles off, talking over the catastrophe of the last three days. “Jesus Himself came up and walked along with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing Him.” The risen Lord does not announce Himself. He falls into step, asks what they are discussing, and lets them pour out their grief to the very person they are grieving. The seeking that filled chapter 15 has not stopped. It has walked out of the parable and onto the road.

There is a kind of waiting that does not look like much from the outside. A mother I know left the porch light on for eleven years. Her son had walked out after a fight neither of them could later quite reconstruct, and for a long time there was no address to write to and no number that still worked. Friends gently suggested she let it go. She kept the light on anyway, and she kept the road in the corner of her eye every time she pulled into the driveway.

She used to say the strange thing was not the leaving. The strange thing was how much of the homecoming was already finished before he ever turned onto the street. The room was made. The plate was in the cupboard. The forgiveness had been worked through, alone, over years, so that when the car finally did pull up there was nothing left to negotiate – only a woman already halfway down the steps before he had the door open.

That is the posture of Luke 15. The father is not surprised by the son on the horizon. He is found because he was being watched for. The compassion was loaded and waiting; the boy walked into a welcome that had been ready for him the whole time he thought he was alone in a far country.

One of two disciples walking the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus on the first Easter afternoon, named in Luke 24:18. He is not one of the Twelve – an ordinary follower, gutted by the crucifixion, walking away from the city in grief. The risen Jesus joins him unrecognized, listens to his despair, reopens the Scriptures to him, and is finally known in the breaking of the bread. Cleopas then runs the seven miles back to tell the others.