Lovesick Father
Extract from What’s so Amazing About Grace? By Philip Yancey

We are accustomed to finding a catch in every promise, but Jesus' stories of extravagant grace include no catch, no loophole disqualifying us from God's love. Each has at its core an ending too good to be true - or so good that it must be true.

How different are these stories from my own childhood notions about God: a God who forgives, yes, but reluctantly, after making the penitent squirm. I imagined God as a distant thundering figure who prefers fear and respect to love. Jesus tells instead of a father publicly humiliating himself by rushing out to embrace a son who has squandered half the family fortune. There is no solemn lecture, "I hope you've learned your lesson!" Instead, Jesus tells of the father's exhilaration - "This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found"- and then adds the buoyant phrase, "they began to make merry."

What blocks forgiveness is not God's reticence - "But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him" - but ours. God's arms are always extended; we are the ones who turn away.

I have meditated enough on Jesus' stories of grace to let their meaning filter through. Still, each time I confront their astonishing message I realize how thickly the veil of ungrace obscures my view of God. A housewife jumping up and down in glee over the discovery of a lost coin is not what naturally comes to mind when I think of God. Yet that is the image Jesus insisted upon.

The story of the Prodigal Son, after all, appears in a string of three stories by Jesus - the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son - all of which seem to make the same point. Each underscores the loser's sense of loss, tells of the thrill of rediscovery, and ends with a scene of jubilation. Jesus says in effect, "Do you want to know what it feels like to be God? When one of those two-Iegged humans pays attention to me, it feels like I just reclaimed my most valuable possession, which I had given up for lost." To God himself, it feels like the discovery of a lifetime.

Strangely, rediscovery may strike a deeper chord than discovery. To lose, and then find, a Mont Blanc pen makes the owner happier than the day she got it in the first place. Once, in the days before computers, I lost four chapters of a book I was writing when I left my only copy in a motel room drawer. For two weeks the motel insisted that cleaning personnel had thrown the stack of papers away. I was inconsolable. How could I summon the energy to start all over when for months I had worked at polishing and improving those four chapters? I would never find the same words. Then one day a cleaning woman who spoke little English called to tell me she had not thrown the chapters away after all. Believe me, I felt far more joy over the chapters that were found than I had ever felt in the process of writing them.

That experience gives me a small foretaste of what it must feel like for a parent to get a phone call from the FBI reporting that the daughter abducted six months ago has been located at last, alive. Or for a wife to get a visit from the Army with a spokesman apologizing about the mix-up; her husband had not been aboard the wrecked helicopter after all. And those images give a mere glimpse of what it must feel like for the Maker of the Universe to get another member of his family back. In Jesus' words, "In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

Grace is shockingly personal. As Henri Nouwen points out, "God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found."