1,2. THEN drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. 3, 4 And he spake this parable unto them, saying, What man of you having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and 5 go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it 6 on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which 7 was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance. 8 Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light 9 a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it? And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; 10 for I have found the piece which I had lost. Likewise, I say unto you, There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.

HERE, opened by the hand of the incarnate Revealer and Redeemer, we have a window into the very heart of God. We see his feelings of compassion toward our race and our own selves. He leaves the society of the sinless and the angelic, and the anthems of seraphim and cherubim, and the communion of heaven, for an earthly allotment of toil and exposure. He must traverse “dark mountains,” when he confronts the contradiction of sinners and the assaults of the tempter, and he becomes denied of earth and buffeted of hell. To lift the victim of sin, and the heir of wrath, to his shoulders, as the recovered and ransomed one, that shoulder must bear the cross of shame and agony; that soul of his must stoop to the yoke of denial, mockery, and betrayal. He must encounter the hidings of the face of the Father.

And this redemption is not all. He is, as the High-Priest, now and after his exaltation to the heavenly glory, still the burden-bearer of his people. The high-priest of the Jewish economy had the breastplate, with its twelve jewels, bearing the names of the twelve tribes, supported by bands that passed over his shoulders. The names of Judah and Levi and their brethren thus lay on his heart; while the weight of the record and the memorial was pressing on his shoulder. The heart is the seat of feeling; the shoulders are the seat of strength. Affection and power are shown thus blended together in undertaking the cause and sustaining the remembrance of his people. So is it in the great Antitype. His shoulder of omnipotence sustains, and his bosom, with its infinite tenderness and unforgetting omniscience, registers and defends his own Israel. “The great Shepherd of the sheep,” as the Apostle entitles him, has shed his blood, not idly and ineffectually, but as the gory sanction, “the blood of an Everlasting Covenant.” W. R. W.

THE Pharisees and scribes could not understand that any one should walk pure and unspotted amid the pollutions of the world, seeking and not shunning sinners. They had neither love to hope the recovery of such, nor medicines to effect that recovery. T.—He will draw aside for a moment the veil that hides the invisible world, and let it be seen what is thought among the angels of God of that ready reception of sinners on his part which has evoked such aversion. Christ does this in three parables—that of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Piece of Money, and the Lost Son. H.

Of the three parables, the first two, those of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Piece of Money, set forth to us mainly the seeking love of God; while the third, that of the Prodigal Son, describes to us rather the rise and growth, responsive to that love, of repentance in the heart of man. It is, in fact, only the same truth presented successively under different aspects, God’s seeking love being set forth first, and this not without reason, since we thus are taught that all first motions toward good are from him, that grace must go before as well as follow us. But yet is it the same truth in all; for it is the confluence of this drawing and seeking love from without, and of the faith awakened by the same power from within—the confluence of these two streams, the grace and the faith—out of which repentance springs. T.

As, in that great scheme of human recovery, the gospel of the great salvation, the whole of the divine Trinity was embarked, so these several parables, here interlocked, seem to allude each primarily to the work of one as distinguished from the others of the persons of the divine Trinity. The first parable presents the great doctrine of the atonement, and the work of God the Son as the Redeemer. It is a condensation of the Epistle to the Hebrews: Christ shown in his sacrifice and priestly intercession. The shepherd seeking his estrayed sheep must be reminding us of the divine speaker of the parable, when elsewhere he denominates himself the good shepherd laying down his life for the sheep. Then, on this redemption go forth, in the second parable, the Providence of God, and the Spirit of God, and the Revelation of God, as the lamp and besom and the diligent search of the housewife, recovering the lost coin; and bringing and enabling the soul of man to see the danger of its condition by sin, and its need of the gracious provisions of the great atonement. The second parable brings out the work of God the Holy Spirit, who convicts that he may convert, and disturbs that he may comfort; like the besom sweeping off the dust that has gathered in the heart and conscience, and upon the Bible and on the Book of Providence, and making all the soul for the time confused and discordant. But by the lamp, enlightening as well as confounding; searching out truths once disparaged and neglected, and finding clews once utterly lost, and bringing to view treasures before unsuspected. So this parable brings out the great truths of conversion and regeneration. The last or third delineation tion presents the great truths of effectual calling and adoption and justification, the lessons of the Epistle to the Romans. These are eminently the work of God the Father. Thus the three graphic sketches together blend the work of the divine Trinity, and bring out the full Godhead embodied in the work of human recovery. W. R. W.

4. We are not to understand “the wilderness” as a sandy or rocky desert, without herbage; but rather as wide-extended grassy plains or savannas, called desert because without habitations of men, but exactly the fittest place for the pasture of sheep. Christ’s incarnation was a girding of himself to go after his lost sheep. His whole life upon earth, his entire walk in the flesh, was a following of the strayed one; for in his own words this was the very purpose of his coming, namely, “to seek and to save that which was lost.” And he sought his own till he found it.

7. A slight yet majestic intimation of the dignity of his person he gives in that “I say unto you"—I who know; I who, when I tell you of heavenly things, tell you of mine own—I say to you that this joy shall be in heaven on the recovery of the lost. T.—Because of its revelation of the divine nature, because of their own surer confirmation in holiness by the great drama of human Redemption, and because of their full sympathy with Jesus, who rejoices in his own kingly and priestly triumph as head of the Church, there is especial joy among angels over every journey of the good Shepherd to rescue his lost and perishing charge. It is God’s statement of God’s regard for the sinner, and of the high interest that heaven, though stainless and happy, has, through all its angelic ranks, in the work of the Lord of the angels to recover the estrayed, to win back the alienated, and to rescue the self-destroyed. W. R. W.

8. Ten pieces of silver. The most noticeable feature in the attire of the women is their headdress of silver coins. They are regarded as in a sense sacred, and are said to be exempt from taxation and from seizure at law. N. C. B.—These coins are the woman’s private property, descending from mother to daughter. Poor, indeed, must she be who had only ten such pieces. How would she miss and bewail the loss of one piece of her little store! How would she light her lamp and search her dark room—for the houses have no windows to the inner apartments—where are stored all the goods, chattels, and implements of the family; and how joyously would she proclaim her good fortune to her neighbors! H. B. T.

In the one piece of money, which the woman loses out of her ten, expositors have delighted to trace a resemblance to the human soul, which was originally stamped with the image and superscription of the great King (“God created man in his own image”), and which still retains traces of the mint from which it proceeded, though by sin the image has been nearly effaced, and the superscription has wellnigh become illegible. Nor is this all; as the piece of money is lost for all useful purposes to its right owner, so man, through sin, is become unprofitable to God, who has not from him that service which is due. T.

Truth introduced into the heart, and providential disturbances and unsettlements in order to its introduction—these are the things symbolized by the lighting of the candle and the sweeping of the house. W. T.—Man needs repentance. The Son of God provided for the bestowment of that penitence, being himself “exalted as a Saviour to give repentance and the remission of sins.” The Father welcomes the exhibition and exercise of that repentance. But it is the Spirit of God who works the repentance itself, who inspires the contrite desire, and who sheds around the sepulchre of our spiritual death, and wafts down upon this moral decay that light of life—that breath of heaven—which disperses the gloom, and arrests the corruption. It is the Spirit who restores to God’s treasure-house that soul which, at first, was coined in God’s image, and garnered for his revenues; but which has since escaped, helplessly and hopelessly, from his service, to be trodden in the dust, and to be swept into the indiscriminate offscourings “whose end is to be burned,” had not mercy thus interposed. His first lessons are of necessity humiliating, alarming, and arousing. Men feel themselves strangely conscious of a misery and guilt and weakness, which before they had never suspected as belonging to them. But as the light shines from the strait gate and the atoning cross, they begin to hope, and believe, and love, and repent. They fall at the feet of the Redeemer, whom they have so long forgotten or spurned. They find under the strong, steady light of Scripture, as expounded and made intense by the Spirit, that Saviour in his glorious fulness. In finding him they find themselves; and their own souls thus saved are in him become resplendent centres, each in its orbit, of a glory never to be clouded, and fountains of a peace unspeakable and eternal.

10. Joy . . . the angels of God.** Beings of a higher world regard man as the creature and the charge of God, the denizen of eternity. To them the true sorrow for sin, and the consequent welcome of the Redeemer, displayed in the case of earth’s vilest transgressor, are causes of joy. To us the victor’s palm, and the capitalist’s revenues, and the poet’s laurel, and the crown of empire, show like realities. To them the realities are God’s smile, or God’s ban—heaven or hell—souls in their apostasy—souls in their recovery—souls in their communion with God—or souls self-banished from God to an irremediable sin and an unreturning exile. W. R. W.

The application of this to the reception of those publicans and sinners that stood around our Lord is grand in the extreme: “Ye turn from these lost ones with disdain, and because I do not the same, ye murmur at it; but a very different feeling is cherished in heaven. There the recovery of even one such outcast is watched with interest and hailed with joy; nor are they left to come home of themselves or perish; for lo! even now the great Shepherd is going after his lost sheep, and the Owner is making diligent search for the lost property; and he is finding it, too, and bringing it back with joy, and all heaven is full of it.” B.—He seeks to shame the murmurers out of their murmurs, holds up to them God and the angels of God rejoicing at the conversion of a sinner, and silently contrasts this with the discontent and envious repinings that found place in their hearts. T.

That repenteth. This is the vindication of Christ from any reproach in having fellowship with sinners. He seeks out sinners—endures all suffering until he finds sinners—carries them home rejoicing, and makes heaven ring with shouts of joy by reason of his finished work. But the sin has been left behind. It has been blotted out in its condemning power. The guilt of it has been lost in the depths of his own mighty sacrifice and death; the stain and the pollution of it have been by grace put away from the sinner. D. K. D.

8-10. The Church of God needs in her own home and house to be busy, grieving not the Spirit, but earnest in keeping the light burning clearly, and vigilant that she may prevent the dust from settling on her inner furniture. To remain by the past is not the sufficient safeguard of religious life and usefulness. The dust of formalism, and lethargy, and worldliness, may soon bury up all her treasures of grace and truth, as far as these consist in Christian example. The discipline, that for the time agitates, may be the first and inevitable condition precedent, for the life and growth that is promised to her prayers and her efforts. W. R. W.

Section 105.—The Lost Son.

11,12. And he said, A certain man had two sons: and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat; and no man gave unto him. And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry. Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. And he was angry, and would not go in; therefore came his father out, and entreated him. And he answering, said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment; yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: but as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me; and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

THE simple pathos of this parable speaks to the heart without an interpreter. The picture moves before us; rather, it lives within us. We see the human heart, in its self-will and self-sufficiency, turning away from God, and, in the flush of worldly pleasure, abandoning itself to the enjoyment of the present. We see this heart disappointed, emptied, beggared, wrung with the feeling of want; we see it for a while fighting the sense of want with the sense of shame, and, rather than confess its sin, accepting a lower humiliation; then, at last, conscience and reason awake, and with the remembrance of God’s goodness comes the first feeling of penitence, and the determination to go to the Father with an unreserved acknowledgment of folly and sin. That decision turns the scale. The penitent, seeking nothing but forgiveness, finds in God nothing but love: hardly waiting for his confession, that love meets him in advance, and overwhelms him with favor. So touchingly does man’s deepest extremity illustrate the mercy of God in seeking and recovering the lost! Who could resist the love of such a Father? J. P. T.

11-24. Closely linked with the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Piece of Money, this may with greater fitness be called the parable of the Lost

Son. This my son was lost and is found. The leading subject of all the three is the lost soul of man—guilty, sinful man. D. K. D.—The first two set before us God seeking and finding the sinner, through the incarnation of the Son, and the agency of the Spirit. The third shows us the sinner seeking God. They are all three true of every real conversion. Viewed from the divine side, God seeks the sinner; but we, who see only the earthly side, perceive only the sinner rising and returning to God. W. T.—It is not that some of fallen humankind are saved after the manner of the strayed sheep, and others after the manner of the prodigal son; not that the Saviour bears one wanderer home by his power, and that another of his own accord arises and returns to the Father. Both these processes are accomplished in every conversion. The man comes, yet Christ brings him; Christ brings him, yet he comes. Arnot.

Drawn from the simplest elements of daily experience, these parables, the last especially, illustrate, in a rising climax of tenderness, the deepest mysteries of the divine compassion—the joy that there is in heaven over one sinner that repenteth. Where, in the entire range of human literature, sacred or profane, can anything be found so terse, so luminous, so full of infinite tenderness—so faithful in the picture which it furnishes of the consequences of sin, yet so merciful in the hope which it affords to amendment and penitence—as this little story? All sin and punishment, all penitence and forgiveness, find their best delineation in these few brief words. F.

12. Portion that falleth to me.** His claiming of his share in this technical, and almost legal, form is a delicate touch, characteristic of the entire alienation from all home affections which has already found place in his heart. Its spiritual significance is the expression of man’s desire to be independent of God, to be a god to himself, and to lay out his life according to his own will and for his own pleasure. It is man growing weary of living upon God and upon his fulness, and desiring to take the ordering of his life into his own hands, and believing that he can be a fountain of blessedness to himself. All the subsequent sins of the younger son are included in this one, as in their germ—are but the unfolding of this, the sin of sins. . . . Directly opposed to “Give me my portion of goods,” is our daily petition, “Give us this day our daily bread:” we therein acknowledge that we desire to wait continually upon God for the supply of our needs, both bodily and spiritual, that we recognize our dependence upon him as our true blessedness. . . . The father “divided unto them his living.” It would have little profited to retain him at home against his will, who had already in heart become strange to that home: rather he will let the young man discover, by bitter experience, the folly of his request. T.

He only intends to wander on, and get the most selfish enjoyment out of the world that it can be made to yield him. The one bad determining act was done where he set up his own headstrong will, took the means of self-gratification into his hands, and made the world’s great sensual saloon his only home. But the prodigal was no extraordinary monster. Thousands of men are doing the same thing in kind every day, and doing it reputably enough. The one characteristic fact about him was that his back was turned to his father and his father’s house. He sought another kingdom first. Precisely how far he had gone, or into what company, was not the first consideration; but which way he was moving. His father let him have his portion of the property, to try his unfilial and dismal experiment with; and so Providence lets irreligious and unchristian men have money and prosperity, for the same purpose, here. There is something unspeakably pathetic, sad, in the sight of a man, with a heart in his breast which God made, getting worldly success, nothing else, and working this experiment out. The badges of fortune that he hangs out about him, and about his family, are only the mockeries of his mistake. How he is to discover it is only a question of time; and this is partly the sadness of it. You look at him as one after another of his purposes is accomplished, as one token after another of his rising and flourishing condition is put forth in his establishment, and you wonder when and how it will be that the hunger in his heart is to discover itself to him. What will be the mysterious influence—whose infidelity, whose treachery, what disorder, what miscalculation—that will turn all these splendors into husks, and these apples into ashes? Fulness of the intellect, fulness of the estate, will not keep the sense of hunger away—and the sense of it is the reality of it. F. D. H.

14,15. Began to be in want.** The sinner for a while may flatter himself that he is doing well at a distance from God; for the world has its attractions, and the flesh its pleasures; his affections are not all at once laid waste, nor the sources of natural delight drawn dry in an instant. The time arrives when he begins to discover that there is a great spiritual famine in the land where he has chosen to dwell—a famine of truth and love, and of all whereby the soul of man lives; he begins to discover his wretchedness and misery, and that it is an evil thing, and a bitter, to have forsaken God. To feed swine. Our Lord gives us a hint here of that awful mystery in the downward progress of souls, by which he who begins by using the world to be a servant to minister to his pleasures, submits in the end to a reversing of the relationship between them, so that the world uses him as its drudge, and sin as its slave. T.

16. Husks.** The word so rendered signifies

“little horns,” with reference to the extended and slightly curved shape of the pods of the fruit of the carob-tree; that fruit being the article of food which the prodigal is represented as having eaten. The poorer class of people employ it as food in the countries where it is produced. It is not meant that the prodigal resorted to food absolutely fit only for swine; but that he who had been brought up in wealth and luxury was reduced to such want as to be obliged to subsist on the meanest fare. H. B. H.—In his hunger he was glad to fill himself with these husks, and did so, no man giving him any nobler sustenance. All he could hope from them was to dull his gnawing pain, for the food of beasts could not appease the cravings of man. Thus a deepest moral truth lies under the words—that none but God can satisfy the longing of an immortal soul—that as the heart was made for him, so he only can fill it. No man gave unto him. But though he has forsaken God, he has not been forsaken by him—not even in that far land; for the misery which has fallen upon him there is indeed an expression of God’s anger against sin, but at the same time of his love to the sinner. He hedges up his way with thorns, he makes his sin bitter to him, that he may leave it. In this way God pursues his fugitives, summoning them back in that only language which now they will understand.

17. How full of consolation for man, how deeply significant are these words, “he came to himself!"—so that to come to one’s self and to come to God are one and the same thing. T.

18. I will arise and go to my father. The change has come at last, and what a change!—couched in terms of such exquisite simplicity and power as if expressly framed for all heart-broken penitents. B.—Father. As that relation was one which his obedience has not constituted, so his disobedience could not annul. T.

The change is wrought immediately within him. But what change? Not a change of place; he has done nothing yet but think and feel. Not a change in his outer man; neither time nor miracle has repaired the waste of dissipation in his body. Not a complete revolution yet, in all the courses and tendencies of his thoughts and desires—for it takes time to swing all these round, in the new-born man, so that they shall play spontaneously and harmoniously with the motions of the Spirit in the “new creature.” But, a change in his relations to his father and his father’s house. In that point, which is the decisive point in every character, the change is entire. Before, every longing impulse, passion, from intellectual curiosity down to fleshly lust, looked for its indulgence away from home, which means away from God; and obeying that choice, every step bore him literally away. Place is not essential at first; but destination is essential. Distance is not the principal thing; direction is. The first sign and proof of the inward transformation is in the character of the first thought and desire. Before, it was to get away from the father and forget him; now, it is to get home and abide with him. F. D. H.

20,21. Arose and came. The coming is the giving back of his love and loyalty and allegiance to his heavenly Father: the surrender to God of the sovereignty of his soul which, in the outset, he had determined to retain to himself. No doubt the Spirit is in it all; yet the soul gives itself up. The Spirit works for us by working in us, and through us; and his agency is not such as we can distinguish, apart from the common operation of our faculties. Hence, if we wish the Spirit to lead us to give back our souls to God, we must ourselves seek to make this spiritual surrender; and when we do, we shall discover that he has been beforehand with us, has already anticipated us with his quickening grace. W. T.—Had compassion, and ran. The evidences of the father’s love are described with a touching minuteness; he does not wait for the poor returning wanderer till he has come all the way, but hastens forward to meet him; at once welcomes him with the kiss, which is more than evidence of affection, being the significant pledge of reconciliation and peace. And thus the Lord draws nigh to them that draw nigh unto him. It was he who put within them even the first weak notions toward good; and as his grace went before them, so also it meets them. And though there may be very much of ignorance in them still, far too slight a view of the evil of their sin, or of the holiness of God, yet he meets them with the evidences of his mercy; at once embraces them in the arms of his love, giving them at this first moment strong consolations. And this he does, because such they need at this moment, to assure them that notwithstanding their moral defilement and misery, they are accepted in Christ Jesus, to convince them of that which it is so hard for the sinner to believe, which it is indeed the great work of faith to realize, that God has put away their sin, and is pacified toward them. T.

Admirably has one said here—“The coming out of the father to meet his son figuratively exhibits the sending of the Son.” All the way to the cross of Calvary has God come, running to meet sinners. That cross is the meeting-place between the righteous God and the repentant prodigal. In Christ, the Father has come as far as he righteously can come to save sinners; and when the sinner is by faith in Christ also, then is he received by God. In Him; mark that! Till we are “in Him” God has not met us; but when we unite ourselves to him by simple trust, then we, too, are in Him, and the Father embraces us. W. T.—We behold all around us a world estranged from holiness; a world cast out from the bosom of its God. But not cast out forever. Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift; that bosom opens itself for our return. Nay, it comes throbbing down to meet us. The Divine clasps the Human, that the Human may make its way back to the Divine. Great indeed is this mystery of the gospel; but no greater than our need of it. R. D. H.

I have sinned in thy sight. Note that it is after, and not before, the kiss of reconciliation, that this confession finds place; for the more the sinner knows and tastes of the love of God, the more he grieves ever to have sinned against that love. In Augustine’s words, “He shows himself worthy, in that he confesses himself unworthy.” He shows his repentance to have been divinely wrought, a work of the Spirit, in that he acknowledges his sin in its root, as being wrought against God. Thus David exclaims, “Against thee, thee only have I sinned;” while his offences had been against the second table. We may injure ourselves by our evil, we may wrong our neighbor, but, strictly speaking, we can sin only against God; and the recognition of our evil as first and chiefly an offence against him, is the essence of all true repentance, and distinguishes it broadly from many other kinds of sorrow which may follow on evil deeds. T.

22,23. But the father said.** The son has not said all he purposed, not so much because the father’s demonstrations had rekindled the filial, and swallowed up all servile, feeling, but because the father’s heart is made to appear too full to listen to more in this strain. B.—Robe and ring. By this bringing out of the best robe, and putting it upon him, is especially signified that act of God which, on its negative side, is a release from condemnation, a causing the sinner’s iniquity to pass from him; on its positive side, an imputation to him of the merits and righteousness of Christ. We have the gift of the Spirit indicated in the ring with which the returning wanderer is also adorned. These all being the ornaments, not of the slave, but of the free; all, therefore, speaking of restoration to his lost privileges, and being accounted tokens of the highest honor and favor. T.—Eat and be merry. The feast indicates the joy of a forgiving God over a forgiven man, and the joy of a forgiven man in a forgiving God. Arnot.

24. Gazing through the parables, and across the sufferings of our Lord and Saviour, into the heart of God thus laid bare, what cause of adoring gratitude and wonder have we in the pledged readiness of God to meet and to pardon the self-accusing, self-destroyed sinner! The new and overwhelming view of our folly and demerit; the juster sense than was ever before attained of our own provocations, of the brightness of the divine holiness, of the excellent righteousness of the divine law, and of the glory of the salvation long spurned, seems now to make our offences hopeless of forgiveness. But look up, through the mist and storm of self-reproach, to the Father, as these parables paint him, and see, in the errand of the ransoming Son, and of the convincing, converting Spirit, the incredible and surpassing goodness of the Father. W. R. W.—God, his Father, instead of reproaching him, has met him half way, and interrupted his confessions by the voice of fatherly forgiveness—has taken him in, and made him a feast, and counts that a day of joy and gladness which has brought back, however soiled and scarred, a living soul from the grasp of hell and death. It is the very gospel of the sinner’s Friend. V.

1-24. These three parables show that God is in earnest in seeking to save souls. The Son becomes incarnate, and offers himself a sacrifice for sin; the Spirit gives the truth, and secures its entrance into the soul; and the Father gladly welcomes the wanderer to his home again. There are no obstacles to man’s salvation now on God’s side. Everything done by him is in the interest of the sinner’s return. His electing love, the enlightening agency of his Spirit, his sovereignty, are all to be interpreted in the light of this chapter, and are to be understood as all designed to help, and not to hinder, the sinner’s restoration. W. T.

25. Since no strain could rise into sweeter and nobler tenderness—since death itself could reveal no lovelier or more consolatory lesson than it conveys to sinful man—to us it might seem that this is the true climax of the parable, and that here it would end as with the music of angel harps. And here it would have ended had the mystery of human malice and perversity been other than it is. But the conclusion of it (25-32) bears most directly on the very circumstances that called it forth. The angry murmur of the Pharisees and scribes had shown how utterly ignorant they were, in their cold, dead hardness and pride of heart, that, in the sight of God, the tear of one truly repentant sinner is transcendently dearer than the loveless, fruitless formalism of a thousand Pharisees. And therefore it was that Jesus added how the elder son came in, and was indignant at the noise of merriment, and was angry at that ready forgiveness, and reproached the tender heart of his father, and dragged up again in their worst form the forgiven sins of this brother whom he would not acknowledge, and showed all the narrow, unpardoning malignity of a heart which had mistaken external rectitude for holy love. Such self-righteous malice is an evil more inveterate—a sore more difficult to probe, and more hard to cure—than open disobedience and passionate sin. F.

28. Note here with what delicate touches the ungenial character of the man is indicated already. He does not go in; he does not take for granted that when his father makes a feast, there is matter worthy of making merry about. T.—29. That I might make merry with my friends—here lay his misapprehension. It was no entertainment for the gratification of the prodigal: it was a father’s expression of the joy he felt at his recovery. B.—

32. Thy brother.** Not merely “my son,” as thou hast ungraciously put it, but “thy brother,” kinned to thee, and to whom therefore kindness is due. T.—Had not the younger child, of the same hearthstone and roof-tree, been dead? was he not alive again? Had he not been lost? was he not found? Was it natural, manly, filial, fraternal, thus to scowl on redemption from hell? What right had they (the Pharisees), as true sons and as true brothers, to remain thus strange to the joys of the loving and the holy Jehovah, and have thus no response, no ear, no tolerance for the anthems and gratulations of all his holy and heavenly worshippers, over the conversion and recovery of the estrayed and the self-destroyed, now brought happily and forever back? W. R. W.

25-32. The two parties standing in the foreground of the parabolic mirror are the scribes and Pharisees, as the elder son; the publicans and sinners, as the younger—all Jews, all belonging to God’s (visible) family. The difficulties which have been found in the latter part of the parable, from the uncontradicted assertion in verse 29, if the

Pharisees are meant, and the great pride and uncharitableness shown, if really righteous persons are meant, are considerably lightened by the consideration that the contradiction of that assertion would have been beside the purpose of the parable—that it was the very thing on which the Pharisees prided themselves—that, besides, it is sufficiently contradicted by the spirit and words of the elder son. He was breaking his father’s commandment even when he made the assertion; and the making it is a part of his hypocrisy. A.

The elder brother—the type or emblem of those against whom Jesus is defending himself—is brought prominently out: a full revelation of his distrustful, spiteful, envious spirit is made. If thirteen verses are given to the story of the younger brother, no fewer than eight are given to that of the elder brother. H.—This elder is now the lost son: he has lost all childlike, filial feeling: he betrays the hypocrite within. Stier.—He forgets for the moment all his family relationships. He will not call his parent father; he will not speak to him as to one to whom he had been indebted—rather he will charge him with injustice and unkindness; he will not call the once lost but now found one his brother—“this thy son” is the way that he speaks of him. Notwithstanding all his unfilial, unbrotherly, contemptuous arrogance, how kindly, how patiently is he dealt with; how mildly is the father’s vindication made; how gently is the rebuke administered! Just as in the parable of the barren fig-tree and the great supper, the curtain drops as the scene should come upon the stage in which the final fortunes of those of whom we take the elder brother as the type should have been disclosed. H.

Section 106.—The Unjust Steward.