A God Worth Coming Home To
*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 17-75
The heart of Christianity is not try harder. It is come home.
Everything this series has done, every week of it, has been preparation for this piece.
Not because the preparation did not matter. It did. 13/75 asked you to bury the false god and told you the space he left was not empty. 14/75 showed you who is actually in that space, the father who runs, the physician who sits down at the table with the wrong people, the God who is constitutionally incapable of waiting for people to qualify before moving toward them. 15/75 handed you the instrument: if your god does not look like Jesus, he is not the Christian God. 16/75 told you the threshold is not certainty but honesty, and that whatever you are afraid to bring, the Psalms have already brought it, and the canon has always had room for the person whose experience does not resolve into a tidy conclusion.
All of that was diagnosis. And diagnosis is never the destination.
The destination is homecoming. And this piece is about what that actually means, what it costs, what it does not cost, and what the person who is standing at the edge of it, almost ready, is afraid of that they do not need to be afraid of.
The Heart of the Thing
The source material for this series closes its final chapter with a sentence I have been sitting with for years. Come home. It is the Father on the road, running with tears in His eyes. It is the Shepherd carrying His lost sheep. It is the Son stretching His arms wide on a cross.
That is the heart of Christianity. Not a system. Not a set of propositions to be intellectually assented to before you are permitted entry. Not a moral code that must be mastered before the door opens. A homecoming. An embrace. A return to the One who never stopped watching the road.
This is the thing that gets lost in almost every popular presentation of Christianity, whether the presentation is hostile or sympathetic. The hostile presentation makes Christianity a set of demands, a list of things you must believe and do and stop doing, a performance evaluation conducted by a God who is perpetually dissatisfied. The sympathetic presentation often makes it a set of benefits, peace and purpose and community and meaning, a transaction in which you bring your need and receive a product. Both presentations miss the thing that makes Christianity strange and specific and unlike anything else on offer.
It is not primarily a demand. It is not primarily a transaction. It is a reunion. A specific, personal, irreducible reunion between a Father who has been watching the road and a child who has been in the far country, and the whole machinery of the cross and the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit is in the service of making that reunion possible. Everything else is secondary to this.
What the Running Means
14/75 walked through the prodigal son in detail and I am not going to repeat that work here. But there is one element of the parable that this piece needs to sit with longer than the previous one did, because it is the element that speaks most directly to the person who is almost home and is afraid of what reception awaits them.
The son in Luke 15 rehearsed a speech. He knew what he had done. He knew what he had spent and what he had become and what he had lost, and he knew that none of it was forgivable on its merits, and so he prepared an argument for why he should at least be permitted to work in the household as a servant, to earn his keep at the lowest possible level, to be present without being restored. He was not asking to be a son. He had forfeited that. He was asking to be a laborer.
He never got to finish the speech.
The father saw him from a long way off, which means the father was watching the road, which means the watching was a daily practice, which means every morning the father got up and looked down the road in the direction his son had gone. And when he saw him, the text says he was filled with compassion. Not filled with righteous indignation. Not filled with the measured dignity of a patriarch about to administer a carefully calibrated welcome that corresponds to the level of repentance demonstrated. Filled with compassion. And then he ran.
The speech was interrupted. The son got three words into it, Father I have sinned, and the father was already calling for the robe. The robe that meant sonship. The ring that meant authority. The sandals that meant he was not a servant. The party that meant this was not a probationary reinstatement but a full restoration to everything he had been before he left.
The son came home prepared to negotiate for the lowest possible position. He received everything.
This is the pattern and it is important to understand what it means for the person who is standing at the edge of homecoming with a speech prepared. The speech is understandable. The speech is the product of honest self-assessment. The person who has been away for a long time, whether physically or spiritually, whether through rebellion or through the slow drift of grief and disappointment and the gradual accumulation of reasons not to return, knows what the account looks like. They are not naive about the years of absence or the things done in those years or the distance that has accumulated. The speech is their honest attempt to account for all of that before asking for anything.
You can bring the speech. He already knows what is in it. And you will not get to finish it.
What Holman Hunt Saw
There is a painting by the English artist Holman Hunt that has been reproduced so many times it has lost some of its strangeness, but the strangeness is worth recovering.
Hunt painted Revelation 3:20: Here I am. I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. The painting shows Jesus standing at a door in the middle of the night, lantern in hand, knocking. The door is overgrown with ivy and vines, which is Hunt’s way of showing that it has not been opened in a long time. The light from the lantern falls on a face that is patient. Not frustrated. Not performing patience while inwardly counting down. Patient in the way that someone is patient when they are genuinely willing to wait as long as it takes.
When Hunt exhibited the painting, a critic pointed out that he had made an error. There was no handle on the outside of the door. Hunt replied that this was not an error. The handle is on the inside. The door can only be opened from within.
God does not force the door. This is one of the most consistently misunderstood features of the Christian account of salvation, and its misunderstanding produces two opposite errors. The first error is the idea that God forces the door, that salvation is entirely his doing from start to finish and human choice is an illusion, that the door opens because he decides it opens and the person inside had nothing to do with it. The second error is the idea that the person inside must do everything, must get themselves together and make themselves presentable and then turn the handle with sufficient force of will.
The painting is the answer to both errors. He knocks. You open. Both things are real. His initiative is prior. Your response is genuine. Neither eliminates the other. The sovereignty of the one knocking and the freedom of the one who hears and opens are not in competition. They are the structure of every real relationship, in which one person reaches toward another and the other has to decide whether to reach back.
And notice what he comes in to do when the door opens. Not to inspect. Not to audit the years of absence or deliver a verdict on the accumulated failures or present a bill for the cost of the waiting. He comes in to eat. Table fellowship. The most intimate expression of welcome and acceptance in the ancient world. The same table where he sat with the tax collectors. The same table where he served the bread and the wine. The same table where he ate fish on the beach with his disciples after the resurrection, in the body that still carried the wounds, making breakfast for the people who had abandoned him.
He comes in to eat. That is what is on offer when the door opens.
What the Far Country Actually Costs
John 10:10 contains one of the sharpest contrasts in the Gospels. I came that they may have life and have it to the full. The contrast is between the thief who comes to steal and kill and destroy and the shepherd who comes to give life in abundance.
I want to spend some time with the stealing, because it is part of the homecoming story that almost never gets told, and its absence leaves people without an honest account of what the far country actually costs.
The prodigal in the far country did not only spend his inheritance. He spent himself. The text says he came to himself in the pig field, which implies that before that moment he had been not quite himself, that the journey away from home had involved a progressive loss of something that was more than money. The riotous living had consumed not only the resources but the self that had possessed them. He arrived at the far country with a fortune and the self-understanding of a son. He left it with nothing and the dawning awareness that even his father’s servants had a better life than he was living.
The far country always costs more than it advertises. This is one of the most consistent features of the testimonies of people who have made the journey home, across centuries and cultures and wildly different biographical circumstances. The cost of the distance is almost never only the obvious cost. It is the slow erosion of the things that made you you. The drift from the person you were when you were known and loved and safe. The accumulation of a self that was assembled in the absence of the Father and therefore reflects the absence rather than the presence.
I am not saying this to produce guilt. Guilt is not the point and the parable does not end in the pig field. I am saying it because the person who is almost home sometimes cannot see clearly why home is worth coming back to, because the far country has done enough damage to their vision that they cannot quite remember what it was like before. And the honest accounting of what the distance costs is sometimes what makes the homecoming thinkable. You are not returning to something you have to give up the far country for. You are returning from something that has been taking from you the whole time you have been there.
The thief came to steal. And the stealing is real and it is ongoing and it does not stop until you are no longer in the thief’s territory.
The Older Brother and the People Who Never Left
The parable of the prodigal son has a second half that the homecoming narrative almost always omits, and its omission leaves a significant gap in the account.
The older brother is in the field when the party starts. He hears the music and the dancing and asks a servant what is happening. The servant tells him his brother has come home and his father has thrown a party. And the older brother is furious. He will not go in. He stands outside the celebration of his brother’s return and rehearses his grievances: I have been here all along, I have never disobeyed you, you never threw a party for me, and now this son of yours, he will not even call him his brother, this son of yours who wasted everything comes back and you kill the fattened calf.
The father comes out to him. He does not rebuke him. He says: son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. Your brother was dead and is alive, was lost and is found. Come in.
The parable ends there, without telling us whether the older brother came in. It is one of the most honest endings in literature. Jesus leaves the door open. The older brother’s choice is real. He can stay outside in his resentment or he can come in to the party. The text does not resolve it.
The older brother is in the pews of most churches. He is the person whose faithfulness has produced not rest but resentment, whose years of compliance have generated not joy but the accumulated bitterness of someone who has been performing for an audience that never seemed adequately impressed. He came to church, he followed the rules, he said the right things, and the experience of God he was promised in exchange for all of that never quite materialized, and now he is standing outside a party he does not feel he was invited to even though the invitation was always open.
The father comes out to him too. He always comes out to him too. The running is not only for the prodigal. The father who runs down the road is the same father who leaves the celebration to stand beside the older brother in the field and say: everything I have is yours. You have been inside this the whole time. Come in.
The older brother’s homecoming looks different from the prodigal’s. He does not need to travel back from a foreign country. He needs to walk twenty feet from the field into the house. But the distance between resentment and celebration is sometimes longer than the distance from the far country to the front gate, and the father comes out for both.
What Coming Home Is Not
Before I tell you what coming home is, I want to spend a paragraph on what it is not, because the false versions of homecoming have done as much damage as the false versions of God, and they are worth naming before they are replaced.
Coming home is not the resolution of all your questions. The prodigal did not have a coherent theology when he turned toward home. He had a memory of his father’s house and a present experience of the pig field, and the contrast was sufficient. Questions are welcome at the table. The feast is not conditional on having sorted out the philosophical problems. You will have better resources for working on those problems from inside the relationship than you ever had from outside it.
Coming home is not the end of difficulty. The son came home to a brother who would not come to his party. The road ahead of him was not smooth. The relationship with the older brother was unresolved. The things he had done in the far country did not unhappen. The return was real and the welcome was real and the feast was real, and none of that made the future without complication. Christianity does not promise a comfortable life. It promises a life in the presence of the one who enters suffering rather than avoiding it, who weeps at tombs, who carries wounds into the resurrection rather than leaving them behind.
Coming home is not a feeling. Feelings follow eventually, for most people, in most circumstances. But the homecoming is a turn, not an emotion. The son turned toward home before he knew how the father would receive him. The turn was an act of will made in the absence of certainty, which is exactly what 16/75 was describing when it talked about honesty rather than certainty as the threshold. You do not have to feel it to do it. You have to do it to begin to feel it.
The Door That Is Still Open
Revelation 3:20 is addressed to a church that has become lukewarm. It is one of the more sobering passages in the New Testament, a description of a community that retained the forms of Christian life while losing the presence that gave those forms their meaning. And into that situation, to that specific community, Jesus says: I am standing at the door and knocking.
He is speaking to people who are already inside the church. The door he is knocking on is not the door of the unconverted. It is the door of the community that has become so habituated to the forms that it no longer notices the absence of the person the forms were supposed to point to. He is outside the church, knocking to get in.
This is one of the stranger images in Scripture and one of the most honest. The person who has been in church their whole life and has never encountered the real presence is as much in need of homecoming as the prodigal in the pig field. The forms can fill the space the presence was supposed to occupy, and fill it convincingly enough that the absence goes unnoticed for years. The older brother was in the field working for his father without knowing his father. Knowing about someone is not the same as knowing them. Performing the relationship is not the same as inhabiting it.
The door is still open. The knocking has not stopped. The invitation is the same for the person who has been in church for thirty years and has never felt at home as it is for the person who left and has been in the far country ever since.
Come in. He came to eat. The table is set.
The God Worth Coming Home To
The God many people rejected was never worth coming home to. The harsh god who kept the books and moved the standard so that you were always just short. The distant god who created the building and vacated the premises. The god of wounded history, assembled from the specific failures of specific people who used his name to do things he explicitly commanded against. The god of cultural noise, the sitcom punchline and the academic dismissal, the figure who exists primarily as the target of a certain kind of sophisticated contempt.
None of those were ever real. Let them stay gone.
The real one is at the door. The real one is on the road. He is the father who saw the son from a long way off because he had been watching every morning, and who ran before the son could finish the speech he had been rehearsing, and who interrupted the apology with the robe and the ring and the party.
He is the shepherd who left the ninety-nine in the open country and went looking for the one, not because the one was more valuable than the ninety-nine, but because the one was his, and that was sufficient reason to go looking.
He is the one who stood outside the tomb of his friend and wept before he called him out of it, because grief is real and he enters it rather than observing it from a safe theological distance.
He is the one who sat at the well at noon and spoke to the woman who came when no one else came, and who knew the full account of her life before she offered it, and who offered her something before she asked for it, and who sent her back to the village where she had been avoiding people to tell everyone she had met someone who told her everything she had ever done, and she was not afraid anymore.
He is the one who, in the moment of maximum suffering, asked his Father to forgive the people who put him there, because they did not know what they were doing.
That is the God worth coming home to. Not safe. Not manageable. Not the tame grandfather or the cosmic critic or any of the constructions that have been handed to people in his name. But good. Bone-deep good. The kind of good that runs down roads and interrupts rehearsed apologies and eats with the wrong people and knocks on doors and waits and waits and waits.
The series has been building toward this from the beginning. 13/75 asked you to bury the false god because he was blocking your view. 14/75 showed you what was behind him. 15/75 gave you the instrument. 16/75 told you the only threshold was honesty.
This piece is telling you what is on the other side of the threshold.
A table. A party. A father who has been watching the road.
Come home.
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