“But while he was still a long way off his father saw him, and his heart went out to him”

(Luke 15:20)

If you go to see a cardiac patient in the intensive care unit of a modern hospital, you can watch the electronic diagramming of the patient’s heart action, moment by moment, on a little, green glass chart by his bedside. A dancing point of light traces on the green graph each beat of his heart. This marvelous apparatus reveals the timing, the strength or weakness, the steady regularity or the wavering insecurity, of the patient’s beating heart. And if the heart falters and stops, that, too, is instantly recorded.

Jesus, in the parable of the prodigal son, is saying that what religion is all about can be clearly diagramed for us in a few classic examples of heart condition. For the theme of this story — indeed, the golden text for all three of these remarkable parables in Luke 15, the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the lost son — is just this: “There is more joy over one sinner whose heart is changed than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need for repentance” (Luke 15:7).

“One sinner whose heart is changed,” as J.B. Phillips’s translation has it. Changes of heart are what religion is all about, from heaven’s point of view. It is not church buildings or church budgets, not Sunday school curricula or sacred music or scholarly sermons that the Christian religion is primarily concerned with, but rather the changes that can take place in the condition of the human heart.

The parable opens by charting the heart action of the prodigal son. What, in a word, is his heart condition? Why, his is the case of the wandering heart, a heart that is no longer at home in his father’s house.

The boy has grown up. He longs for freedom. The house rules of his father are old-fashioned and oppressive to him. He’s got to be free. His heart has already crossed the threshold of his parental home. His spirit already roams in distant ports. What can hold him? Nothing. So the father bows to the inevitable. He gives him his inheritance, and the boy with the wandering heart makes his journey into the far country of his dreams.

How did he go, this boy of the wandering heart? Did he join a camel caravan or ship out on a sailing schooner or hop a fast freight or thumb a ride on the interstate or take a trip on drugs?

However it may have started in noble dreams of freedom and creative self-expression and rejection of a shoddy establishment, the journey of his wandering heart soon degenerates into self-indulgence and foolish ex­travagance and, if the elder brother’s suspicions are to be believed, into debauchery with prostitutes. Finally, his money all gone, his freedom follows not far behind. He has to go to work. And the best he can do is tend pigs. Soon he is hungry, lonely, and miserable.

Who is this prodigal? Do we recognize him at all, this boy whose heart condition is that of a wandering heart that roams from the father’s house? Helmut Thielicke, in his book The Waiting Father, says the prodigal is every one of us. Everything we have comes from our Heavenly Father — our life, our time, our ability, our possessions. Our prodigality consists in our using what is his without him. That’s what it means to wander from the father’s house.

“[The prodigal’s] body, which he adorns and uses, which so many are in love with — that came from [his father]. His possessions, money, clothes, shoes, food, and drink — they too came from his father, gained from the capital he gave to him. In themselves they are good things; otherwise the father would not have given them to him. But as he uses them they become his undoing, for he uses them for himself, he uses them without the father,” Thielicke says. That’s why his whole, sad, sick condition is traceable to his wandering heart.

The turning point in the story comes when the prodigal’s heart is changed. The quaint language of the King James Version reads: “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” (Luke 15:17-19).

The wandering heart becomes the homing heart. That’s the change in heart condition. Instantly, the decision made, the prodigal is on his way home.

But how did the change of heart take place? What mysterious influences were at work? Was it just the hard practicality of hunger gnawing in his belly? Surely that, but was there anything else? Was it the subtle psychological image of the favored son that once had been contrasted with the haggard wastrel that now was? Did he change as the idealized image gained ascen­dancy over the sensual image?

Robert Louis Stevenson, writing in maturity about the struggles of his youth, simply said, “I came round like a well-turned ship.” I heard a young man say not long ago in describing his experience of becoming a Christian, “It was a modern miracle.”

The theologians have several words for this changed heart condition. One is conversion, a turning round and going back, the wandering heart turning homeward again. Another is repentance, which in the Greek carried the image of thinking and feeling together with another, namely, God, whose will and way and love had been cast off by the wandering heart and are at last reconciled and brought into agreement again.

How the repentance or conversion takes place remains a great mystery, and in all cases such changed heart conditions have their own individual records of change. But Jesus, as he talked with Nicodemus about this mystery of the changed heart, attributed it to the ever-brooding spirit of God, who as the relentless Hound of Heaven never — never — ceases to track down the wandering heart of his prodigal children.

The second heart condition charted for us in the parable of the prodigal son is the heart action of the waiting father. As the New English Bible puts it: “While he [the returning prodigal] was still a long way off his father saw him, and his heart went out to him. He ran to meet him, flung his arms round him, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20).

Consider the different possibilities of the heart action in the father waiting at home when at last the discredited and defeated and despicable wastrel shows up. The father’s heart might well have registered disgust at the sight of the boy’s rags and the long, matted hair and the smell of the pig slop about him. Or the father’s heart might have boiled over in outrage at all the wealth the son had allowed to slip through his fingers. Or the father’s heart might have been set on the just judgment that demanded righteous retribution, of where he might put this boy to work on the lowest rung on the ladder of his establishment until he could restore every wasted dollar. Or the father’s heart might have risen in utter rejection as he said: “Away with you. When you clean yourself up and mend your ways and reform your character and regain your lost reputation, then come back and we’ll see about letting you in this respectable house once more.”

But no, the gospel record is that the father’s heart went out to his son. He understood how deep was the change in the boy’s heart. His was no longer a wandering heart, but an eagerly, hopefully homing heart. The only change that made any difference, a change in the condition of the boy’s heart, had already taken place.

So the waiting father brushed aside his son’s stumbling, humbling premeditated speech, “Father, make me as one of your hired servants,” by giving orders fast and furiously to the servants: “Quick, off with these rags. Put my best robe on him. Bring a ring for his finger and shoes for his bare feet. And prepare a feast, for my son was lost and is found. He was dead and is alive again.”

This is the heart action Jesus says every penitent prodigal can count on in our Heavenly Father. How do we know? Not just because Jesus told a story about it, but because Jesus lived a life and died a death that showed it. “For God so loved the world,” runs John 3:16-17, “that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Yes, the divine rationale for the Incarnation reveals the heart of God. And the old hymn proclaims it: “For the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind; and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.” When any soul is lost, God is plunged in loss. When any human heart is wandering, the heart of the Eternal is going out to him, and God the Father’s search for his lost world went as far as Calvary.

But there is a third heart condition charted in this parable — the heart action of the elder brother. It is a hardened heart, the heart that goes not out to others.

This elder son has stayed at home faithfully keeping everything running at the old home place while the prodigal sowed his wild oats. Coming home from work in the fields that memorable afternoon, the elder brother hears the sound of music and dancing and laughter. He asks a servant what’s going on, and when he hears of his brother’s return and the welcome his father has given the boy, he’s angry and won’t go in.

When his father comes out and pleads with him to put away his natural resentment at the waste of good money and time and at the scandal that’s soiling the reputation of their respectable family, he won’t listen. He’s mad and he won’t go in.

The heart condition of the elder brother is what bars him from the gala occasion, shutting out, not only the younger brother and the feasting friends, but even his father. His disposition casts a pall all round his world.

Here is Jesus’ message for us in this parable: The life each one of us lives is heart action all the way.

If your heart has wandered, if you’ve rebelled against the rules in your Father’s house and wasted the years and the substance and the ennobling relationships the Father has given you — and who of us hasn’t failed some­how, somewhere at our great opportunity of life — then don’t wait any longer. Don’t sink any deeper. Let your heart be changed to a glad acceptance of his ways. Come home to him. Repent. Confess your wrongs. Renounce your rebellion. Don’t wait another moment. Why? Because we can all be sure of the heart action of the eternal, the waiting Father. There is no question of his heart condition. He sees us a long way off. He knows the moment our hearts are changed. His great heart goes out to us. But he can’t in his heart go out to us a moment before our hearts have allowed his love to turn us round. Just as he would not compel us to stay at the Father’s house when we wanted to wander, neither can he hang out a Welcome Back sign for us before we are ready to come back. The unrepentant, the unchanged in heart remain forever in an alien land.

But the major thrust of the whole story for us church people is that elder brother part. Its message is directed at that in us which hardens our hearts against the prodigals who would come home to God but for us and our self-righteous, judgmental ways. Henry Drummond, the Scottish writer and lecturer, in his discourse on the elder brother’s ill temper, raises the question, “What would have happened had the prodigal returned on an afternoon when there was no one home but the elder brother?”

The forbidding specter of modern, respectable, self-righteous, and judgmental Christianity stands across the doorway of the Church of Jesus Christ today, barring entrance to many a tired and homesick prodigal who is longing to come home. What each one of us in the Church today needs to do is to be sure our hearts are not casting that shadow, allow our hearts to be changed, and go out with him whose heart in Christ has already gone out to all the world.