prodigal

Every family is normal, until you get to know them. I often think of this saying when I read of King David’s family. This is the family Jesus would come from, the royal family, but it’s full of plotting, dastardly deeds, and weird people.

This morning I read of the rape and murder and the exile and then return of Absalom. Even though he was allowed back home, Absalom was kept away from the palace and the king until he burned Joab’s field to get his attention, and then pled his case. And then this, from 2 Samuel 14:33: “So Joab went to the king and told him this. Then the king summoned Absalom, and he came in and bowed down with his face to the ground before the king. And the king kissed Absalom.”

There are echoes here for me of the parable of the prodigal son, except this maybe is a dark, twisted version. In the parable, the greedy son repents, the loving father welcomes him home, and the faithful older brother struggles with this act of grace. In the real-life story of Absalom, the son never really repents and its the father struggles with the tension between grace and justice.

Even more key, in Absalom’s story no one turns to the only one who can truly show grace, which is God. David could forgive an offense against him, but he couldn’t forgive the sins committed by Absalom. And Absalom, unforgiven in this sense and, even worse, not seeing a need for forgiveness, will go on to contest for David’s throne.

That’s the warning here for me – the way men and women strive and compete and do each other wrong and never see it as wrong. It’s easy to miss my own need to be forgiven. We’re all prodigals, but we see the homecoming welcome as our right, because we can explain. We had good reasons! Like Absalom, we can mask our own ambition behind an act of serving others, and excuse ourselves a lot of corner-cutting as we do so.

My prayer this morning is to see my need for forgiveness and grace, to see my misbehavior as the sin it is.