It’s Easter Sunday and I find myself drawn back to three key things in Luke’s Gospel. First, we have the Resurrection Sunday afternoon walk on the Emmaus Road. Jesus works his way through Scripture to show that the whole account was pointing towards him and his death and resurrection.
Then back in Luke 3:21-38, we have the account of Jesus’ baptism followed by his genealogy, all the way back to Adam. Adam is described as God’s Son in the family tree but of course, that right and status was lost when he sinned. The Father announces as Jesus is baptised that Jesus is his beloved son. The familial relationship between God and his people is restored in Christ,
Finally, I’ve been reflecting on the parable of the prodigal son recently (Luke 15). I’ve mentioned previously that the story is one of death and resurrection. In the story, the Son claims his inheritance early, he leaves the family home, squanders his wealth, ends up an outcast doing unclean work on a pig farm. Famished he returns home as a servant but is welcomed back by his Father as the Son who had died but is now alive again.
The prodigal’s story is the story of humanity in Adam. The first man sought to take his inheritance, to acquire knowledge for himself rather than allowing God to reveal it in his own time. Just as the son treats his father as dead, Adam seeks to replace God, to kill him off. Since Adam, the reality is that humanity have squandered all that God gave to us. Adam has to go into exile from the family home of Eden. We have ended up on a mess. In Adam we are dead.
This is where Jesus’ story interweaves with the two. Jesus does not seek to seize and inheritance, to grasp equality with God but according to Philippians 2, willingly leaves his heavenly home and becomes servant. He is the one who is outcast, he identifies with the unclean and his death is that of a criminal outside the city. Jesus returns to heaven and is declared the Son in power.[1]
It is because Jesus has taken over the story, as the true and better Son that we too are welcomed back by the Father, not as servants but as loved, adopted children.
[1] See Romans 1:4. I wonder if Paul had Luke’s account of the prodigal son in mind as he wrote?
Faithroots 