We Christians are all Prodigal until we die

See: Luke 15:11-32, Romans 3:23.

We’re all on a journey. When it comes to the refinement of our spirit and understanding of love, we start a journey from birth that never completes during our living years. Our ability to express love through the mediums of compassion, empathy, honesty, humility and forgiveness never reaches an acceptable standard and in some cases has deteriorated from the highs it once enjoyed when we reach the end of our lives.

Love is what brings us home through the medium of forgiveness. It is only in accepting how we fall short and asking for mercy that the gate opens for us to be taken into a welcome home embrace. We do well to remember this fact with humility when peering into the lives of others. Considering they share our journey home, what right do we have to rebuke their mode of transport when our vessel for doing so is also in dire need of repair? Especially when you consider we walk as Christians, our imperfection arguably places us further from our destination because we already know that love yet still fail to make the necessary changes.

Rebuke and condemnation also fail to take a valuable lesson that Jesus taught through his actions in the bible. Healing and love always came first. Jesus went hard against the religious establishment, but understood how the average person didn’t know him, and that the best way to introduce himself was through love. He broke bread with them, healed them, and saved them from the condemnation that came through punishments like stoning. He didn’t seek to rebuke and condemn, certainly not as a way of winning hearts. If hearts is what Jesus wants to win, surely the way to the heart is love.

We who seek to be guides on this path, or who just want to be good examples of the love we receive, are probably best served to follow Jesus’ example. We should be providers of healing and compassion to warm other travellers on the colder stretches of road. If we cannot provide a welcoming atmosphere for people to break bread in, how can we expect people to stop for nourishment?

We never know how tough the road is home for other people. They walk different paths with different dangers with different personal weaknesses. Jesus explicitly said it is not for us to judge the distance a person is away from home, lest we lose sight of how far we have to go. It behooves us in our cries for mercy to remember this in the context of all the sin we never account for ourselves.