Joy in Heaven (Ash Wednesday)
There is a line from an old hymn that has always felt uncomfortably personal to me: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it / Prone to leave the God I love.” Ash Wednesday invites us to begin Lent with exactly that kind of honesty — to acknowledge that we are creatures of dust, and that wandering from God comes naturally to us. Luke 15 answers that honesty with something unexpected: not a demand to do better, but a portrait of a God who throws a party when we come home.
The chapter opens with the scene that gives all three parables their meaning. Tax collectors and sinners are drawing near to Jesus, and the Pharisees and scribes are grumbling:
“This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2).
Jesus responds not with an argument but with three stories, each one a window into the same reality.
A shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one that is lost. A woman lights a lamp and sweeps the whole house for a single coin. A father watches the road for a son who “came to himself” in a far country and decided to turn for home (15:17). The progression is deliberate. With each parable, the lost thing is more precious and the joy at its recovery more personal.
What the three stories share is more striking than what distinguishes them. Each ends not with a sober acknowledgment that things are back in order, but with a celebration. “Rejoice with me,” both the shepherd and the woman say (15:6, 9). And Jesus names the deeper reality behind both: “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (15:7).
The Prodigal Son extends this logic to its furthest reach. The son rehearses his confession on the long walk home, but the father never lets him finish it.
But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him (15:20)
The father runs — an undignified act for a patriarch in the ancient world — because his joy will not wait for propriety. The robe, the ring, and the fatted calf are not rewards for a successful repentance. They are the expression of a love that was already running toward the returning son.
Ash Wednesday asks us to return. Luke 15 tells us what we are returning to.
I pray that Ash Wednesday brings joy to your Father in heaven. He is running to meet you and welcome you home.