Like the familiar tales of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, preachers like me sometimes wonder what else is left to say about the Bible’s other well-known and beloved stories – like this morning’s Scripture lesson: the parable of the prodigal son, his jealous and resentful older brother, and their graciously forgiving father.
This classic narrative rather seems like your grandma’s time-honored recipe for oatmeal-raisin cookies. At some point you’re tempted to tweak the recipe to freshen up the taste. Adding chocolate chips might be fun, or using golden raisins in place of purple; maybe sprinkle in a little more cinnamon and nutmeg. But when your kids bite into the resulting, oven-fresh cookies, they crinkle their noses in disgust and chide you for messing with an already-good thing. “We liked ’em better the old way!”
Perhaps so also with Luke’s telling of the prodigal son. When all is said and done – when you’ve preached it from all the angles and character perspectives, and heard all the various interpretations and takeaways, you’ve still got the same basic story that Jesus tells to make a very-basic Gospel point: Honest repentance of self always leads to authentic restoration of relationship. So maybe, in our Spirit-inspired listening for the Word of the Lord, we shouldn’t mess with an already good thing.
But let’s not lose sight of some important details: like the many unfaithful ways that the younger son loses himself – estranged from his family, living “according to the flesh,” choosing a life that shatters the integrity of his faith and identity. Then there’s the way the older son’s words reveal the festering of his heart: his opinion of the just desserts his naughty, little brother deserves; his own feelings of entitlement; his jealous fear of losing out; his implication of how his father should feel and respond.
The details also reveal the father’s character. He’s always been a closer companion to the older son, probably by virtue of being the firstborn but also because the older son – at least in recent months – has been more physically present!
But Dad proves his unconditional love for both sons by what he says and what he does: throwing preference to the wind by running out to welcome home the younger son, even while the wayward boy is still stumbling along the humbling path of repentance. The father shows compassion and forgiveness, even while his younger son is yet a sinner. That alone is the Good News of the Gospel in a nutshell! And the opening verses of Luke 15 prime the pump for the outpouring of such amazing grace –
“Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus,” Luke writes. “And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” Jesus then explains himself with stories of a shepherd’s persistence in the seeking of lost sheep and a woman’s doggedness in searching for valuable lost coins. “Just so, I tell you,” Jesus next proclaims, “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
What follows is the Lord’s parable of the prodigal, and his brother, and their father – a story of sin and judgment to be sure, but also one of personal repentance and the grace that always befalls a changed heart and mind. On earth as it is in heaven, it matters not how far and wide the heart and mind have gone astray. Grace always abounds!
Back in the day, I once believed that the two most powerful sentences in the English language were “I love you” and “I’m sorry.” I’ve learned personally and pastorally that such phrases can wound with the deepest of trauma, when such words contradict one’s actions. “I’m sorry” can even insult our intelligence if regret never leads to repentance.
An unlikely source quickens reflection and discernment: the TV show “The Bear,” a hit Hulu drama about a Chicago restaurant and the small community of cooks and servers laboring to transform a family-owned sandwich shop into a top-tier culinary destination.
The series centers on a young, talented chef named Carmen Berzatto. Carmy, as his friends and fellow workers call him, moves home to Chicago after his brother dies by suicide.
Carmy is left to manage the family business, a sandwich shop called the “Original Beef of Chicagoland.” Running the tiny eatery is an eccentric crew of employees, and Carmy is charged with keeping the place alive. The twist is that Carmy is no ordinary cook; he’s an elite chef who’s sautéed and flambéed in the world’s finest restaurants.
As your employment history might prove, restaurant work is stressful, and “The Bear” reveals that reality with brutal honesty. At the restaurant tables in “The Bear,” customers enjoy scrumptious meals and nourishing conversation, and they bask in the finest hospitality. But in the kitchen, the pace is brutal. Emotions run raw, and even the best of friends will occasionally stand nose to nose, toe to toe, screaming profanities at each other.
Mostly, the anger is quickly forgotten. Mostly, everyone is able to push through the stress and retain their bonds of family and friendship. But not always. Sometimes people go too far. Sometimes the chaos is too great. And sometimes a boss like Carmy crosses the line from pushing an employee to breaking one. Sometimes friends do more than test friendships. They fracture them.
That’s the moral challenge of watching “The Bear”: How do we live together when someone always seems to be going too far? The answer we ultimately get is that we can’t. Neither you nor I can sustain a community when the pain grows too great. In binge-watching “The Bear,” I cannot help but seeing ourselves; I cannot avoid the echoes of the primal anger that’s ripping apart our families, communities, and nations.
Carmy’s raw talent creates around him a field of distortion. He’s the kid from Chicago who became a global talent. When he returns home, he’s not just Carmy, the guy they’ve known their whole lives; he’s near celebrity, a man so gifted that people are willing to forgive his flaws just to be in his presence, absorb his knowledge, and savor his cuisine.
That’s exactly what threatens to destroy the restaurant. His arrogance is overwhelming: He changes the menu every night just because he’s that good. Though you can see his fundamental decency, his ambition and temperament threaten his relationships, his restaurant, his family bonds.
A couple seasons in, you can clearly see the damage Carmy has done. He has made something great, but each person in the restaurant — each person in his professional and personal family — endures under terrible stress and strain. Something has to give. More precisely, someone has to give, and that someone is Carmy.
That awful tension and agonizing emotion are what make “The Bear” so difficult to watch. Because relationships are splintering across America. It’s hard enough to live in a community; we are all, after all, inherently flawed. Normal human failings create persistent frictions, and unless we learn to deal with and reduce that friction, even the best of friendships can sometimes crumble to dust.
But we’re living through something else: A furious anger in which it seems people actually want to end friendships, where they want to inflict pain with their words. It’s one way to demonstrate your commitment, your great and high ideological, or religious, or political calling. The cause demands it, and you serve the cause. We create relational rubble and find that it’s hard to live in the ruins.
In the latest episodes of “The Bear,” Carmy abides in those ruins, but he decides to rebuild. And his blueprint overpowers the strongest of human reactions to sin and loss: Carmy repents. Carmy realizes that he is the problem. Yes, other members of his family and other people at the restaurant have their own problems, but Carmy is at the epicenter of the chaos. And in a single, extended scene of the finale, he makes that clear not just by saying he’s sorry but also by turning, by changing.
Spoiler alert: He gives the restaurant back to his family, to his most valued colleague and to his closest friends — to the people he has harmed the most. The star decides to fade so that others might shine. For a time, he seems to say: I must diminish. I must become less, so that you can become the more that you are supposed to be.
At first, no one sees what Carmy is doing. The mistrust is so great and the pain so deep that his colleagues only see his actions as another betrayal — abandoning them when the restaurant needs his talents the most. When Carmy tells his brother and co-worker Richie that he’s leaving, Richie feels angry, abandoned, and hurt.
But then there’s the instant when Richie realizes what is really going on. Carmy isn’t abandoning anyone. Instead, he too is hurting and needs help. And the gift of his stake of the restaurant isn’t a decision to wash his hands of a failing enterprise. Instead, it’s an expression of hope and confidence — a sincere declaration that his friends and family can do better than he.
As clarity dawns on everyone — as they slowly understand what Carmy is doing, warmth and love start to spread across their faces like a slow-breaking dawn. “I missed you,” says Carmy’s brother, Richie. And when Richie knows the new partnership is real, he nods, agreeing to the deal, using words for emphasis that I cannot share from the pulpit: “Yes. It is an honor.”
Personally, I’m so fallen that, when I watched that scene, I admit my first thought was of the people who needed to repent to me. But thankfully, that moment passed. Instead, I came to feel a profound sense of conviction. I asked myself, “Who have I harmed?” and — more importantly — “How can I change?”
At a time of extraordinary fury, we all live in a degree of pain. We all live with regrets. But hope can come from unexpected places — and perhaps a show that features pan-seared scallops, hand-rolled pastries, and old-fashioned Chicago beef also teaches with emphasis that only repentance can heal our broken hearts.
Visualizations of the parable of the prodigal son are many, but uncanny is one that particularly catches my gaze: James B. Janknegt’s depiction of the older son’s anger in “Two Sons.” The older son is so angry about the celebration of his brother’s return that he breaks his own guitar. Anger destroys his ability to share the joy of the moment.
Not exactly the same situation, but I sense a lot of anger in these our days, and one aspect of our shared moment feels eerily close to the anger of the older brother. These are not simple questions to answer and emotions to resolve. But what is clear is that for the older son – and for those of us angry at how someone else is getting treated better than we think they deserve, our anger likely says more about ourselves than the other.
What convicts is that our inner dreams for justice are really all about grace, about our views of ourselves, and our motivations for what we do, and how we want the world to work. The anger itself isn’t necessarily the problem. The problem is whether our anger leads to continued and greater sin against God or neighbor: If it hardens us against the Lord’s love and grace, if it makes us turn from seeking the fullness of life for any- and every-one, if it makes us blind to our own experiences of grace, and how we get much more than we deserve. If anger shuns us from the party, and the joy that infuses the kingdom of God, then we likely are going to end up pouting, bitter and alone – as is the sorry state of the older brother.
In an era of revenge movies and cultural cries for karma, what a profound reminder that the way of being a disciple of Jesus is different. The Lord does not make us grovel, nor does God give us what we deserve. Instead, the Lord restores us. And true repentance is coming to our senses about reality. And yet, in our lesson, the older son’s response also reminds that repentance before God is only part of the process of restoration. We so also need God’s help to mend relationships with one another.
Even if the older brother joins the party, we all know that the rebuilding of his relationships will take time, and that awkward, uncomfortable process will be difficult for everyone involved. It will take a community — like the one the father gathers for the party — to support both sons.
In the end it is the father who is the truly prodigal, in his willingness to lavish mercy and love upon an undeserving child. The son’s prodigality, such as it is, focuses on himself and living “the high life.” His waywardness lies in indulgence, of draining away life’s vitality and goodness. The father’s prodigality goes the other way: Thickening life, restoring lost goodness, and ensuring a better future. That, my friends, is the essence of Easter resurrection!
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on Sunday, August 17, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by David French, Chelsea Harmon, and Scott Hoezee inform the message.