He Joined Himself to a Man Who Sent Him to the Pigs

Everybody knows the story of the son who took the money and left. Almost nobody notices what he did after it ran out.

He did not go home. That is the part I want to sit with. The money went, the famine hit, and the very next thing in the text is that he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country.

Joined himself. That is a strong phrase and Luke chose it on purpose. It is a clinging word. He attached himself to a stranger in a foreign place, and the stranger, who had no reason to care one way or the other, sent him into the fields to feed pigs.

And there he sat, so hungry that he would have eaten what the animals were eating, and the line that finishes that sentence is the loneliest one in the parable.

And no man gave unto him.

He was in an arrangement. He had a place to be and a job to do and a person he answered to. What he did not have was anybody who cared whether he ate, and it took him a long time in that field to notice the difference.

He took an arrangement over a father

Read the sequence, because the order tells you everything about how people work.

And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. (Luke 15:15-16, King James Version)

Broke, then attached, then pigs, then starving. And home was available the whole time.

He did not go home first because going home meant being somebody's son again, and being somebody's son means being known, and being known was the thing he had spent all that money getting away from.

An arrangement is easier than a relationship. An arrangement does not ask you how you are. It does not remember what you said last year. It just pays, or feeds, or gives you somewhere to be at seven in the morning, and it lets you stay a stranger while it does it.

You are worth more than an arrangement, and God has never once been content to be a place you report to. That is not a poetic flourish. Luke 15:15 has a son attach himself to a stranger while his father's house stood open, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person notice the difference between being employed and being loved.

No man gave unto him

That little sentence at the end of verse sixteen is the whole diagnosis.

No man gave unto him. He was surrounded by people. There was a household, there were fields, there were other workers. It was not a wilderness. And in the middle of all of that, nobody gave him anything, because nobody there had any relationship to him that would produce giving.

That is what an arrangement looks like when it gets thin. It holds exactly as long as a person is useful and not one hour longer, and it is not cruel about it. It simply has no category for anybody's hunger.

I need to be careful here, because I am not talking about anybody's job or making a point about how workplaces should feel like families. I am talking about the difference between where a person gets fed and where a person is known, and about what happens when somebody quietly lets the first one replace the second.

You are known by name, and no arrangement has ever once been able to do what that does. Luke 15:16 says no man gave unto him in the middle of a full household, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a person feel the loneliness they have been managing.

Coming to himself

Now the turn, and the words Luke uses are extraordinary.

He came to himself.

Not he repented, not he decided, not he had a breakthrough. He came to himself, which is what you say about somebody who has been unconscious or out of their mind. The implication is that the whole time in that field, he had not been himself, and the pigs and the hunger and the arrangement were what a man does when he is not.

And what he says when he comes to is not a spiritual sentence. It is arithmetic. How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger.

He starts by comparing his food situation. That is where it starts, and it is enough.

You are allowed to come home over something as ordinary as being hungry, and He has never once required a better reason. Luke 15:17 has the turn begin with a comparison about bread, and the Holy Spirit is the one who uses an ordinary practical thought to start a person moving.

The father was not waiting to be convinced

And here is the part everybody knows and almost nobody believes about their own life.

The son rehearsed a speech. He had it ready. Make me as one of thy hired servants, which is a man asking to be moved from one arrangement to another, because that is the only category he still had.

The father did not let him finish it. The text says while he was yet a great way off, his father saw him and ran, and the running is the point. That is a man who had been watching a road.

Notice what the father never says. He never asks for the money back. He never asks what happened. He does not put him on probation.

And notice what he refuses. He refuses the hired servant offer completely, because the son was trying to come back as an employee and the father would not have it.

You are being met on the road, and He has never once been waiting at the end of it with His arms folded. Luke 15:20 says the father ran, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person believe that about God rather than merely agree with it.