Based on Pastor David Jang’s preaching, this offers an in-depth exposition of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. It organizes repentance and forgiveness, possession and oneness, the Father’s heart, and the church community’s welcome as the heart of the gospel.
Pastor David Jang lingers long over Luke 15—the “Parable of
the Prodigal Son”—because this story does not merely offer an “emotional
narrative about someone who lived recklessly and then returned.” It compresses
and reveals the very heart of the gospel with startling clarity. Luke 15 moves
from the “lost sheep,” to the “lost drachma,” and finally to the “lost son,”
exposing how directly the logic of the kingdom of God collides with human
merit-based religion. As Pastor David Jang often emphasizes, we must remember
the air in the room where this parable was first spoken: the grumbling of the
Pharisees and scribes. They could not understand that Jesus welcomed sinners
and sat at table with them, breaking bread in shared fellowship. In their eyes,
the table was a boundary line where the “clean” confirmed their cleanness, and
communal eating looked like a violation of the rules of distance meant to
preserve holiness. Yet Jesus receives their complaint head-on and
explains—through a threefold parable—who God is and how God sees sinners. The
searching hand that seeks what is lost, the joy that erupts when what is lost
is found, and even the religious deficiency that cannot enter into that joy:
the light the gospel reveals and the shadow that refuses that light are layered
together in a single scene.
The parable strikes so powerfully because the way a human
being collapses here is painfully realistic. The younger son says to his
father, “Give me the share of the estate that falls to me.” To demand an
inheritance while the father is still alive is not a mere economic transaction;
it signals relational rupture. The moment he believes that “being with the
father” can be separated from inheritance—torn away from communion and handled
as an independent asset—he has already left home in his heart. Pastor David
Jang presses into this point as a theology of possession, or a spirituality of
possession. The essence of sin is not only the sum of catalogued misdeeds; it
can begin when the idea of “mine” cuts relationships apart. The father’s house
is originally a place where abundance is assumed, yet the younger son mistakes
abundance not as a reality “shared in together,” but as an “asset that must be
fixed as my portion.” When that error fuses with a distorted idea of freedom,
human beings flee most easily into a “distant country.” They mistake leaving
the embrace of love for freedom, and they try to prove self-determination
through the destruction of relationship.
But the parable unfolds with an even more brutal honesty.
In the distant country he squanders his property in reckless living, until he
finally hits the bare floor of deprivation. Feeding pigs—falling into the most
unclean station within the Jewish symbolic world—along with the emptiness of
carob pods that no one gives him, dramatizes the truth that the liberation sin
promises ends in slavery. This is why Pastor David Jang describes the
prodigal’s repentance as an “ontological return.” The prodigal’s repentance is
not merely a moral vow—“I’m sorry, I won’t do it again”—but an awakening of
being: “I could not live without the father.” That is why his confession does
not linger in a long inventory of particular wrongs, but goes straight to the
essence: “I have sinned against heaven and before you.” It is a comprehensive
recognition that life as a whole, lived away from God, was sin; it is the
moment he realizes that severed relationship becomes severed life.
Yet the center of the gospel lies even farther than the
prodigal’s resolve—it lies in the father’s movement. While the son is still far
off, the father sees him, feels compassion, runs to him, embraces him, and
kisses him. There is no interrogation, no probation period, no conditional
observation. An excess of welcome—unthinkable by the ethics of common
sense—pours out. The best robe, a ring, sandals, and the fattened calf: these
symbols do not merely say “he is accepted again,” but “his status as son is restored.”
Even if the son asks for the position of a hired servant, the father refuses to
reduce him to hired labor. The instant he returns, he is a son. Pastor David
Jang reads the very substance of the gospel here because God’s posture toward
sinners is “restoration” before “correction,” and “embrace” before “verdict.”
The gospel is not a tame system that operates only after our excuses and tidy
explanations are finished; it is the living power of God that re-knits a broken
relationship in a single sweep.
But the blade of this parable turns from the younger son to
the older son. The older brother did not leave. Outwardly he was faithful, he
did not break the rules, he kept working. But when he hears the sound of
celebration, he refuses to go in. His anger arrives wearing the face of
“justice.” “This son of yours… has devoured your property with prostitutes, and
you killed the fattened calf for him!” His words mingle fact and speculation,
and above all, there is no room in his world for the father’s joy. In the older
brother’s universe, relationships are always converted into calculation. He
understands the father less as a person to love and more as a distributor of
wages. He believes he has provided “loyalty” as labor and must therefore
receive compensation. As Pastor David Jang points out, the older brother’s
tragedy begins not outside the house but inside it. Spatially he is near the
father, but emotionally he is separated from him. This is why the father’s
answer becomes another crest of the gospel: “Son, you are always with me, and
all that is mine is yours.” This one sentence is both a declaration of
abundance and a declaration of relationship. He was already with the father; he
was already sharing; he was already able to enjoy—and yet he locks himself in
scarcity because he never truly knew. Here the gospel does not speak only of
“the restoration of a blatant sinner.” It also exposes and heals “the isolation
of the religious who pride themselves on righteousness” as a wound that must be
addressed.
When Pastor David Jang connects this passage to the
realities of the Korean church, it is not a moralistic scolding but an expanded
question about the structure of community. The larger a church becomes, the
more resources increase, the more people gather, the more subtly the language
of “my share” begins to gnaw at the community from within. Just as the prodigal
left because of a “misunderstanding of possession,” the older brother cannot
enter the feast because of the same “misunderstanding of possession.” The
prodigal said, “Give me my share,” choosing separation; the older brother says,
“You never gave me even a young goat,” revealing the same separated heart. They
look like opposites, but they suffer from the same disease. The moment the
father’s house is understood not as “abundance enjoyed together,” but as
“portions to be divided and owned,” prodigality does not occur only outside. It
also occurs inside—outside as squandering wealth, inside as refusing joy. That
is why Pastor David Jang’s emphasis on “stewardship” is not merely a technique
of financial management, but a spirituality that protects relationships. When
everything becomes “mine,” the community fractures; when we return to the
recognition that everything is “the Father’s,” the community recovers the joy
of oneness.
A resonant echo from the Old Testament often illuminates
this movement more deeply: Jeremiah 31. Ephraim’s lament from afar, and God’s
response—“My heart yearns… I will surely have mercy”—touches the same nerve as
the “father who runs” in Luke 15. The gospel is not a sentimental humanism
invented abruptly in the New Testament; it is God’s self-revelation that
persists stubbornly from the Old Testament onward. God is the One who seeks the
lost, the One who rejoices when the lost are found, and the One who wants His
children to participate in that joy. Pastor David Jang’s preaching ultimately
asks the church to face its direction: Toward whom are our doors opened? And
what does it mean, concretely, to lower the threshold? If welcoming sinners is
to be more than “nice words,” then the returning person must actually receive
what the ring, the robe, and the sandals symbolize: the restoration of dignity.
At the same time, those already inside must be told again the gospel’s
abundance: “You were always with me.” It is not only those returning from
outside who need repentance; repentance is needed also for the heart that
remained inside while quietly accumulating self-righteousness. There is no
poverty deeper than misunderstanding the Father while living in the Father’s
house.
If we follow Luke’s editorial flow, the parable that
appears immediately after Luke 15—Luke 16’s “Parable of the Unjust
Steward”—feels profoundly significant. Scripture was originally read without
chapter divisions, so the story of “a son who left by misunderstanding
possession” and the story of “a steward’s wisdom in handling possessions”
interlock like mirrors reflecting each other. If the prodigal’s parable
diagnoses that “the desire to secure possession as mine destroys relationship,”
then the steward’s parable sounds like a prescription: “Then how should we
direct and manage possessions for the rest of our lives?” From Pastor David
Jang’s perspective, true maturity in the church is not simply a matter of
growing in size, but of being gospel-aligned in our posture toward possessions.
The paradox remains: the more we have, the lower we must go; the more abundant
we become, the more freely we must be able to share. And that sharing is not
mere moral philanthropy, but the expression of identity—“the Father’s house is
originally that kind of place.”
At this point, a masterpiece of visual art often helps us
hold the parable once more with deeper attention: Rembrandt’s
seventeenth-century work The Return of the Prodigal Son.
Rather than “explaining” a scene like an illustration, the painting transforms
the story into light that “reveals” the grain of the human interior. The work
is commonly introduced as being held by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg,
Russia, and as dating to the 1660s. At the center of the canvas, the son has
collapsed to his knees, and the father envelops him. What is striking is that
the embrace does not look like the display of a victor, but like a quiet
gravity that holds the wounded. The light draws the viewer’s attention
naturally toward the father’s hands and the son’s back. The older brother’s
presence at the side resists any simplistic reduction into a “bad character.”
He stands in the shadows, looking toward the light, trying to judge the logic
of joy at the threshold of the feast. This frozen moment Rembrandt left behind awakens
the very truth Pastor David Jang underscores in preaching: the twofold
restoration is necessary at once—the restoration of the one who returned, and
the restoration of the one who stayed. Even the story of how the painting
entered a collection during the era of Catherine II (Catherine the Great) in
the late eighteenth century can feel symbolic: one person’s story of repentance
continues to be spoken of across centuries and empires in motion. Art bears
witness in its own way that the prodigal’s parable is not a moral tale for one
era, but a gospel language that runs through all of human history.
In the end, the core that Pastor David Jang’s preaching
persuades us toward is simple. The gospel is an invitation: “Come home.” And
that invitation always arrives to us at the speed of “a Father already running
toward you.” Human beings get lost in two ways. One is an obvious wandering.
The other is a cynicism hidden inside obedience. One is in the pigsty of a far
country; the other is in the courtyard of the father’s house. But the Father
speaks to both: “Come home,” and “You were always with me.” When these two
sentences overlap into one, the language of the church moves away from
aggression and exclusion and returns to its original texture—hospitality and
restoration. Just as Jesus eating with sinners made the religious elites
uncomfortable then, the gospel still makes the meritocracy inside us
uncomfortable now. Yet that discomfort is not destruction; it is more like
surgery for healing. The feast is held not because someone proved they were
qualified, but because someone “was dead and is alive again.” Before life
recovered from being lost, God responds not with calculation but with joy.
Today’s reality incites the language of scarcity. It says
we must have more to be safe, and we must win more to prove our worth. In that
climate, communities easily become wars over “shares.” But the Father’s
economics presented in the prodigal’s parable is entirely different. The
Father’s house is abundant enough to throw a feast. The issue is not the total
amount of resources, but whether we read that abundance as “being together,” or
whether we split it into “mine.” This is the point Pastor David Jang repeatedly
touches. If the church truly wants to speak the gospel, sermon rhetoric alone
is not enough. We must provide an actual space for those who return to return
into, and we must restore an actual reason for those who remain to rejoice.
Anyone can become the prodigal; anyone can become the older brother. The
maturity of the gospel is not in dividing ourselves by asking, “Which one am
I?” It finally depends on whether we learn “the Father’s heart.” The Father’s
heart is not permissive negligence that takes sin lightly; it is a love large
enough to overcome sin. It is not favoritism that collapses justice; it is
grace that fulfills justice at a deeper level. Therefore, before the gospel,
there is one thing for us to do: participate in the feast that embraces the one
who has come home—and realize, even if late, that this feast was never someone
else’s feast, but “the original language of my own home.” Wherever that
realization happens, the church becomes again “the Father’s house.”
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