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When you’re lost, it’s good to be missed; it’s even better to be found. At the heart of spiritual lostness, though, is our collusion in our own absence. People are not inanimate objects like coins, things that can fall unwittingly into corners, nor are they like sheep, animals with limited understanding of the repercussions of their wandering ways. When people stray spiritually, they act with free will, although it can be restricted by previous experiences, ignorance and naïveté. Still, people walk away from God, generally because we are convinced we know better than God does what is best for us.

During the Exodus, God spoke to Moses, saying: “Go down at once to your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, for they have become depraved. They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it, sacrificing to it and crying out, ‘This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’”

Should we file this under “How soon they forget” or “What have you done for me lately”? Moses intervenes, imploring God to preserve the people about whom God had said, “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky,” and the Lord “relented in the punishment he had threatened to inflict on his people.”

It is not that God in the Old Testament is hungry to punish the people of Israel, or wrongdoers in general; God is not pulled back from the fight, screaming, “Let me at them,” conjuring up some other plan to wreak deadly revenge. The issue is what we deserve. The biblical accent can fall on what we have earned through our own stubborn behavior and God’s merciful relenting, as in Exodus, or it can fall on God’s merciful search for those who are lost because of their own stubborn behavior. Wherever the accent falls, the word is always mercy and the necessity is the turn back to God.

Jesus tells a story of two lost sons, the younger one, who has wandered far from home and “squandered his inheritance,” and the older one, who has stayed near his father on his estate. The youngest son winds up wasting his inheritance and living with pigs, eating the husks of pig food. At some point the wandering son realizes it is time to go home and beg for mercy from his father. He has not lost only his money; he has lost himself. The father spies him from a long way off, runs to his son, embraces him and kisses him.

But it was when the younger son recognized that he was lost, that he had made choices that reduced him to physical and spiritual poverty, that he could repent and be found. It was only then that he could come home to be showered not with reproach but with mercy.

The older son is another matter. He has remained near to his father, but it seems he is not close to him. He resents his younger brother coming home to a feast and his father for throwing the feast. He is angry that mercy has been shown, and when his father comes to plead with him to celebrate, he spews out the grievances he has been nursing for many years: “Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders.”

The older brother cannot celebrate his sibling’s return because he has no joy in the father’s presence. Life with father has been a burden, an unwelcome task, a plodding life in which he has struggled not to “disobey your orders.” Can the older son see that he is lost? You can only be found when you know you are lost and it is time to come home.

Many of us fall into the category of the older son, but it does not matter where we are as long as we make it home, for either “you are here with me always; everything I have is yours” or “we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.” Party at God’s house. Everyone’s invited.

Place yourself in the parable of the two sons. Which son (or daughter) are you and what do you need to grasp or let go in order to celebrate?

This article appears in September 9-16 2013.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.