The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith

by Timothy J. Keller

“This man welcomes sinners and [even] eats with them.” To sit down and eat with someone in the ancient Near East was a token of acceptance.

So to whom is Jesus’s teaching in this parable directed? It is to the second group, the scribes and Pharisees.

Jesus’s purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories.

Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and the religious are spiritually lost, both life-paths are dead ends, and that every thought the human race has had about how to connect to God has been wrong.