Note 84 — XXIV. THE PRODIGAL SON.

Stier’s observations on this point are excellent:—“The well-meaning efforts which are made to explain the absence of reference to the mediating propitiation of the Son of God in this instant exhibition of the Father’s mercy, are altogether needless; they rest fundamentally on false dogmatic views of this propitiation, as if there were not existing in the Father’s being the same love which is expressed in the Son,—as if the Father needed abstractly to be propitiated in order to entertain this love! We are not to seek Christ himself as mediator in the person of this father; nor (though Melancthon has strangely ventured to affirm it), afterwards in the fatted calf, as sacrificially slain. His place here is rather to be sought in his thus authoritatively testifying of the Father’s mercy. As Nitzsch excellently says:—‘If he seems to conceal himself here, he is all the more manifest there, where the Shepherd seeks the lost sheep. For the Son—who is neither an elder nor a younger, the eternal Son of the Father, one with him, his eye and his heart towards the lost—is come into this world, although invisible and unnamed in the parable, to reveal the Father where he had been ever invisible, and where no man knew him: and he is to the children of the law and the curse, not only a living herald of the propitiable—we shall rather say of the already propitiated—Father, but the (that is our) propitiation itself, and the way whereby every one of us may come back to God.’ The mediation of Christ is no more denied by this silence than the seduction of Satan was denied in the sinner’s apostasy at the beginning of the parable. We may also say with Von Gerlach that the ‘coming out of the father to meet his son, here figuratively exhibits the sending of the Son.’”—Stier in loc.[84]