A British journalist by the name of Christopher Booker argues that all of literature can be classified into seven basic narratives.  Though many would deem the idea itself deficient, Booker exhaustively identifies each category in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.  One such category he describes is the "Voyage and Return" plot.  Here, Booker catalogs, among other works, Alice and Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Gone with the Wind, each of these stories chronicling a hero who travels away from the familiar and into the unfamiliar, only to return again with new perspective.    

Among his list of "Voyage and Return" plots, Booker also identifies Jesus's parable of the Prodigal Son.  He describes the parable as many of us understand it.  The younger son demands his inheritance, travels to another country, squanders his money until he has nothing left, and finally decides to come home again pleading for mercy.  When told or heard like this, it is a story fitting neatly into Booker's category, and perhaps neatly into our understanding of faith.  Journeys to faith and to the Father are often stories of coming and going and returning again.  

But is this an accurate understanding of the parable of Jesus?  Is the story of the prodigal son really about the son?  Is our membership in the body of Christ about our coming and going or Christ's? 

My story of life as a Christian, like many others, cannot be told without some admittance of wandering to and from faith, in and out of God's will, walking with and without the Son.  When I think of my place in the Christian assembly, the body of Christ, or the great cloud of witnesses, I am immediately aware of my drifting heart and less than perfect role in the story.  I imagine my place in the assembly of martyrs and missionaries as I might image entering a grand ballroom of crowned guests and beautiful robes only to realize I am wearing a t-shirt and old jeans.  The greater body of Christ—with its ardent disciples from early centuries and saints from today—does not seem like a place in which some of us readily belong.  Of my place in the great cloud witnesses, sometimes we feel more like humorist Groucho Marx, who once declined the offer of membership into an organization with the reply:  "I don't care to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member."  If I myself am the main character, this is the story I must tell. 

Thankfully, I am not.  And Jesus's parable of the prodigal son is one more reminder of this among many.  The parable of the prodigal son is only a "voyage and return" narrative in the way Booker describes it if the son is the subject of the story.  But any study of the father in this story makes that an unlikely theory.  Jesus tells us that it was while the son was still "a long way off" that the father saw him and "was filled with compassion for him" (Luke 15:20).  Literally, this father was moved by this compassion.  The Greek word conveys an inward movement of concern and mercy, but this man was also clearly moved outwardly.  The father runs to the son, embraces him (literally, "falls upon his neck"), and kisses him.  

Jesus describes a scene that is far more abrupt and shocking than the story we often remember of a son who wanders away and returns home again.  It is not the wayward son who runs to the father but the father who runs to his wayward son, and at that, without any assurance of his son's repentance whatsoever.  In fact, the father runs without any promise that the son is even home to stay.  Moreover, it is not the son who we find kneeling in the story Jesus tells, but the father.  It is as if he is reminding us once again that all have indeed fallen short of the glory of God, but that God has fallen to pick us up again and again, and to bring us home.  Jesus gives us a story whose merciful ending has far more to do with the actions of the father than any action of the son. 

So it is with our own stories.  Your place in the body of Christ, your membership in the great cloud of witnesses is never valid because of who you are, but because of who Christ is.  If we must use Booker's headings to describe the journey of faith, the voyage was Christ's, so that we might forever return to the Father. 

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.