Luke 15:31

31. All I have is thine Thou art still my son; thou hast not been disinherited; what I have is still within my reach as ever. The captious Scribes and Pharisees were still in Church relations ever with God. Yet they were forfeiting their organic sonship by being, like this sons angry because Jesus was calling the wanderers home. And mark that the son in the parable stays without; and without the parable leaves him. After the parable has thus fulfilled its immediate object, it may be applied to a great variety of equivalent cases. We may truly, then, say that the elder son is the Jews, and the younger the Gentiles; and that the return of the prodigal is the restoration of the Gentiles to the Church of God. The elder son, the Jews, is still angry and without; but he, too, may ultimately re-enter his father’s house in joy. The true lesson for these Pharisees is, that it is a poor and pitiful piety which wraps itself in a cold and selfish sanctity, and never smiles in gladness when sinners come home to God. And yet we must guard against the error of supposing that the repentant are dearer to God than the life-long Christian. For, as Philo the Jew says, “there ever remain in the souls of the repentant the scars and traces of ancient sins.”