NOTES for Luk 15:1-32
These three parables are usually called parables about repentance, but repentance is shown in them from a completely unusual side. What is described here is not so much the experience of the repentant person, his feelings, pain, and so on. Jesus speaks about how God and His angels rejoice when a person finds the road home. This is repentance "from God's point of view."
This is apparently not accidental. When a person reasons about his conversion, about seeking God, about faith, he is always inclined to think about himself: about his motives, about his spiritual path. God here is imagined as an impersonal "goal" that one has to reach, as an abstract "meaning of life" that one has to find. But it turns out that for God our conversion is far more important than we realize. He rejoices like a shepherd who lost a beloved sheep and found it again, like a poor woman who gathers her neighbors for a festive treat out of joy over a found coin, like a father who saw a son who had been lost forever. "God is not indifferent to your fate," Jesus seems to say. "Let this support you on the way."