But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.
—Luke 15:20
The prodigal’s father was so anxious for his son’s return that, when he saw him, he ran to meet him. This indicates a great deal more than joyful haste to meet his long-awaited son. It indicates a profound humility on the part of the father. Even today, in our hurried western culture, adults do not run under normal circumstances. We normally run only in emergencies or in controlled contexts in which running is appropriate, such as sporting events. We don’t normally see a man dressed in business attire, briefcase in hand, running down the sidewalk. That would be undignified. Yet, we can imagine a loving father running to meet a long lost son, and so we must enter the world in which this story was told to grasp the significance of the father’s race to greet his returning son. John MacArthur writes:
And make no mistake: in the context of that culture, the father’s action of running to the boy and embracing him before he even came all the way home was seen as a shameful breech of decorum. In the jaded perspective of the scribes and Pharisees, this was just one more thing that added to the father’s shame. For one thing, noblemen in that culture did not run. Running was for little boys and servants. Grown men did not run—especially men of dignity and importance. They walked magisterially, with a slow gait and deliberate steps. But Jesus says “his father . . . ran” (v. 20; emphasis added). He did not send a servant or a messenger ahead to intercept his son. And it was not merely that he quickened his pace. He himself ran. The text uses a word that speaks of sprinting, as if he were in an athletic competition. The father gathered up the hem of his robe and took off in a most undignified manner.
The image of a respectable, wealthy, honorable man such as this running seems so out of place in Middle Eastern culture that Arabic Bible translators have traditionally been reluctant to translate the phrase without resorting to a euphemism such as “he hurried,” or “he presented himself.” Kenneth E. Bailey, an evangelical Bible commentator who lived in the Middle East and made careful studies of the language and culture there, wrote:
The reluctance on the part of the Arabic versions to let the father run is amazing. . . . For a thousand years a wide range of such phrases were employed (almost as if there was a conspiracy) to avoid the humiliating truth of the text—the father ran! The explanation for all of this is simple. The tradition identified the father with God, and running in public is too humiliating to attribute to a person who symbolizes God. Not until 1860, with the appearance of the Bustani–Van Dyck Arabic Bible, does the father appear running. The work sheets of the translators are available to me and even in that great version the first rendition of the Greek was “he hurried,” and only in the second round of the translation process does rakada (he ran) appear. The Hebrew of Prov. 19:2 reads, “He that hastens with his feet sins” (my translation). The father represents God. How could he run? He does.’The father was humbling himself, even though the Prodigal Son was the one who should have been doing so.
—John MacArthur, A Tale of Two Sons (Thomas Nelson, 2008), 113–114.
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