A Not So Idle Tale (Luke 24:1 - 12 - Easter Sunday)

In 1889, a 5th Century papyrus was bought in Cairo by a German scholar named Karl Reinhart.  It had been found wrapped in feathers at a Christian burial site, bound in a cover made of leather stretched over boards.  After it was brought to Berlin, it became known as the Berlin Codex, although why it wasn't called the Feather-Wrapped-Cairo Codex has been lost to history.  It contained three complete manuscripts and fragments of a fourth, and though all four are important, it’s the fragment—one Gospel of Mary Magdalene—that caused the greatest stir.  Fifty years later, a farmer found a jar of papyri squirreled away in a cave in Upper Egypt.  Because the nearest town was the sleepy village of Nag Hammadi, the trove became known as the Nag Hammadi Library.  Through a series of adventures and misadventures, including a middle-eastern blood feud, the Library didn't get brought to general attention until the mid-1970s.  Similarly, publication delays resulted in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene not being published in English until about the same time.  Together with other manuscripts from the finds, they have remade our understanding of early Christianity, including the teachings of Jesus himself.

Why is this important to us, especially on this, of all days?  Well, the Gospels are bookended by Marys—the mother of Jesus at their beginning and the Magdalene at the end, and the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas, from the Nag Hammadi find, shed new light on the latter.   And considering our understanding the resurrection has been largely through the eyes of women, Mary Magdalene in particular, it seems to be a good time to talk about it a bit.  Perhaps a better understanding of her will result in a better understanding of Easter.

In all four canonical Gospels, Mary is the first at the empty tomb, sometimes accompanied by other women, sometimes on her own.  In three out of the four, she’s the first, or among the first, to meet the risen savior face to face.  And in all of them, she goes out and proclaims the Good News to the others.  In fact, because of all this, she has been known in the church as “the apostle to the apostles,” literally “the one sent to the sent,” ever since.

But she is not considered an apostle herself, and the question is, why?  These days, the standard answer is that nasty patriarchy again, and that is certainly at least partially true, but it’s more complicated than that; to see why, let's start with Luke’s version of the resurrection, the one we just read.  Like the other Gospels, he notes that a group of women, presumably including Mary Magdalene, remains faithfully throughout the crucifixion ordeal, the body’s removal by Joseph of Arimithea.  They follow the burial procession to see where he is laid, so they can come back and embalm his body.  Then they go home to keep the Sabbath.

When our passage opens, it's the first day of the week—AKA, Sunday—and the women—again presumably including the Magdalene—set out to embalm him, but when they arrived , they find the stone rolled away and Jesus not to be found.  While they are standing around gawking, behold!  Two guys in brilliant, shining robes appear beside them, and they are sore afraid.  As would be any sensible person, ‘cause the men are obviously not of this world.

 And while the women are groveling—again, as anybody would, unless they’re running, feets don’t fail me now—while the women are shaking in their sandals, the men say: “Why y’all looking for the living among the dead?  Don't you remember what he told you, that he’d be handed over to sinners, crucified, and rise again on the third day?”  And with sheepish grins, the women allow that, now that they mention it, they do remember, and they return from the tomb to tell the eleven and the rest what they'd seen and heard.

And here’s the first time the women in this group are mentioned by name: “Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women who told this to the apostles.”  And notice that Luke clearly separates the women—now indubitably including Mary Magdalene—as not “the apostles.”  Now, though usually considered the most inclusive of the gospel writers when it comes to Gentiles, Luke isn't like that with women.  Although there are exceptions, he generally tows the first-century literary line: most of the time, they aren’t named.  It’s  actually unusual for him to do so; it’s as if he wants to connect them—perhaps especially the first-mentioned Mary Magdalene—with his next observation: “these words seemed to [the eleven] an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

Now.  Let’s stop right there and consider the implication of this.  Luke is writing perhaps 60 years after the resurrection, and the twelve must have been well known by that time, especially by his congregation.  By saying that the apostles didn't believe the women, that they considered it an idle tale, he subtly pits them—the pillars of the ancient church—against the women, and by having Peter go right out and discover it for himself, he implies that the apostles—well known by that time as the one chosen by the master himself—only believe him, even though he doesn't say so.  After all, they obviously believed someone . . .

Well.  Certainly all this is enough for feminist scholars, with their hermeneutic of suspicion—their interpretive method based on an assumption of male bias—it's enough for them to conclude they weren't believed because they were women, and that’s probably true.  But is that really enough for all the damage done to Mary Magdalene’s reputation by the Catholic Church?  After all, she was declared a prostitute on zero evidence in 594, by no less a personage than Pope Gregory, and it wasn’t until almost 1400 years later that the church said “oops, my bad.”  What’s going on here?

Enter the Gospel of Mary.  Written in Greek sometime early in the second century, it’s attributed to Mary Magdalene, which is amazing enough: out of all the gospels we know of, it was the only one attributed to a woman.  What it does do is provide a significantly different account of early Christianity than the master story we all grew up with. You  know the master story . . . It's the one that we Christians have been bathed in, nourished on, spoon-fed since we were knee-high to a grasshopper.  According to scholar Karen King, it goes like this “Jesus reveals the pure doctrine to his apostles, partly before his death and partly in the forty days before his ascension. After Jesus’s final departure, the apostles apportion the world among themselves, and each takes the unadulterated gospel to the land allotted him. Even after the death of the disciples the gospel branches out farther. But now obstacles spring up to it within Christianity itself. The devil cannot resist sowing weeds in the divine field . . . [and] true Christians blinded by him abandon the pure doctrine.”  This pure doctrine, handed down pristine from Christ himself, became orthodox, and anyone who strays from it will surely go straight to where it's awful hot, even though the sun don't shine.

Problem is, the Gospel of Mary and other recently-recovered writings, blow this theory wide open.  They show that there wasn't any pure doctrine agreed on by all the apostles, and that instead, early Christianity was a bubbling stew of competing flavors.  Neither was it led by an all-male cadre of apostles directly descended from those first twelve (the remaining eleven plus Paul) but instead by a variety of different kinds of people, including (gasp!) women!  The Gospel of Mary depicts Mary not only as a full-fledged apostle, but first among them.  Jesus’ favorite, a beloved apostle, one to whom he imparted teaching not given to the others.  At the request of Peter himself, she tells him, Andrew and another apostle what Jesus said, and Peter does believe her because, as he says, “Would the Savior speak these things to a woman in private without openly sharing them so that we too might hear?”

But the Gospel of Mary might be dismissed as a one-off product disgruntled, second-century feminist if it weren't for the Gospel of Thomas.  This gospel was written much earlier, about the same time as Luke and Matthew, or perhaps even earlier, and contains what scholarly consensus says are the actual sayings of Jesus.  And the very last segment corroborates the incident between Mary and Peter. “Simon Peter said to them all: Mary should leave us, for women are not worthy of this Life.”  To which Jesus replies, “I myself will lead her, making her male if she must become worthy like you males! I will transform her Into a living spirit, Because any woman changed In this way Will enter the divine realm.”  You can almost hear the irony dripping from his mouth: if it's so blasted important to y’all that she be a male, I’ll make her a male, or a tree or a rock, for that matter … I’ll make her into a living spirit, and that’s how she’ll enter into the divine realm.

And it's right here that we have the other reason that the figure of Mary, and the gospels that tell about her, have been maligned and buried by orthodox Christianity: in these gospels, instead of believing the right things about Jesus, things that—coincidentally, I’m sure—the church controls, it's a personal encounter with the Christ, an experiential transformation, that is the key to the divine realm, AKA the Kingdom of God.

And so what about Mary, the woman at the center of the Easter story?  Was she just a bystander, as indicated by our four Gospels—none of which are contradicted by any of the new ones, by the way—or was she a valued member of Jesus’ inner circle, beloved by the master, perhaps even more so than Peter, that rock upon whom the church has been built?  We’ll never know for sure, but the weight of evidence is leaning that way . . .

And at Easter, when our lives are made anew, when Christian hope is born anew, it is appropriate that we come to a renewed vision of how Christ came for everyone, of how integral all people, male and female, Jew or Greek, black or white, Asian or European, how integral all are to the salvation story, the story of Christ rising again to new life for us all. Especially a woman from the little town of Magdala.  Amen.

The Palms and the Passion (Luke 19:28 - 40)

      If you go to the lectionary for today, you’ll see that it’s schizophrenic – the name of this Sunday is listed as “Palm/Passion Sunday” . . . that’s Palm and Passion, with a slash in between: Palm-slash-Passion. Now, I suspect it’s like that for a very practical reason – it’s the last Sunday in Lent, the last Sunday to contemplate what Christ did for us, the suffering and the pain and the anguish. At the same time, it’s the Sunday we traditionally celebrate the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, with all its Palms and cloaks and screaming crowds, all the people singing and screaming out “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” and “Hosanna in the highest heaven.” But in a lot of churches, they don’t have Maundy Thursday services like we do, or Good Friday services, and this is the only time they have to read the passion narratives, the story of the betrayal and death and burial of the Lord. Of course, some skip over the passion entirely, and go from jubilation to jubilation, from triumphal entry to triumphal resurrection, and pay little heed to the heartache in between.

      But of course, here in Greenhills, we wouldn’t do that . . . we have a Good Friday service, and so we have the luxury of celebrating the triumph today.  And we did – the choir paced in and you all did a fine job of waving those palm leaves . . . and we sang “Hosanna, Loud Hosanna” and I thought it was stirring. But the fact is, the joy is short-lived . . . it’s merely a lull in the storm. We’re at an in-between time, a high place before we start down-hill. We’re on the cusp, at a time between Jesus’ ministry on earth, and the final act of his life . . . and unlike the people crowding the city that day, unlike the cheering, stomping crowds, we know what comes next, and for us the celebration is colored by sadness, it’s tinged with melancholy. We know that the wild joy of this moment will soon be overshadowed by almost unimaginable sacrifice and suffering . . . it’s only five days away.

      The gospel writers knew this too . . . they knew what comes next – after all, they were writing decades after the crucifixion – and the way they wrote the story reflected this.  But it also reflected their individual concerns as well.  Each one colored their telling of the tale to reflect his particular theological bent.  Take Matthew, for instance: that most Jewish of Gospel writers was concerned above all that we understand that Jesus was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy.  So the centerpiece of his story is the riding on the donkey and a colt, both, at once, and it’s a detail no other Gospel has. When he gets near Jerusalem, he sends a couple of disciples over to a nearby village with really specific instructions – “immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this: “The Lord needs them.’” And so far so good – the disciples go and do as he commanded them, and Matthew makes sure we get the point: He quotes Zechariah – “Tell the daughter of Zion” – that’s Jerusalem – “Behold!  Your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” And if we look at this in our modern mind’s eye, we can’t help but chuckle at the image – Jesus must have had pretty wide legs to ride them both, and of course, Matthew knows that it’s silly, just like he knows that “on a donkey, on a colt the foal of a donkey” is poetic repetition, the basis of Hebrew poetry . . . but he was steeped in the rabbinic tradition, where every detail counts, and his first-century readers were too, and they would have understood the symbolism . . . Jesus was both the fulfillment of prophecy, and yet unexpected, humble, like no other king they knew.

The other Gospel writers know nothing of the two-steed theory . . . John is more concerned with the contrast between what the disciples saw that day, and how the crowd praised him – John’s version is the only one where there are actually palms – and the way he ended up.  And John—who has a penchant for explaining things in excruciating detail—tells us how to think about the events on that day:  he says “the disciples understood these things only after Jesus was glorified.”  And for John, Jesus’ “glorification” was what, for any other man, would be the ultimate humiliation: his mean and lowly death, spiked to a tree to die the death of the most dangerous criminals.  And so John echoes—in the way he tells the story—Paul’s formulation of the ultimate reversal.  God’s power resides precisely in what the world would call weakness. “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” he says “but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

In Luke’s version, which we just read, he doesn’t mention the coming storm . . . instead, he emphasizes the power of Christ and his royal welcome.  As he draws near to the city, he sends two disciples with instructions about the colt. Here he knows ahead of time where it will be tied, what will be asked them, and what they should say in return.  Thus, like God’s own self, Jesus is prescient, he knows what is to come.  He has the power of foreknowledge.

And when he gets into town, the people praise God “for all the deeds of power that they had seen” (v. 37).  And though in other gospels—especially Mark and John—following Jesus for his miracles is frowned upon, here in Luke, it’s a continuation of the understanding that Jesus demonstrates preternatural power, and has since before the beginning of his ministry.   At the very beginning, as he comes out of the wilderness, Luke says he is “filled with the Holy Spirit,” and he continues to do deeds of power that mark him as both human and divine—God’s son—and he imparts that power to his disciples.  And so those who welcome Jesus to Jerusalem because of his “deeds of power” respond rightly to his ministry.

Other details emphasize his kingship . . . the use of an animal not previously ridden—i.e., the colt—is several times associated in the Hebrew scriptures with royal doings, and the spreading of the cloaks recalls the peoples’ greeting of King Jehu after his coronation.  But most direct association of Jesus’ entry with kingship comes in v. 38, with the quotation from Ps. 118:26:  “"Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven.”  And although all three of the other gospels quote this verse, only Luke inserts the word “king:” blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord.

And so Luke invite us to think about just what it means to be king in the kingdom of God: because we know, just as his readers did, just as did the folks in the congregation for whom he wrote the Gospel, what will happen in not very many more days.  We know—and have known—what the journey to Jerusalem has led to, and as if to remind us of it, as if to insert just the teensiest of shadows into this triumphal picture, those who are out to kill Jesus make a guest appearance at the end.  Perhaps thinking that Jesus’ words are mighty close to blasphemy or—more likely—worried that the rabble might rise up in revolt, rallying around a new king, the Pharisees tell Jesus to make them stop.  His reply speaks to not only the power and inevitability of his acclimation, but manages to slyly insult the Pharisees as well: “if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  Not only are the common folk who line the road more on top of it than the Pharisees, but the stones are as well.  The Pharisees truly are dumber than a box of rocks.

I might have said this before—a bad memory does have it’s advantages, after all—but I was talking with one of my sisters about movies or something, and she opined that she was tired of this post-modern (or post-post modern, if you like) obsession with irony.  On the big screen, in literature, on the stage … and I, being a fan of the Coen brothers, and a smart-aleck, below the belt fighter and big brother, said sweetly that she must not read scripture, because it’s full of irony.  And—sibling relationships aside—it’s true, and this is one whopping big example of it.  Here’s Jesus, welcomed into Jerusalem, welcomed into the seat of Judaic power, welcomed with palms and cheers and all that jazz, and we know what’s going to happen, we know about Golgotha and vinegar-on-a-stick, about the sword in the side, and it’s watery flow.  And the power of this story resides in precisely that fact: we know.  We know.

Unfortunately, over the years, Christians have acted like we don’t . . . and it goes far beyond certain Christians’—and politicians’—recent calls for holy war  . . . it goes all the way back to the beginning, with Constantine, his legitimization of the church, and the church’s legitimization, in turn, of the Roman Empire.  It goes back to the Holy Roman Emperor, the warrior Popes, and the Siege of Jerusalem, wherein Christians massacred some 30,000 Muslims and Jews.  It goes from the Spanish Inquisition to the conflict in Northern Ireland, from the Spanish Inquisition to the calls for bloody revenge upon Muslims, all in the name of God.

Christian triumphalism is alive and well, and not just in the pompadours and chandeliers of TV preachers . . . it’s embedded in the way we do business, the way we practice church.  Every pastor knows that preaching humble, going-to-the-cross, following Jesus too much will not a megachurch grow.  We want to be reminded how special we are, how God has blessed us, we want the clean, happy, triumphal version of the faith.

But here at the culmination of Lent, as we hurtle on into Holy Week, we are reminded of the true nature of our faith, of the paradox and terrible irony at its heart.  The monarch who was crucified, the weakness that is strength, the King who is humbled.  At Lent—and especially here on Palm Sunday—we can feel the full weight of our faith, and as we travel this week toward the cross, during the week we call “Holy,” let us keep that in our hearts and minds.  What does it mean to be King and yet crucified, to be weak and yet strong, to be foolish and yet wise?  In other words, this Holy Week let us ponder and pray and cogitate about this paradox, thus irony that is the true heart of our faith … let us think upon what it means to be Christian.  Amen.

Table Manners (John 12:1 - 8)

      Here’s a riddle: how is a table like a well?  Answer: in the Bible, at least, lots of things happen around them.  Biblical romances develop around wells: Moses meets his Midianite daughter at one, and Jacob first catches a glimpse of the hard-to-get Rachel as she waters the livestock.  And in John’s gospel, this romantic undertone plays beneath Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well.  And as we saw last week, table fellowship is very important -- it figures at some level into many of the gospel stories.  Over in Matthew, Jesus eats with assorted sinners, folks who were considered to be outside the pale, who were considered unclean.  In Luke, the king invites all the riff-raff from the highways and hedges in to eat at his wedding banquet with him, thus admitting of the hilarious possibility that the all the homeless and road-crazies, all the blind-beggars and widowed orphans, would be rubbing shoulders with the Kim Kardashians of the day.  I like to imagine the dialog . . . Kim, turning to the dirty fellow scratching an open sore on her right: “that new chef at ‘Metropole’ is marvelous: his rack of lamb just melts in your mouth.”  To which the dirty fellow scratching an open sore replies: “Uh, yesterday, the bread in the dumpster out back was only 3-days-old . . .”

      Anyway, over in John, the table imagery is less specific, less in your face, but it’s there nevertheless . . . the wedding in Cana, where Jesus turns the water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, where the people are told to recline, as if they were at table, and of course the last third of the book, most of which occurs at the Passover table.  And I think this scene around Mary and Martha’s table should be viewed in that light . . . the significance of the table should not be ignored in this scene . . . it’s a foreshadowing of the last supper – where in a stunning turnabout, Jesus will anoint the disciples’ feet – and the upper room, where the resurrected Jesus will eat and drink once again, and the great Messianic banquet that we ourselves foreshadow at our communion table.

      So let’s try to picture the scene around Mary and Martha’s table . . . who’s there?  Well, we know that Lazarus is there, don’t we . . . as a matter of fact, this comes right after the scene where he’s raised from the dead, and all the people were murmuring about it, they were wondering about it, they were being converted over it, or so John tells us, and it was making the religious authorities real nervous, and John is very careful to emphasize the fact that he’s there, he mentions it twice . . . and so maybe we should ask ourselves what Lazarus represents in our little tableau . . . death is the ultimate unclean, and here Jesus is eating with someone who until recently was very dead, four days dead, as a matter of fact . . . and Lazarus’ death and resurrection clearly prefigures Jesus’ own, so we’re clued in to a central theme right at the outset . . . this episode is about Jesus’ upcoming crucifixion, just seven days away.

      And if there is any doubt, here comes Mary with a whole pound of perfume made out of pure nard, and the smell of it saturates the room, so that it overcomes even the heavy Middle-Eastern cooking, and the scent reminds each disciple there of the best times they’ve ever had, times when they’d snuggle up to their own mothers as children and smell her rough-soaped hair, or the exotic caravan women with their black-kohled eyes and sinuous glide, passing on the road to Egypt . . . it was a wildly feminine scent, an extravagantly female aroma, and Mary takes the perfume and kneels with graceful flow at Jesus’ feet and begins to massage in the perfume, and the scene is both incredibly intimate, as she wipes them with her own hair, and overtly symbolic, as she clearly anoints him for his burial.

      And why is she anointing him now? Why is she anointing him when his death is still a week away?  Could it be that this is one more symbol in this over-packed scene?  Could it be that we – who know about the empty tomb – are supposed to recognize what she apparently gets implicitly, in her heart?  That somehow, in some way, Christ won’t be around for her to anoint when they go to the tomb?

And just who is this Mary, anyway?  We see her at least two other times, in the episode just before this, when she mourns her brother’s death, and over in Luke, where she sits at Jesus’ feet while Martha bustles around the house, getting more and more annoyed.  There, as well as here, she seems to be the only one who gets the true nature of Jesus’ mission.

      Well.  We’ve talked about Lazarus – symbol of death, symbol of resurrection, symbol of unclean made clean – and we’ve talked about Mary, but there’s another person here besides Jesus, and that’s Judas.  And when John introduces him here, he does so with an editorial comment: Judas Iscariot, he says, was “the one who was about to betray him,” and by pointing it out John makes sure we understand who this is, but it also has the effect of cutting off further consideration in the scene . . . we immediately dismiss him as The One Who Betrayed Jesus in big capital letters, and will believe anything . . . of course he steals from widows and orphans, he’s The One Who Betrayed Jesus, it’s expected . . .

      But in this episode Judas is more than that, in this episode he fulfills the same role as Peter in so many others, the role of symbol, of stand-in, of exemplar of something larger than the sin of just one human being.  Mary gets what this scene is trying to foreshadow . . . she gets it that Jesus – far from leading them in a glorious re-establishment of the Davidic throne, far from being a great revolutionary leader in the manner of Che Guevara or Mao Tse Tsung – she gets it that Jesus was going to die on a cross just about a week from that time.

      Judas . . . doesn’t.  He doesn’t understand . . . and here, maybe, is the crux of the matter, the crux of the difference between him and Mary . . . she treats him with royal respect, treats him like a king while still acknowledging that he is going to die.  Her anointing of him carries the dual significance of royalty – kings were anointed with pure nard – and death.  She treats him as one who is already dead, but who is king nevertheless.  And that’s the opposite of what the disciples thought – including and perhaps especially a certain one named Judas Iscariot.  Like the rest of the world, like their society at large, Judas believed that might makes right, that it took the strong to survive.  To the world – and was it so to Judas as well? – a dying Messiah was a walking oxymoron . . . Messiahs didn’t die, they led glorious re-takings, glorious revolutions.  The world had no use – and it still has no use – for a leader that gets spiked to a tree.  That’s the foolishness that is the cross, as Paul would memorably come to say.

      In the film The Last Temptation of Christ, Judas is pictured as a fiery, red-headed zealot, who grows weary – and wary – of Jesus’ preaching of peace, of his insistence on not resisting his march toward crucifixion . . . and is this why Judas betrays him?  In the film, it's Judas the zealot who perhaps loves him best, piles all his hopes upon him, and like other spurned lovers in literature, reacts violently when the object of his adoration turns out to be other than he supposes . . . Is this what drives Judas to betray him? When Jesus doesn’t fulfill his role as rabble-rousing revolutionary, does he get him done in?

      Regardless . . . this story is essentially about two ways of looking, two ways of being, and it illustrates them by contrasting Mary – who understands that Jesus’ true glory, his true king-ship lies in his death – and Judas, who doesn’t.  One way, John is saying, belongs to the world, to the powers that be, the other, is the way of the believer, the way of the true follower of Christ.  The true follower of Christ knows that Jesus’ royalty, his glorification lies precisely in his death, and will acknowledge, will anoint him king in that dying.  Mary’s anointing of Jesus is acknowledgement of that, it is a symbol of her conversion, her belief that it is the way of humility, the way of service that signals genuine faith.

      You will always have the poor to serve, Jesus says, and by this he isn’t resigning himself to that fact, or giving us permission to ignoring them . . . to believe that you have to ignore all the rest of his teachings, by both word and deed, in which he fed and housed and healed the least of these who walked on earth.  What Jesus means by this is that you can serve the poor anytime, don’t let me stop you, be my guest, but you will not always have me around to anoint.

      But I think it goes deeper than that . . . if Mary’s anointing constitutes true belief, if it symbolizes her conversion to genuine faith, then perhaps Jesus is linking true service of the poor to the anointing of the crucified Christ in our hearts, that unless we too understand, like Mary, that true power lies in humility, that Christ’s kingship lies in pouring out his life for us, just as Mary poured out that expensive nard, our service of the poor will end in scandal and ineffectualness, like it did for Judas.  True service is grounded in a self-emptying love, not the other way around.

      And that’s the way in for us in this passage, the way to see ourselves here, to apply it to us today . . . it’s the notion that Judas is somehow representative of – and a symbol of – the other disciples, who mirror the world’s inability to understand the true nature of the gospel – that true power, God’s power, lies in Jesus’ oft-repeated phrase that the last shall be first and the first last, in the Apostle Paul’s insistence that the power of God is weakness to the world.

      And speaking of Paul, in his beautiful Christ hymn, he characterizes what Christ does as kenosis, as self-emptying: emptying himself of all he is, his God-hood and taking the form of a human, even until death on a cross.  And we shouldn't miss the parallel as Mary does the same thing, extravagantly emptying herself by pouring the fabulously expensive perfume all over the body of her beloved.  Judas didn't understand the significance of that any more than he understood when Jesus did it a week later.

      The upshot of it is that Judas feathered his own nest at the expense of the poor – John spells it out, to be sure we get it – and that hasn’t changed much since his time, has it?  All the wealth of Western society is built on the backs of the poor, who produce our goods and services at less-than-living wages so they remain cheap and affordable.  We trickle help down to them in dribs and drabs, in food banks and ever-cut social-welfare budgets . . . wouldn’t want to cut the national security budgets, gotta get the money from somewhere, and the poor don’t have a lot of lobbying power . . . and so we give ‘em a little palliative help, just to keep ‘em happy, throw ‘em a little welfare bone . . . western society feeds off the poor every bit as much as Judas did, because Western society believes just as he did, that those with the most stuff, the most power, the most money, win.

      But you know what?  Even though it obscures our view of Judas, even though it over-simplifies this undoubtedly complex man, John’s insistence on rubbing in the obvious, on pointing out the fact very clearly that Judas was the one who crucified Christ, serves a purpose.  We know what Judas’ beliefs got him, don’t we?  We know that he died, some say he hung himself, some say he fell into a hole and burst his stomach, but the fact of the matter is that he was wrong, wasn’t he?  The way to happiness doesn’t proceed from power, it doesn’t proceed from money, from climbing the old social or political or monetary ladder . . . what proceeds from all of that is death . . . the way to life is the tougher way, the more narrow way, the way of Mary, the way of self-emptying, where you will lose your life to save it, paradoxically enough, the way to life is through death.  Amen.

My Two Sons (Luke 15:1 - 3; 11b - 32)

To understand this parable, you have to realize that it’s misnamed — it’s not about the prodigal son, or the responsible son who gets so jealous. It’s about the father, and how the father behaves, and like most of Jesus’ parables, it is a radical reversal of the expectations of his audience.

And it’s important to realize who makes up that audience -- they're the religious leaders of the day, and they're grumbling about Jesus' association with tax collectors and other dregs of society. They say – “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”   and today we say – so what? So what if Jesus ate with tax collectors? I mean, maybe we don't like the IRS, but we'd still eat with them . . . after all, they are respectable members of society.  But in Jesus' time they weren't – they were Jews, hired by the Romans, and they got rich collecting the heavy Roman taxes. They were turncoats, outside the pale, the lowest of the low. And for the Pharisees, the term “sinners” wasn’t for folks who steal a few pencils from the office,      or drive a little too fast down 275. To them, it referred to outcasts, those outside the religious system, who did not worship at the temple or observe the Torah.  Sinners were those whose breaking of Mosaic law was known in the community, and they were outcast from the temple.

One final piece of the puzzle – have you ever wondered why they made such a big deal about who ate with whom? Over and over again in the Gospels the religious leaders go on and on about who Jesus ate with, and there was a reason – what you ate and who you broke bread with was highly ritualized in the Judaism of the day. It defined your standing in the religious community – in Jesus’ time you didn’t eat a meal with just anybody. Being invited to eat in a Jewish household implied that you were clean, holy and consecrated within the community.   And here Jesus was – eating with sinners, folks who by definition weren't holy and consecrated within the community.

And so the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of a serious breach of religious practice – table fellowship with sinners.   And in response, Jesus tells them three parables. And note that the reason Jesus tells them the stories is because they’re griping about his eating with sinners; so one should expect that the stories have something to do with that. The first parable is about a shepherd who leaves a flock of 99 sheep to find just one lost lamb; and the second is about a woman who scours her whole house, top to bottom, to find a tenth of her money, which had been lost.

And our parable begins -- “There was a man who had two sons,” not “There was a son who took his inheritance and left home” or “There was a son who was really ticked off when his father forgave his younger brother.” It says “There was a man who had two sons” and remember, it's in response to Pharisitical grumbling about Jesus eating with tax collectors and other sinners.

Now, it wasn't unheard of that a son would take his inheritance early, and strike out on his own. In fact, it's clearly allowed for in Hebrew custom, and could be an advantage to a younger son. He could get his one-third of the estate and head out to establish his own household while he was young and vigorous, and not have to wait until his father died. The problem was what this son did with it – instead of investing it in real estate or tax-deferred mutuals pegged to the Standard and Poors, instead of saving for a rainy day or giving it to the poor – and getting at least a big, fat, tax write-off — he squandered it having fun!  He spent it on what Luke fastidiously called “dissolute living,” and what the older brother came right out and said were prostitutes. He went into some distant, gentile country and bought liquor and loose women. And I don't know about you, but I'm right there with the Pharisees, right there with my Presbyterian righteous indignation aflame in my heart! How dare he take his father's hard-earned money and blow it all! Not very decent, and certainly not in very good order. And as a final blow, he ends up right down there with the tax collectors, right down there with the sinners, because he goes to work slopping hogs, working for somebody who's obviously a gentile, and so he is outcast, unclean, somebody who no self-respecting Jew could eat with. He's feeding pigs!! He's the ultimate unclean – he's lower than unclean, he's the servant of pigs, he's the servant of the unclean!

And when he comes to his senses, when he realizes how low he can go, how low he has gone, he figures “Here's what I'll do. I'll say 'Father, I have sinned against heaven – I have become unclean – and in front of you! I'm not your son anymore, take me back, make me a hired hand, have mercy on me!' And maybe, at least, I'll get something to eat.” So he heads home, planning to do just that, but before he gets there, while he is just a speck on the horizon, his father rushes out to embrace him, to kiss him, so overjoyed is he to see his son! And his son says “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer fit to be your son . . .” and before he can finish, his father interrupts and sends for a fine robe, and beautiful shoes, and jewelry to shower upon his son, and most importantly, most importantly, he kills a fatted calf to feast with his son. He plans to eat with the outcast, to share table fellowship with his unclean son.

And so Jesus is telling his audience – and through this parable, Luke is telling his – that the father welcomes his unclean son, and will do the ultimate act of welcoming, the ultimate act of reconciliation. He will eat with his outcast child. And, like the Pharisees, we know who the father represents, he represents God. And who the older, more responsible son is as well – he is the Jewish religious establishment, the leaders of synagogue and temple. In other words, the oldest son represents Jesus' audience, the Pharisees.

And he says “Listen! For all these years I was a slave for you, and I've never disobeyed you; but you've never even given me a goat so I could party with friends. But when this son of yours came back, who wasted all your money on prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” The son is outraged that the father welcomes his errant children – children like the Romans, the tax collectors, even the hated Philistines – welcomes then with rejoicing. All these years and he'd obeyed all the rules and all the commandments in Torah, and his father welcomed the bad son back unconditionally. He didn't make him ritually purify himself or shovel manure out of the stables. He didn't even make him say ten hail Mary's or go to church. He threw open his arms wide and welcomed him back with tears of joy. The prodigal son was equal in the eyes of the father to the good, righteous son. He told him “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice,   because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”

Like many parables this is an allegory, where elements in the story stand for things in real life. It's about the father – God – and how he treats his children. The responsible son represents the religious establishment, perhaps generalized to the Israelites as a people, and the prodigal son represents sinners like tax collectors and gentiles overall, who are excluded from temple practice.

And it was radical stuff back then – the Judaism of that day was a religion based on purity, and it excluded anyone not born Jewish, who could not prove ancestry through their mother's line. And there was good reason for it – over and over again, their very survival had hinged on it. When they were a rural peoples, farming the arid high country of Palestine, the purity laws in the Torah maintained their health and well-being. After the Babylonian exile, what kept the their people together was a return to a strict piety, a casting-away of anything that was not absolutely pure, not purely Jewish. And here Jesus comes along, consorting with sinners, eating with people who weren't pure, who weren't welcome in the temple, and it was an affront to their whole being, their whole sense of who they were as the people of God. It turned their world upside down.

And we congratulate ourselves that we're not like that, that we welcome anyone, that anyone can be a Christian, and we're right – nearly from the beginning, Christianity has welcomed all into its fold, anyone who, like the prodigal, comes to God in repentance. But I think that, for us, the Parable of the Forgiving Father is as radical in its own way as it was in Jesus' time, for his original audience. If it weren't, why do we so resolutely personalize it? Why do we focus in on the repentance of the younger son or the anger of the elder? Why do we ignore the context and make it just about sin and forgiveness, and not who's in or out of the kingdom of God?

Who are the outcasts of today? Who are outside the pale of our mainstream version of Christianity? We're tempted to say     “Why no one, of course – all are welcome in the house of the Lord.” But . . . is that really true? What if we substitute, say . . . crack dealers for the tax collectors? What if they came to church, sang our hymns and then went off to their street corners and resumed their trade in cocaine? Or what about, oh . . . what about child abusers? That strikes home for me . . . one of my best friends served time in Parchmen prison in Mississippi for sexually abusing his little girl.  Or, I should say, one of my former best friends, because I cut him loose just like the rest of the church when the stuff hit the fan. Only a courageous pastor who'd never known him outside of jail was able to be with him, and even she had to choose between him and the church. What if he were to walk right through that door over there, come on in and sit down in the front row, and started to listen to this sermon?  Well, if he's done his time . . . if he's paid the price . . . but what if he hasn't? What if I knew that he'd gotten away Scott free, without paying anything, and worse, that he might do it again, might endanger the sanity or health of somebody in this congregation?

The radical fact is, the father didn't require a price from his wayward son, didn't require him to pay him back, to make amends, or anything else that we require as a matter of course. And as the body of Christ on earth, as God's representatives, God's people on this planet hurtling through space, can we do any less? Can we require sinners to become upstanding before they come in here? Can we require them to pay for their sins before they can come before God?

Grace is radical stuff, folks, and make no mistake about it, it's grace we're talking about here. God's free, righteous grace that comes to sinners, the dregs of society, and frees them, makes them righteous and just before God. And we're sometimes offended by grace, like the religious leaders were by Jesus' even-handed table fellowship, like the son who was offended at his father's generosity. Grace is offensive to our tit-for-tat society, where you have to pay for what you get, pay your debts to society and to one another and to Sears and Roebuck.

And that's the really radical thing about this passage, the really subversive thing about the Parable of the Forgiving Father.  Grace is free – we don't have to pay for it. And if it got out that God was giving away eternal life for nothing, just giving away Scott-free freedom from death and bondage to sin, well, pretty soon, folks might want food for free, or medical care, or transportation or clothing, and our whole house of cards, our whole economy based on buying and selling and selling and selling, with its Doritos Super Bowl and Budweiser half-time show, might come fluttering down like an overheated house of cards.

But of course, what's amazing about grace is that it is so radical – it is free. Nobody has to pay for it, not the sinners, or the Pharisees, or the axe-murderers or the drug dealers. Not the college professors or the congressmen or the Methodists or even us. Jesus, who ate with child molesters and crack-addicts, who ate with biker gangs, bankers and wall street brokers, eats with us, and is here with us, and died on the cross for us. Even if we are faithless, God is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins.  And like the father in the parable, God is filled with joy when a lost child returns, and prepares a banquet fit for kings and queens and just plain old folks, like us.  Amen.