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.
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