Lent IV Year C |
St James’, Peace River |
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What a great story! This has to be one of the most resonant and true-to-life things you can read in the Bible. Sure, some of the details don't work in our modern world – keeping pigs, or killing the fatted calf. But parental love, sibling rivalry, hitting bottom, needing approval, resenting unfairness.... these are all timeless experiences that we can understand every bit as much today as 2000 years ago. Of course, it's not just the story telling that makes this tale of a father and two sons so special. If you asked people to say what they thought was at the heart of the Bible, I suppose the most votes would go to John 3:16 (“God so loved the world...”). But my guess is that this parable would be in the top three. It says so much about the nature of God's love for us, and as a story it works like a miniature version of the whole story the Bible tells: what happens when we run away from that love; and what happens when we receive it. The only problem is, it's a parable, and we generally don't know what to do with parables. We treat them a bit like Aesop's Fables, and ask, “What is the point of this story? What is its moral?” I think, if there were a point to this parable, or any other for that matter, Jesus would have told us what the point was, and might not have bothered telling the story at all. The story IS the point. Jesus tells it because we need to hear it. The point is that the story can only have an impact when we hear it, when it makes a difference to who we are and how we live. Perhaps that's why this parable has so many names. For most it's the parable of the Prodigal Son: the story is really about the one son who takes all he's due from the father, runs away, spends his way through it, and then is left with nowhere to turn. Some people call it the Prodigal Son because they recognize themselves in the prodigal: whether literally or figuratively, they've had that experience of failing to value the blessings they received, and “coming to their senses” when everything's gone. The parable then tells the good news, that there's always a way home. Of course some people call it the parable of the Prodigal Son because they've NEVER had that experience! - they think the story is about other people, or at least that it's easier to deal with the story if it's not about me. Another name for this story is the parable of the Forgiving Father. Perhaps that also comes from identification. If you see yourself in the character of the father in the story – if you've been put in the position of being repudiated and betrayed by someone close to you, someone you loved – who then pops up again asking for forgiveness.... perhaps you understand more than most the extraordinary love that motivates the father in the story, not just to come round eventually and forgive his son, but to spend his days watching, hoping and praying for the son to come home. A few people even recognize this story as the parable of the Two Sons. I don't think that comes from an identification with the older brother so much as a recognition that both sons describe something of who we are. The story paints them as extremes, but the reality is that most of us see something of ourselves in both of them. We want to do good, whether it's for an outward reward or just for the satisfaction of doing the right thing. But in some proportion, we also want to cut loose and “be ourselves”, generally without thinking of the consequences to us or anyone else. The tension between making the right choice and making our own choice is something we can identify with. But the parable of the Two Sons is also about relationships with other people – people who have made different choices than we have – and we may also recognize the temptation to envy and resent others whose choices appear to us to have worked out better. All of that, though, is about what we identify with in the parable. And that's not where the story hits home. A parable is meant to get us to jump the tracks in our thought patterns – to see something we've never seen before, but nevertheless recognize as true. It's also meant to leave us asking questions, because those questions are what will make us different after we heard the story as compared to before. So it's not enough to respond to the parable with “beautiful story, moving, touching really” and then put it back on the shelf. What are you shocked by? What are you wondering about? Because those are the things that are going to make a difference. Maybe you're surprised that I said shocked. The story is so familiar it's hard to be shocked by it. But Jesus' original audience would have been mind-boggled by some of the details, in ways we're likely to miss. First there's the son's demand for his inheritance. This plays right into a network of cultural and religious assumptions about family life and property which Jesus's audience shared, but we don't. Even in our time, there would be something odd about asking for your share of the estate before your parents die – it would be a fast way to get yourself written out of the will, with all the emotional connotations that has. In the story, the younger son might as well have gone up to his father and said “I wish you were dead! Why aren't you dead?” He is the very definition of the rebellious child referred to in the law in Deuteronomy 21, and the consequences are spelled out there: “All the men of the town are to stone him to death.” Repudiating your father like that is such a shameful act that it brings shame on the whole community, and there is no going back – the community recovers its honour only by expunging the offender. The real shocker, though, is that the father meekly does what his son tells him to do. And then, when the son runs off, rather than washing his hands of him, the father acts like a lovesick maiden rather than a vengeful patriarch – hanging out on the porch, watching and waiting for the son to return, making an idiot of himself in the eyes of his neighbours. Of course it's a good thing he WAS watching when the son actually did come back, because if the townsfolk had spotted the miscreant first, that would be the end of the story. That's when the father does the most bizarre thing of all – completely up-ending the expectation of what to do with a rebellious child. Instead of a stoning, he arranges a celebration, the biggest party he could manage. Something in all of this is meant to shock us out of our complacency, about who we think God really is and how we think God operates. In the world the way God sees it, Jesus is saying, there really is “more joy over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who need no repentance.” That seems unfair. That's not right. But God wants to change our ideas about what is right. The single most important thing that could ever happen, Jesus is saying, more important than anything else we can ever do, is to come home. And that gives us a new way of looking at the whole story of the Bible from start to finish: because it turns out that the big story plays out a lot like this miniature version, with God letting his rebellious human children make their own choices, while longing for them to come back. If anything, God does even more than the father in the story, because God goes looking for the lost ones. In that sense, I might go so far as to say that it's in this parable that Jesus creates the heart of what we later came to know as Christianity. It's a new religion he's preaching, in the sense that it's a new way of understanding the world and the God who is at the heart of it. This religion is not about karma, or what goes around comes around, or doing good to receive a blessing and being cursed for doing evil. It's about being able to come home no matter what. This religion is not about moderation or balance or striking the middle path; it's about extravagance, about seeking out those who are least deserving and squandering your love on them. This religion is not about every action having an equal and opposite reaction. It's about one thing, one force, one great love coming out from the heart of God and working to draw the entire universe to itself. You can be attracted by that or repelled by it, and probably if you're honest, both at the same time. To me that's the question the character of the elder brother leaves us with. We don't know what the resolution of his story is. We can sympathize with him, in the sheer injustice of what's happened, but also in his desire to protect his father's dignity and to talk some sense back into him. But there's a deeper layer of the story, where the father is asking the older brother – and asking us – to sympathize with him. To share what is on his heart, to break through to the point where we can share the joy of heaven over one sinner who repents. The story asks us the same question the father asks the older brother. Are you going to walk out of the story, out of sight of that extravagant love? Or are you going to walk in, to join the feast. And I think Jesus gives us two reasons why he wants us to walk in. One is that we may feel like the older brother today, but yesterday or tomorrow we are the younger brother. One day you are going to need that extravagant grace yourself; one day I'm the one who is going to need to know that I can come home no matter what. The other reason isn't in the story so much as in what happens after. The story needs to keep being told, so that people can keep hearing the shocking and amazing depth of God's love, can keep being challenged and sought by it. That's what we are here for – to be the community of people who continue to tell Jesus' story. We're far from perfect in how we do that, but that's because the story is still working on us. We don't know yet, whether we are ready to walk into the feast or walk out of it. But as long as we keep asking ourselves the question, we will keep telling the story, and the grace of God will continue to work on both the rebellious and the righteous children. * |
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