11 Jesus said, “A certain man had two sons. 12 The younger son said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the inheritance.’ Then the father divided his estate between them. 13 Soon afterward, the younger son gathered everything together and took a trip to a land far away. There, he wasted his wealth through extravagant living. 14 “When he had used up his resources, a severe food shortage arose in that country and he began to be in need. 15 He hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. 16 He longed to eat his fill from what the pigs ate, but no one gave him anything.17 When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have more than enough food, but I’m starving to death! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I no longer deserve to be called your son. Take me on as one of your hired hands.” ’ (CEB)
“Loss, Mercy, and Redemption: The Luke
15 Parables,” Week Three
A couple of years ago, my childhood pastor, Holly McKissick, told
me the story of a war journalist who did a tour of work in Afghanistan during
our current war there, and how this journalist was staying with her husband in
the home of a native Afghani farmer. This farmer could see how tense, how
on edge this couple was to be doing their work in the middle of a years-old war
zone, so after dinner, he spoke to them and offered to have one of his sons
stand guard outside their room while they slept. This son could not have
been more than 12 or 13, but took to the job with such enthusiasm that the
couple felt they couldn’t refuse without causing offense. And so she
agreed to be “protected” by this underaged guard who, if the world were truly
just, would be spending his time with toys and books rather than with weapons
of war.
Late that night, this journalist hears a noise, she wakes up, and goes
to crack open the door, and she sees this little boy, leaned up against a giant
rifle, fast asleep. She turns back, returns to her room, and falls back
asleep. And in the morning, the boy
offers them breakfast and excitedly asks her something—she turns to her
translator, and the translator simply says, “He wants to know if you think he
was a good bodyguard.”
And
what goes unspoken in this story from our vantage point—as Westerners with
different expectations of law and order and of what it means to crash on your
buddy’s couch for the weekend—is that where there is not a reliable and
dependable local civil police force, you must rely on your own family to protect you. This boy was treating this foreign woman and
her husband like family. And it is
something that the boy who turns into the prodigal son can only dream of in a
similar far away land of ill fortune and unimaginable loneliness.
With
Lent as a new season in the church’s worship calendar, you may notice a few
things different—we hang purple, we draw the curtains on our baptistry’s
portrait of Jesus, and, naturally, we begin another sermon series. This sermon series takes us through the 40
days of Lent to Holy Week—the week of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good
Friday, and Easter Sunday that is the most important time in the Christian
calendar (yes, I dare say, more important than Christmas!). And Lent traditionally is meant to be a time
of reflection and repentance as we do some even more intensive-than-usual
soul-searching in preparation for what will eventually be the empty tomb. And so we’ll be using this year’s Lenten
season to walk verse-by-verse through the three parables that make up the
fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable
of the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal son. These stories all have a common theme of
being “lost and found,” so to speak, but there is a much larger dimension at
work here—Jesus is telling these parables to the scribes and Pharisees—as Luke
writes, “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to
Him. And the Pharisees and the scribes
were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with
them.”” And what Jesus is responding with,
in so many words is, “Yes, because it isn’t just about you!”
This
is one of the most famous, well-loved, well-known, well-everythinged parables
that Jesus ever tells, and yet you’ll only find it here, in Luke 15! It’s one of those things that I have no idea
why the other Gospel writers didn’t include, like John’s account of the raising
of Lazarus.
Because
the parable of the prodigal son does, I think, speak to the worst in each of
us, that which we are perhaps not willing to admit we ever possess, but which,
for some of us, we likely act on at one time or another—and that is, quite
simply, taking those whom we love for granted, to the point of no longer seeing
any need for them in our lives.
It
is what this son does by asking his father for his inheritance. In doing this, he is saying that his father
has no worth to him aside from his inheritance and that he would, in fact,
rather have the inheritance than have his father. He is, in a sentence, saying he’d prefer if his
father were dead.
And
here’s our first hint of grace—the father, instead of taking this for the
horrific insult that it is and throwing his son out, actually accedes to his
son’s wish, gives him his inheritance, and sends him on his way. You have to think it was one of the hardest
things this father has ever had to do.
Because
of this, we should not be so surprised when we are told that we should think of
this father as God Himself. But who we
should think of as the prodigal may surprise us a bit.
In
ancient Roman law—bear in mind that Israel is occupied by Rome during the time
of Jesus—there was a concept called the homo sacer. Literally, it translates in English to “the
sacred man,” but there really was nothing we would think of as very sacred
about it. The homo sacer is an outlaw, a
person set apart from their community who lives outside the protection of the
law—they can be killed, and their killer can never be charged with murder.
The
ancient Greek language has a term for this kind of a life—they called it “the
bare life,” and when you think about it, the name fits. Stripped of everything you might have once had, built up only to be
brought down to nothing, it is a life bare of any other preconceptions, any
other protections, any other sense of hope.
And that is the life of the prodigal son where we leave him.
Consider
this—we probably think this son could not return home because it was a
financial impossibility. But it was
almost as surely a societal impossibility as well. How could he expect to be welcomed back home
after insulting his father—the source of his livelihood and protection—the way
that he did at the outset of the story?
Even if the son had not squandered his inheritance, he still likely
would have never thought he could see home again.
And that’s the sort of vulnerability and
loneliness that Jesus is talking about to the Pharisees on behalf of the tax
collectors and the other sinners. These
are people who are living a bare life, stripped and devoid of any other means
of enjoyment precisely because they’re known as sinners. And—hold onto your hats here—I would venture
a guess to say that part of the reason Jesus is championing them so in this
chapter is because more than anybody else could, He gets it.
We
know that Jesus, as the divine Word, the Logos in John 1, is God made flesh,
God who became human and lived with us.
And Paul writes in Philippians 2—he cites a poem, in fact—that Jesus,
though being made of the same stuff as God, empties himself of this divine
substance and takes the form of a human, the form of a slave, even, Paul says,
so that His mission and ministry might be fulfilled. And Jesus fulfills this mission and ministry
without the protection of Roman law, either—indeed, the law instead acts to
execute Jesus in order to end that ministry.
What
if Jesus was the original “sacred man?”
What if Jesus was the original prodigal?
Would
that change how we treat the vulnerable people in our lives?
Return
to the little boy bodyguard and his story.
How did he treat the prodigal in his life, the sacred person who came to
his homeland where there was no such protection of the law?
Would
we be so willing to offer that to the prodigal, to the set apart people in our
lives today?
More
to the point, would we be so willing as to offer that to Jesus if He showed up
tomorrow? After all...as it is written
in Hebrews, there are those who, by welcoming complete strangers, have
unknowingly welcomed in angels.
Put
a different way, when Jesus says, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you
do to me,” this is what he’s talking about.
This prodigal son has become the least and the lost, and Jesus is
saying, even in all His righteousness and glory and divinity, “I still identify
with the prodigal.”
If
you have been following along in this series, you’ll know that I’m pretty big
on discerning which character represents whom in this trilogy of parables, and
on face, yes, the prodigal represents our real-life prodigals—the sinners and
the outcasts. But the prodigal also
represents Jesus. Consider this: Jesus,
in Paul’s words, takes the form of a slave, and He went to the ritually unclean—to
the sick and the leprous, to the women and the blind, even to the dead to raise
them. And the son is eventually hired
out to feed the ritually unclean: a herd of pigs!
And
both will eventually seek a way out from their lots in life by returning to
their father—the prodigal, as we know, is actually able to do so, but at
Gethsemane, when Jesus speaks to God and begs Him to take the cup of poison
away, Jesus instead surrenders to the machinations of the world that necessitate
His death by crucifixion.
But
look at how this part of the story ends—the prodigal does not think he can
return to his father as his father—he thinks he can only return to his father
as a prospective employee, so disgraced does he believe he has become.
How
many such prodigals do you know who ask if God could ever, ever love them? Have you ever felt that way yourself?
If
your answer to either question is “yes,” then God has good news for you.
You
will be welcomed home.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
March
3, 2013
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