Sermon: “We Had to Celebrate!”

Text: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

4^th Sunday in Lent (C)

March 14, 2010

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is one of Jesus’ parables, which is found in the 15^th chapter of Luke’s Gospel.  Found only in Luke, this is the longest and most elaborate of Jesus’ parables.  Sometimes we call it the parable of the “Prodigal Son,” but that title is misleading; for the parable is more about the father and his interactions with his two sons.  We might rather call it the parable of the “Man with Two Sons.”  Many of you will recognize that this is the same parable we have been studying on Thursday nights during our Lenten series.  We have been considering the parable from the point of view of the different characters.

As Luke records it, this is the third of three parables with which Jesus answered an implied accusation of the Pharisees and scribes.  As the first three verses of chapter 15 tell us, these self-righteous persons “grumbled” when Jesus welcomed the tax collectors and sinners who came near to listen to him.  All three parables illustrate how, despite the ways we become “lost” by turning from God, nevertheless God continues to love us and work to recover us and to rejoice greatly when we do repent and return to God.  The first parable is of the shepherd who, realizing that one of his flock of sheep has strayed, seeks diligently for the lost sheep until it is found—and then rejoices with his friends and neighbors.  The second is about woman who has lost a silver coin.  She searches for it diligently until it is found—and then she rejoices with her friends and neighbors.

These first two parables, which illustrate God’s eagerness to welcome us back when we are lost, guide us in interpreting the third.  Thus, the main character is the father, who lovingly receives his lost son back home.  So far, this parable is congruent with the first two; but now Jesus adds a wrinkle.  There is another son.  How will he react to these events, and how will the father respond to him?

Sermon.  “Dad, I’m tired of living in this boring house.  I’m sick of the chores you make me do.  This is the dullest town on the face of the earth, and I just have to get away and see the world.  Give me now my share of your savings and investments that will be coming to me when you die so that I can leave you and this house and enjoy the life that I really want.”  Wow!  Could anything be more off-putting or disrespectful of a loving father?  As bad as this might sound to us—and it does sound terrible—the effect on a first-century Jewish audience would have been even more profound.

You see, for a Jewish family the land that they owned and farmed was a sacred trust—passed down from generation to generation.  Because it was the family’s share of the Promised Land that God had given them, its ownership was a responsibility that went way beyond family economics clear into the realm of theology.  The family farm was the family’s very identity.  We can make some educated guesses about the legalities of what the younger son asked, and what the father granted.[1]  According to Deuteronomy 21:17, when a father died the first-born son was entitled to inherit double that of any of the other sons.  With two sons, then, the older son would inherit 2/3 of the estate and the younger son 1/3.  The practice of dividing the property before the father’s death was probably very unusual, but possible.  Dr. Kenneth Bailey has discussed this parable with modern Middle Easterners, and they report that in their culture what the son requested was tantamount to saying publically that he wished his father were dead.[2]  Even so, as verse 12 records, the father divided his property (in the Greek, literally, “his life”) “between them.”  The pronoun is not specific, but I gather that the father granted a 1/3 ownership to his younger son and a 2/3 ownership to his older son.  Because it concerned the family land, this transaction would have taken place at the gates of the town, where all the elders of the region congregated and decided matters of local interest.  The father’s humiliation and the son’s shame would have been absolutely public.

Even so, the transfer would not have given the sons a present right to possess the land and its profits—only to receive the land after their father’s death.  True, the interest they received could have been sold, but only to someone who was content to wait until the father’s death to take possession of the land.  Apparently, the younger son sold his share; and the older son kept his.  Of course, the younger son’s interest in the land would not command a very high price because the father remained on the property and continued to receive its harvests.  So the younger son probably sold his interest in the family’s land for a relatively small sum.  For a pittance, then, he jeopardized the family’s right to their ancestral lands.  In a sort of reverse disinheritance, the younger son had sold his connection to the family.  As far as he was concerned he had no father.  He had sold his own identity. 

And his new identity was a disaster.  Quickly he spent his inheritance and found himself alone and hungry in a faraway, that is, Gentile land.  It was bad enough for him to become an employee of a Gentile, but nothing could have been more degrading than to tend the pigs, which were unclean and disgusting to a Jew.  But then, as Jesus said, “He came to himself.”  That is, the young man remembered who he was.  He remembered that he had a father.  He was not an unattached person in a foreign land; he had a home, although he had left it.  As one commentator has observed, “Home never looks so good as when it is remembered from a far country.”[3]  Sitting in the pig-sty in a far country he began to think about his father and to plan what he would say to his father when he arrived.  “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”  And so he got up and went.

Let me pause here to observe that this younger son is not scheming any longer.  He knows that his plans have gone wrong.  Yes, he is driven to repentance by the consequences of his earlier decisions and his need for self-preservation, but it is repentance all the same.  He now acknowledges his father, but he will make no demands—only a request that he be taken on as a hired hand.[4] 

“[W]hile he was still far off,” Jesus says, “his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”  Can we imagine the father, still sitting in the gates of the town by the main road, listening to the discussions of the other elders, but mainly looking down the road toward the horizon where he had had the last view of his departing son?  Ant then at a great distance his father recognized him coming.  Probably only the father would have known him at this distance.[5]  Just as the town elders had earlier witnessed the father’s humiliation and the son’s shame, now just as publicly they see the father actually running—something that would have been very undignified, embarrassing, and shocking in that culture.[6]  In his elation the father has sacrificed his dignity, and there can be no mistaking the father’s welcome.  He immediately orders the servants to bring the best robe, and a ring, and sandals.  The son makes his confession.  But before he can finish his rehearsed speech, before he can ask to be a hired hand, his father already has welcomed him back as a member of the family.

I imagine the folks that must have crowded around Jesus when he told this parable.  Surely, those persons were a lot like us.  For some this parable was a reminder of how, just like the prodigal son in the parable, they had willfully left their heavenly Father; and now they were standing in the pig-sty of regret—friendships they had not honored, family members they had quarreled with, lies that still haunted their memories, relationship-destroying greed, and clawing envy.  Others in the crowd may not have been thinking of big failings, but rather the constant drip, drip, drip of little ways in which they had fallen short of their identity as members in God’s family.  These would have been mainly sins of omission—things they had not done, opportunities for service that they had not seized, moments of grace that they had let pass by unrecognized or unacknowledged.  Many would have considered God to be a great judge, toting up the plusses and minuses of our behavior, never satisfied with us and disappointed in our lack of perfection.  But the God that Jesus talked about was different.  This was a gracious God who cared personally about each sheep in the flock.  This God was like the woman who would not give up the search until the coin—the person—who had been lost was found.  This God never turned his back on us, but always waited patiently in the gate, gazing intently down the road, hoping—even expecting—that the wayward prodigal would eventually return.  When the sheep was found, the coin was discovered, and the son returned, there was great rejoicing in heaven, as God generously met repentance with abundant mercy and love that was deep and broad and high.[7]  No sin was too great, and no time was too late.  The God whom Jesus knew and preached was eager to welcome his children back into the family.  Whether we always believed in God or not, God always believed in us and patiently waited until we “came to ourselves” and our souls cried out, “Father!”

 Then what about the elder son?  We don’t know the end of the story—whether he finally relented—but his first reaction contrasts greatly with his father’s love and mercy.  In a very real sense, the older son is more lost and estranged from his family than was the younger son.  The younger son always addressed his father as “father.”  But the older son never uses that title, and he won’t call his brother, “brother.”  He magnified the sins of the younger son, adding details of his failings that we wonder how he knew.  He accused his father of being stingy, when all the evidence points to the contrary.  The elder son remains outside the house, symbolically refusing to be part of a family that can celebrate the return of its most foolish member.  Recall that just as the father desired reconciliation with his younger son, so also he left the party and came out of the house searching for his older son, who was himself now in danger of being lost. 

Why would Jesus spoil such a joyous parable with the wrinkle about the older brother?  Was it not a warning to the scribes and Pharisees—and a lesson for us—that because God is merciful and forgiving, we should be, too?  If God has forgiven someone, how could we presume to withhold our acceptance?  How could we fail to forgive others their debts as God has forgiven ours?  The road of discipleship is a balance of receiving forgiveness and forgiving others.  Sometimes we are the ones who are lost and then found.  Sometimes we work with God to seek and to find others.  Prodigals and elder sons, tax collectors and Pharisees, God loves us all and wants us to claim our identity as children in God’s household.  We have to celebrate!