Additional Text: 2 Corinthians 5:17-21
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)
(The Slave – Captured)
A 16-year-old boy was captured by slave traders and brought to another country to work in the fields taking care of the livestock belonging to his new owners. He himself wasn’t considered much more than livestock, just a slave to be overworked and mistreated.
Even though his dad was a deacon and his grandfather had been a priest, the boy knew very little about his Christian faith. When he was about 21, he escaped by traveling about 200 miles to get on a ship that took him back to his home country, where his family welcomed him back.
The boy, now a young man, began to study more about his Christian faith and took holy orders as a priest, and later became a bishop. This amazing conversion experience was just the beginning. I’ll tell you the rest of the story at the end of my sermon.
Today’s Gospel passage is often called the story of “The Prodigal Son.” But the word “prodigal” just means “wastefully, or recklessly extravagant.” We don’t have to do all the things the younger son in this story did to be wasteful. But we often try anyway. The passage, however, is not about being wasteful; it’s about repentance and forgiveness, so I think we’d be better off thinking of the passage as the story of “The Forgiving Father.”
When we hear this passage, we usually picture ourselves as the son who transgressed our loving Father through our sinful lives. Whatever our own particular sins may be, we relate to, we long for, we even expect, a loving God who’ll throw his arms out wide and come running to greet us. Our awesome loving God would do no less, and Jesus confirms it for us in the parable.
But as Americans living more than 20 centuries after Luke wrote this Gospel, we overlook a few things that would have been readily apparent to the average listener in 1st-century Israel.
Life was different then, although much of that culture still remains in the Middle East today. The behavior that Jesus mentions would have been shocking — if not downright unbelievable — to his listeners. Not the son’s behavior so much — rude children have been the bane of every parent’s existence since time began. Rather, it’s the father’s behavior that would have shocked them right out of their sandals.
For a son to ask for his inheritance from his father who is still alive is the same as saying “You’re worthless to me as a father! If you were dead I’d at least get some money out of this relationship! Why don’t you just pretend you’re dead and give me my money now? That way I don’t have to pretend to mourn at your funeral.”
Not the kind of sentiment we’re likely to see on any Hallmark Father’s Day cards anytime soon.
Dishonoring the family is a serious thing. In many cultures — including the one Jesus was addressing — disrespect at that level was punishable by death at the hands of the father. Leviticus 20:9 states: “If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head.”
Some of you may have wished — even if just for a brief moment when your own children were teenagers — that a similar law was in effect here. Regardless of whether we agree with the Mosaic penalty or not, this was the law of the culture at the time Jesus told this parable.
By verse 15, Jesus’ Jewish listeners were no doubt ready for the story to end. In fact, there’s a 2nd-century Jewish story that ends similarly: the son gets what he deserves — he is reduced to the low, horrible level of feeding the most unclean animals in Jewish culture. At this point the son is cut off from the Jewish community and from any financial charity it would have otherwise offered him.
In that culture, fathers are revered and adult men of any social standing walk with regal stature – they don’t run. Children and servants may run, but not an adult male, and not a father who has children to run for him. Thus, a returning son would be brought to the father, not the other way around. And in no instance would a grown Middle Eastern man take off running with his arms out to greet someone — especially a son who had shamed him and his family as disgracefully and publicly as this one had.
In order to run, the father would have to lift his garment up above his knees. Picture a grown man trying to do that while reaching out with his arms at the same time. Few things look less dignified than that. Yet that’s what the father in this parable did.
When he reached his son, he grabbed him in a big bear hug and called for the best robe, a ring, and sandals for his returned son.
The best robe in the house would have belonged to the father himself, and the ring would have been the family signet ring — a symbol of the young man’s reinstatement to sonship in a wealthy household, even after spending a third of what the father had spent his entire life earning. Slaves did not wear sandals; they went barefoot. So the father is saying that he will take him back, not as a servant, but only as a son.
Yes, this is the type of father we want God to be. Someone who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, and will come running to welcome us home. And the lost son reminds us of ourselves so much. Verse 17 reminds us that it wasn’t the badness of his life that made the young man realize his error; it was the goodness of his father.
A young man named Robert Robinson had been saved from a very sinful life in the mid 1700s through George Whitfield’s ministry in England. Soon afterward, the 23-year-old Robinson wrote the hymn, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” You may recognize some of the lyrics:
Come thou font of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing thy grace
Streams of mercy never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise
But sadly, Robinson later drifted away from those streams he had written about and, like the Prodigal Son, journeyed into the far country of decadence. Then one day he was riding in a stagecoach, sitting next to a young woman who was deeply engrossed in her book. She ran across a verse she thought was beautiful and asked Robinson what he thought of it.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love.
Bursting into tears, Robinson said, “Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then.”
Although greatly surprised, she reassured him that the “streams of mercy” mentioned in his song still flowed. Robinson was deeply touched. Turning his “wandering heart” back to the Lord, he was restored to full fellowship.
— (Kenneth W. Osbeck, 101 Hymn Stories, p. 52)
There’s another son, however. The one we ignore. The one we think of as trying to prevent the father from welcoming us back. Jesus doesn’t say whether that son comes back in to the party or not.
And this had to be a huge party. A calf would be enough to feed the entire village!
The father explains that the celebration is for all of them to partake in – as the lost son was also a lost brother. Remember that the brother refers to him as “this son of yours,” and not “this brother of mine.”
Does that stubborn brother see the father’s point and join them inside, or does he keep his miserable attitude and stay outside? We presume that the father went back in, but we can’t be sure about that brother. His own pride and stubbornness have pushed him from the father’s banquet.
That brother symbolized the Pharisees whom Jesus implied had pushed themselves out of Heaven and away from God. They believed that only certain people were worthy of God’s love. The others were barred from the temple. The prostitutes, tax collectors, and so-called scum of the earth who Jesus ministered to were not even allowed to enter the temple. The Pharisees considered them unworthy and a waste of time and resources.
But Jesus saw them as children of God. Remember, God has no grandchildren. All his children are precious and those who stray but come back to him are greeted by him with joy.
Most of us, however, would probably be shocked to discover that the Father sees us as the older brother, instead of as the lost son. And most of us are living up to that role. Think about it. If you’re here in this room, there’s a good chance you’ve already come back to the Father through Jesus. You’ve repented for your sins and accepted Christ’s sacrificial death to bring you eternal life.
How many of us would be thrilled to learn that Osama bin Laden prayed for forgiveness and received it, and will go to heaven when he dies? Or that Saddam Hussein accepted Christ’s forgiveness just before he was hanged?
How would we feel if we got to Heaven and discovered Hitler living comfortably there in full glory? If those ideas make us feel a little uncomfortable, we’ve got more of the older brother in us than we’d like to admit.
We set the bar low for our own salvation, just not so low that other sinners can get over it also. For example, I’ve asked professing Christians about helping with the Kairos prison ministry, and only one person out of the two parishes I’ve asked even gave it a try. I’ve received the reply, “I’ll do a lot of things for Jesus, but not for them.” And they hand the application back to me without even reading it.
Others have told me “those people aren’t worth saving.” We have similar difficulties with getting volunteers to help the homeless, although people tend to have a little more compassion and pity in their tone when they decline to help.
For some reason, after God lovingly welcomes us back into his kingdom, we tend to believe that makes us his chosen protectors of the realm — to enforce the heavenly dress code as it were, to keep the riff-raff from cluttering up the lobby.
We act as though only certain types of people, with certain types of sin, are worthy of God’s forgiveness.
We each view the minimum level for receiving God’s grace a little differently, but generally it goes something like this: We set Mother Teresa at one end of the scale and put Hitler at the other; then we put ourselves somewhere between those two and calibrate our “salvationometer” to allow God to forgive people at our level or above. We view others through that mental filter, and use it to justify our disdain for them.
In our minds, everyone who falls below a certain pre-determined level on our salvationometers, doesn’t deserve God’s grace. What we fail to realize is that none of us deserve it. If we deserved it, it wouldn’t be grace.
Jesus died for all of us, every one of us, so that we wouldn’t have to. Anyone who accepts that gift from God is saved. As Paul mentions in our New Testament reading today, everyone who is in Christ is a new creation. Whatever they were before has been changed.
Whether we approve of them or not, in Jesus’ eyes, each of us is worth dying for. So how can we think of someone else as being worthless? If we saw the Christ in each of us, we’d treat each other differently.
A young lady named Sally had an experience in a seminary class, given by her professor who was known for his elaborate object lessons. One particular day, Sally walked into the class and saw a big target on the wall. On a table nearby was a bunch of darts. The professor told the students to draw a picture of someone that they disliked, or someone who had made them angry, and he would allow them to throw darts at the person’s picture.
Sally’s friend drew a picture of someone who had stolen her boyfriend. Another friend drew a picture of his little brother. Sally drew a picture of a former friend, putting a lot of detail into her drawing, even drawing pimples on the face. Sally was pleased with the overall effect she had achieved.
The class lined up and began throwing darts. Some of the students threw their darts with such force that their targets were ripping apart. Sally looked forward to her turn, and was disappointed when the professor, because of time limits, asked the students to return to their seats.
As Sally sat thinking about how angry she was because she didn’t have a chance to throw any darts at her target. The professor began removing the target from the wall.
Underneath the target was a picture of Jesus. A hush fell over the room as each student viewed the mangled picture of Jesus; holes and jagged marks covered His face and His eyes were pierced.
The professor said only these words...
And the King will tell them, ‘I assure you, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’
— Matthew 25:40
No other words were necessary; the tear-filled eyes of the students focused only on the picture of Christ.
So how do we feel about “the least of these”? Do we welcome sinners into the body of Christ, or do we storm out of God’s kingdom in a huff because we think he’s offering salvation to the wrong kinds of sinners?
As difficult as it is to realize that we are all both the yo0unger son and the older brother, we have a third calling: to be the father.
Henri Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest who was deeply intrigued by Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” So much so that he wrote a book about the spiritual implications of that parable, based on the perspective he gained from looking at that painting for days during a visit to St. Petersburg in Russia.
He writes, “As the returned child of God, living in the Father’s house, God’s joy is mine to claim. … But there is more. A child does not remain a child. … A child becomes an adult. … When the prodigal son returns home, he returns not to remain a child, but to claim his sonship and become a father himself.”
Jesus himself, when asked by his disciples how they should pray, included the command that we ask the father to forgive us just as we forgive others. When we can honestly wish someone well who has hurt us, we are maturing and growing through the level of the older brother and becoming like the father.
As Nouwen writes, “Rembrandt portrays the father as the man who has transcended the ways of his children. His own loneliness and anger may have been there, but they have been transformed … This is who I have to become. I see it as clearly as I see the immense beauty of the father’s … compassion. Can I let the younger and the elder son grow in me to the maturity of the compassionate father?”
I realize there’s a lot a masculine imagery here, and it may be difficult for women to relate to the idea of becoming sons and fathers. But if men have to accept the idea of being the “Bride of Christ,” I’m hoping women can accept the idea of being fathers and sons for the purpose of this parable.
It is interesting that the father describes his lost son’s condition as having been lost but now found, dead but now alive. Those are the spiritual conditions of every sinner who comes to the Father through faith in Jesus Christ (John 5:24; Eph. 2:1–10).
In our Gospel passage today, the prodigal son was lost (verse 24), but Jesus says in the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, verse 6, “I am the way”; the prodigal son was ignorant (verse 17), but Jesus says, “I am the truth”; and in verse 24 the son was dead, but Jesus says, “I am the life.”
There’s a parallel between the prodigal son coming to the father and our coming to the father through Christ. There is only one way to come to the Father, and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.
Which brings us back to our escaped teenaged slave who managed to return home. His decision to try to escape was a result of a vision he had from God the night before he left, telling him that his ship had arrived. So he traveled the 200-mile distance, and found that indeed a ship was there that was going back to his home country of Britain, leaving Ireland shortly after he reached the pier.
About 30 years later, Patrick, now a bishop, received another vision from God, calling him to return to Ireland — the place where he’d been sold into slavery and suffered as a boy at the hands of his Druid masters.
He was now expected not only to forgive them, but to actively work to bring them into the same banquet the Father had welcomed Patrick into earlier.
The Druids had control over most of Ireland, threatening local villages with curses, or “bad spells” against their crops, health, or fertility if the virgins and other offerings from the people weren’t considered good enough by the Druid leaders pillaging from village to village.
As Patrick brought the good news of Jesus Christ and salvation to the local kings of their tribes in each village, they saw that the bad spells of the Druids were no match to the good news, or “good spells” of Jesus.
They welcomed these “good spells,” or “Godspells” as they were called in Middle English. Or “Gospels” as we call them today.
The saving power of Christ’s death on the cross and his resurrection was well understood by Saint Patrick, whose own death is commemorated every March 17th as a feast day. He himself had been lost, and returned to his Heavenly father.
He chose to accept the father’s decision to welcome his captors into the kingdom with him, and he brought the father’s forgiveness to the Irish people and even the Druid leaders as Bishop of Ireland. He established more than 300 churches in Ireland, and led more than 100,000 to Christ. His ministry included many miracles, but one claim seems to need some clarification. Saint Patrick is credited with chasing the snakes out of Ireland.
As an island nation at the edge of the Arctic Circle, Ireland never had a history of snakes. The claim that Patrick chased all the snakes from Ireland is more likely to be spiritual than physical. It’s no great feat to chase away things that aren’t around, and that’s hardly the sort of thing legends are based upon. It’s like me claiming to have chased all the alligators out of National City.
However, the snake was an image and symbol used by the Druids and it also represents Satan. Patrick’s evangelical action spread Christianity throughout Ireland, replacing the Druid stranglehold on the country, chasing away all their power and symbols. Those snakes are the most venomous anyway, and the most difficult to eliminate.
If we truly accept Christ’s message to us in today’s parable, we’ll understand that it’s not all about us. It’s about the glory of God and his kingdom, and our obligation, if we truly repent, to grow in his love so we can help bring his kingdom to others — even to those we don’t think deserve it. That’s what makes it grace.
God bless you.
