The Younger Son Returns
The Return of the Prodigal, prt. 3
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
February 27, 2011
First I want to say Happy Anniversary to my lovely wife Christy. She believed in Wildwind Church, and dreamed of Wildwind Church, and saw me as the pastor of Wildwind Church, many, many years before I was able to believe in myself enough to step up and do it. She motivates me when I’m stuck, inspires me when I feel lifeless, and stays close enough to me that I get to feed continually off of her energy and enthusiasm. She has been instrumental in turning our three sweet little girls into brilliant, compassionate, and confident young women. She has stuck by me through my problems with MS, worked me through college and grad school, and stood behind me through a huge change when I decided to stop being a record store clerk and became a pastor. She put her own aspirations on hold to stay home with our children, and then still completed her bachelor’s degree and became a teacher after Anna went to school, and then got through graduate school too. As most of you know, she’s a gifted singer, but she also has wicked good decorating sense, is a great cook, is the manager and organizer behind our family, and is an amazing seamstress. Best of all, she loves the kids and me, and loves God, and she is constantly growing in grace, in mercy, and in faith.
You all know her because she’s always up front, but I don’t often take the opportunity to publicly thank her for all that she is and all that she means to me. Happy 23rd anniversary sweetie. Thanks for being my girl since we were 17 and here’s to many, many more years.
We’re looking in this series at the prodigal son and last week I talked to you about his return. This week I’m going to talk to you about – his return. After all, the series is called The Return of the Prodigal. The story matters not because he leaves, but because he comes back. I wrapped up last week saying that the moment that young man decided that he would be better off at home in his Father’s house, he returned. That’s where conversion happened. That was a huge change of mind – a shift in his consciousness which up until that moment had been directed against his Father.
But it’s important to be realistic here. He did not have faith in the Father’s love. He did not say, “My father waits at home, hurting every moment over my departure. He’ll be so happy to see me.” In fact he says just the opposite.
Luke 15:17-19 (NIV)
17 "When he came to his senses, he said, ’How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!
18 I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.
19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.’
All he wants is some food and a roof over his head. We don’t have any indication in this text that his motive is anything other than self-preservation. Clearly this boy goes home because he has nowhere else to go. Sounds downright Biblical to me –
John 6:67-68 (NIV)
67 "You do not want to leave too, do you?" Jesus asked the Twelve.
68 Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
We’re so stuck on intentions in our culture. We say, “I don’t want to open up my life to God until I know I’m doing it for the right reasons.” And then we feel all ethical and upstanding having made that statement. But this statement is actually foolish. What if this young man had said it? “Well, I know I could go home, but it would only be to get some food and shelter and those aren’t very good reasons – it’s not like I want a relationship with my dad again. I’d better stay here.” Of course if he’d said that, he’d have been dead. Everyone needs food and shelter, and to not get it wherever you can find it is very foolish at best. So also, if it’s true that everyone needs God, then to not get yourself to God is very foolish at best . This thing about wanting to go to God for “the right reasons” is just a smokescreen. It keeps us from having to deal openly with the depth of our need, and from having to feel the sting of repentance. After all, how totally humbling to go to God simply because you know you’re just in it for you! You’d feel much better waiting to go to God until you have a better reason than that. But ultimately we need God for one reason and that’s because we are insufficient unto ourselves and we have made a mess of our lives in various ways, and we need help. It starts right there, with our need for self-preservation. You know why Jonah went to Ninevah? Because he didn’t want to live in a fish any longer. You see in the story it’s not like he cared about those people at all! Self-preservation. That was Jonah’s motive. That was the prodigal son’s motive. The lesson we learn here is to stop worrying about your reasons for going to God, and just go! Go by all means. Go for whatever reason, whether it seems pure or selfish. Part of being away from God is that we cannot clearly see, so our assessment of our own motives is likely not accurate in the first place.
So he comes up with his speech.
Luke 15:18-19 (NIV)
18 I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.
19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.’
He low-balls it. Ever think about that? Jesus could have told the story so that the son could have come home and said, “Father, I have been such an idiot. I should have never left. I love you, and I missed you so much. Please forgive me and there’s nothing I’d love more than to eat at your table again as your son.” Then the Father could have said, “Okay, sounds good,” the end. But Jesus doesn’t tell it that way. Jesus tells it the way he knows most of us tend to approach God – not with faith in his lavish love and goodness, but out of desperation and a willingness to just scrape by. If God will let us in the back door and feed us some Alpo here and there, we’ll take it. We don’t really believe God loves us, we just hope he won’t send us to hell.
This is where we pin on God all of our neuroses in relationships. Here you can see the prodigal son’s sense of justice. “Clearly I deserve to be treated like a servant.” “Clearly I cannot even ask my father to restore me as a son.” “Clearly I’ll be lucky to get a place in the barn to sleep.” “After the stupid stunt I’ve pulled, this is the best I can ask for.” It would actually humiliate the son to ask for more than that, wouldn’t it? Think about it. He’s already humiliated going back at all. So he can minimize his humiliation by asking for as little as possible. Don’t for one moment, my friends, believe this young man’s bare-bones request has anything to do with consideration for his father. This request is about preserving as much of the young man’s dignity as possible. After all, nothing is more humiliating than doing something incredibly selfish and stupid and having someone treat you with grace and kindness. You WANT them to be mad. You WANT to get exactly what you deserve, otherwise you feel in their debt.
That’s human illness right there, my friends. That is our total lack of familiarity with grace, our total unreadiness to receive it, our total distrust in it because if I let you show me any grace, then I owe you. Notice none of this has anything at all to do with the Father. As the son comes up with his speech, we see not his humility, but his lack of humility. We see not the Father’s harshness with the son, but the tit-for-tat world the son lives in. We see not the Father’s unwillingness to dispense grace, but how far it is from the son’s mind to even ask for it. This whole section is about the son and his neurosis about being fully loved, fully accepted, fully forgiven.
Nearly all of us are dealing with that too. Nearly all of us find it immensely hard to trust that our Father loves, accepts, and forgives us fully. Jesus said:
John 15:15 (NIV)
15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends...
But we think, “If God’ll just treat me like a servant – just open the door enough to squeeze me in, that would be great.” It is not God’s unwillingness to love us that keeps some of us far from him, it is our unwillingness, or sometimes inability, to accept love. Henri Nouwen writes, “Just like the prodigal, we still live as though the Father to whom we return demands an explanation. We still think about God’s love as conditional and about home as a place we are not yet fully sure of.” We’ve got our speech all prepared for the Father, ready to accept the bare minimum from him. Again, Nouwen writes, I know this state of mind and heart quite well. It is like saying: “Well, I couldn’t make it on my own, I have to acknowledge that God is the only resource left to me. I will go to God and ask for forgiveness in the hope that I will receive minimal punishment and be allowed to survive on the condition of hard labor.” God remains a harsh, judgmental God. It is this God who makes me feel guilty and worried and calls up in me all these self-serving apologies. Submission to this God does not create true inner freedom, but breeds only bitterness and resentment.”
We are so convinced of our filth and darkness that we seem to want to convince God of it. Recently I had a student in one of my classes who was so let down by her own performance on an assignment that she almost seemed to be trying to convince me that it was terrible, before I had even read it. When I did read it and found it quite good, she would not allow me to encourage her and was, frankly, inconsolable. And this is someone who actually performed reasonably well! We do this with God. It is not God who is bound by these harsh and judgmental standards, it is us who come with our standards of rightness and fairness and what does and does not measure up. Those are the standards we are constantly measuring not only ourselves but others and God by as well. We project those harsh standards onto God and then resent God for it, and say God is making us feel guilty when it comes from us the whole time.
That is our way of still living not as a beloved son or daughter, but as a hired servant. We might complain about being a servant, but as a servant, I can still keep my distance, still revolt, reject, strike, run away, or complain about my pay. As the beloved son, I have to claim my full dignity, see myself for who I really am, and prepare myself to become the Father.
This son thinks he’s on a journey to become a servant, but he’s actually on a journey to become a son again. He has far more to live up to.
Luke 12:48 (NLT)
48 ... When someone has been given much, much will be required in return....
This is what we fear, and so we set the bar low and simply ask to be servants. We ask God to forgive us enough to keep us out of hell, but not enough to promote us to children and friends. But indeed what God asks of us is not that we become servants but that we become children.
John 3:3 (NLT)
3 Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
Nouwen notes that Jesus does not ask me to remain a child but to become one. Becoming a child is living toward a second innocence: not the innocence of the newborn infant, but the innocence that is reached through conscious choices.
Nouwen relates the story of how he was showing the painting to a group of his friends
and one of them said “This is the head of a baby who just came out of his mother’s womb.” She said, “Look, it is still wet, and the face is still fetus-like.” Nouwen goes on to say that it’s impossible to know whether this was Rembrandt’s intention with the painting, but points out that he never again was able to look at the painting without seeing the face of a child.
Childhood is what we are called to return to. Childhood is part of our home-going. Not childhood born of naiveté, but childhood born of having made some very bad choices and now knowing from personal experience that it was better with the Father all along. It is childhood born not of ignorance about life, but born rather from hard-won knowledge about it, and all the suffering that comes with that.
Here is the mystery. Jesus became the prodigal son for us, not out of rebellion but out of obedience.
Colossians 1:19-20 (NIV)
19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things...
So here is Jesus, leaving the house of his Father, coming to a foreign country, giving away all he had, and returning through a cross to his father’s home. Jesus told this story of the prodigal son, having lived the long and painful journey he describes.
And so we come full circle. Though seeing Jesus himself as the prodigal son goes beyond the way the parable is traditionally interpreted, it is helpful to understand it that way. Because as it was for Jesus, so it will be for you. In Nouwen’s words, there is no journey to God outside of the journey that Jesus made. Here is Jesus, walking that road and calling you to walk it with him. So we can see this young man not simply as one repentant sinner, but as Christ himself, bringing all of humanity back to God – the return to innocence.
Of course the younger son is not the only one in the painting, or in the parable. Next week we will turn our attention to the elder son and my guess is that some of you will find yourself relating much more to the elder son than to the younger one. Would you pray with me?
1 John 3:1-3 (MSG)
1 What marvelous love the Father has extended to us! Just look at it—we’re called children of God! That’s who we really are. But that’s also why the world doesn’t recognize us or take us seriously, because it has no idea who he is or what he’s up to.
2 But friends, that’s exactly who we are: children of God. And that’s only the beginning. Who knows how we’ll end up! What we know is that when Christ is openly revealed, we’ll see him—and in seeing him, become like him.
3 All of us who look forward to his Coming stay ready, with the glistening purity of Jesus’ life as a model for our own.
