March 13-14, 2010
First Presbyterian Church of Hollidaysburg
Who's Your Jesus?
Last week Chuck had to tackle a tough passage. It was a passage where we see Jesus not as a happy, laughing, pastor welcoming little children and asking us to love one another. Instead he tells those following him on the way to Jerusalem to repent and produce or perish. Ouch. Between that chapter and our verse today this is some of what we learn Jesus does.
He: heals a crippled woman on the Sabbath, tells people to go through “the narrow door” or they will be cast out from the Kingdom of God, insults Herod by calling him a fox, foreshadows his death in Jerusalem, challenges the Pharisees' wealth, social status, and understanding of the Law, heals again on the Sabbath, tells people at a dinner hosted by a Pharisee that the people initially invited into the Kingdom of God likely won't be there, then tells the people following him to bear the burden of a cross and sell all they have to follow him.
This is all part of a busy journey to Jerusalem that ends in crucifixion. It is a journey in which we participate in our observance of Lent. Luke's account of this journey is loaded with harsh language of judgment and accountability for those who would dare believe they have earned the privilege of entering into God's Kingdom. What we see repeatedly is a Jesus using vivid and critical language against those who hold political, religious, and economic power. The message: invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame into your fellowship, or else.
When I have heard our text today, I have more often than not heard it told with two lenses. The first is the grace of a father who would basically humiliate himself in front of everyone to welcome his pathetic young son back into the family. This younger son in effect tells his father that he would rather him die so that he can cash in his family inheritance in order to party it up. This son loses it all, becomes no better than a pig in slop, decides that he needs to find a way to pay it all back to atone for his behavior, and is surprisingly thrown a feast by a father who wanted one thing all along: to have his son there with him. So the second lens is through this Prodigal Son image.
This resonates with parents doesn't it? There is an awful lot of positive emotional appeal to a story that has such a happy ending. It's got conflict and resolution between a father and son. It's like Field of Dreams or even Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs where behind all of the magic and drama, the story is a simple feel-good narrative about fathers and sons reconciling their relationship with one another. We are tempted to stop there. And we often do.
But the story continues doesn't it… I want to spend the next few minutes looking at the relationship between the father and the older son. It's not as tidy of a story, and it doesn't end with a very good feeling. But unless we understand this part of the story, we miss why Jesus was telling this parable in the first place. This is a story consistent with the harsh, tense, and volatile moments that mount as Jesus wanders through the desert on his way to the Cross.
The first few verses today put this parable into context. Jesus is addressing the Pharisees and scribes, the top religious authorities. Jesus is responding to the Pharisees and scribes grumbling and complaining that he welcomes sinners to his table as equals. Among all the other things he has done up until this point to offend the sacred religious structure of his day. Jesus looks like a radical.
Jesus tells the Pharisees and scribes three stories about the joy one should have about finding something of precious value that was lost: a sheep, a coin, and a son. Each of these represent the joy that God shares when a lost sinner receives the Kingdom of God. Each show that God is not passively waiting for the lost, but actively seeking them out.
Then Jesus closes the sequence with a turn: the older son in our parable. When he hears about the joy of the town spurred by his father's act of mercy and grace on his little brother's return, he gets furious. He refuses to partake in the party. When his father hears about his oldest son's anger he went out to him to try to get him to come in and share in the joy.
The scene would have been that the children were all outside of the home having their own age-appropriate activities while all of the adults drank and sang inside the home. Many of us have had parties like this right? The kids are playing games downstairs while the adults act more or less like kids with the social lubricant of wine flowing. I hear a certain celebration of a Saint named Patrick is famous for events such as these…
So think about this. Your first-born pouts and rather than join in the celebration sulks on the front steps. When you go out to see what's going on, he or she gets irate with you and pitches a fit saying, “That kid of yours wasted your money and you toss a party for him? I've worked my butt off and it's not like you ever cared enough about ME to let me have a party with MY friends!” I would imagine that if your eldest went off at you like this in front of all the guests, it would feel a little disrespectful right?
In the era and culture of this parable this is beyond disrespectful. The older son also decides to take a few stabs at his little brother by saying that he “devoured his father's property with prostitutes.” What the older brother has in mind here is a passage from Deuteronomy 21:
If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.
Instead of doing the right thing by confronting his father in private after the party, the older son berates and disrespects his father in front of everyone and then proceeds to imply, very strongly, that his little brother should be stoned to death instead of this foolishness! In short, the older son is grumbling that the father would welcome such a sinner in such a lavish way when that sinner deserves death or at least to be shunned.
Moreover, did you catch how the older son addresses people here? He opens up to tell his father that he has been as a “slave” to him and does not address his brother as a brother but as “this son.” Something is seriously wrong in the way that the older brother envisions and understands his relationship with his family.
I have often heard people say that dysfunction in our families is “the new normal.” Clearly, this family takes the cake. No mother is mentioned. Both sons reject their father, and just when things seem to be getting better, they just get worse at the end.
Yet the father is consistent with a response of grace with both sons who each deserved to be cut off from not only the family inheritance, but from the town as well.
Jesus is showing us that the character of God is to welcome sinners and outcasts to the table as equals in the Kingdom of God. The response of joy in finding the lost that we see in this entire chapter of Luke is consistent.
But remember that the second part of this parable is coming in the context of all of the judgment we have heard from Jesus to this point. The piece about the older son does not end very tidy. We have no idea if the older son accepts his father's grace to join the party. This is an open question for Jesus' audience, the ones who were grumbling that he was messing with the Sabbath laws and welcoming sinners.
An important lesson here is that God cannot be contained in religious systems and God's favor cannot be earned by how well we think we are doing aligned with what we think the will of God is. Jesus challenges not those who are lost so that they may follow a religious system in order to gain God's favor. What he continually does on the road to Jerusalem is challenge the religious and political systems in power in order to align everything crooked in them with God's mercy and grace.
A question for us is if we grumble at the thought of welcoming sinners or those who do not look like and behave the way we do, or expect of others. What if I came to church today wearing jeans and a t-shirt? Who among us would grumble? What if we filled the pews with the homeless, unwed parents, drug addicts, and ex-convicts on parole? Would we grumble?
Lent is about following Jesus on this road and seeking the outcasts, the lonely, the sinners, the orphans, the addicts, the crippled, and whoever are the unclean among us. We are to do this not to admonish them, but to throw them a feast and rejoice. Jesus was serious enough about this message that it is what gets him killed on Good Friday. During this Lenten season, our challenge is, as it always is, to hear this Gospel and partake in the Kingdom of God even at the expense of our earthly inheritances and comforts. Is this the Jesus that we worship? If it is, where are the poor, the sinners, and the outcasts among us at this very moment, in this very house we have the audacity to call a house of God?
Amen.
