The Gospel isn’t meant to be gulped down on Sunday morning, but gnawed on through the week so it really becomes a part of us. You’ve got to work at it, like a dog with a good bone! Here’s the Gospel for this coming Sunday — The Fourth Sunday in Lent — with food for thought about reconciliation. Gnaw away!
Fourth Sunday in Lent – Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Meanwhile, the tax collectors and the “sinners” were all gathering around Jesus to listen to his teaching, at which the Pharisees and the religious scholars murmured, “This person welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
Jesus then addressed this parable to them:
Then he said, “There was once a man who had two sons. The younger said to his mother, ‘Mother, I want right now what’s coming to me.’
“So the mother divided the property between them. It wasn’t long before the younger son packed his bags and left for a distant country. There, undisciplined and dissipated, he wasted everything he had. After he had gone through all his money, there was a bad famine all through that country and he began to hurt. He signed on with a citizen there who assigned him to his fields to slop the pigs. He was so hungry he would have eaten the corncobs in the pig slop, but no one would give him any.
“That brought him to his senses. He said, ‘All those farmhands working for my mother sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death. I’m going back to my mother. I’ll say to him, Mother, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son. Take me on as a hired hand.’ He got right up and went home to his mother.
“When he was still a long way off, his mother saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. The son started his speech: ‘Mother, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son ever again.’
“But the mother wasn’t listening. She was calling to the servants, ‘Quick. Bring a clean set of clothes and dress him. Put the family ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Then get a grain-fed heifer and roast it. We’re going to feast! We’re going to have a wonderful time! My son is here—given up for dead and now alive! Given up for lost and now found!’ And they began to have a wonderful time.
“All this time his older son was out in the field. When the day’s work was done he came in. As he approached the house, he heard the music and dancing. Calling over one of the houseboys, he asked what was going on. He told him, ‘Your brother came home. Your mother has ordered a feast—barbecued beef!—because she has him home safe and sound.’
“The older brother stalked off in an angry sulk and refused to join in. His mother came out and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. The son said, ‘Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!’
“His mother said, ‘Son, you don’t understand. You’re with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours—but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!’”
The Backstory – What’s Going On Here?
We are doing a few different things with the Gospel this week. First, we are using the version of the Gospel from The Message, a reworking of the Gospel that strives to capture the more conversational tone of the original Greek and put it into more contemporary conversational language.
Most notably we have changed the gender of the parent in the story of the Prodigal Son.
We are doing this recognizing that the parable was told intentionally with a male head of household because in a patriarchal society, the power and inheritance norms of this story only made sense with a father in the story. And … a core message of the Gospel is the dismantling of systems of oppression like patriarchy. So we are telling the story with a mother in the role of power so we can notice how it sounds in our ears and how it makes us think differently about other ways we traditionally assign power by gender today.
The parable of the prodigal son is part of a teaching section of Luke that includes a series of parables. Whom the story is told to is as important as the story that is being told … and in this case, this parable is the third of three being told by Jesus to the Pharisees and scribes.
The two parables preceding this are the parables of the lost sheep (15:4-7) and the lost coin (15:8-10). All three involve something that is lost and then found, followed by a celebration. There is increasing magnitude of loss as we move through the three. The lost sheep was one of 100 – no great tragedy. The lost coin was one of 10 – 10% of your wealth, but still not paralyzing. The prodigal son was not only one of two, but a son.
The constant in all these is God’s rejoicing over the return of what is lost.
Given that the Pharisees and scribes are grumbling about Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, it’s pretty clear that Jesus is contrasting God’s response to sinners (celebration) with the Pharisees (condemnation). But the parable of the prodigal son goes even further. The party is not the end of the story. The elder son, who – like the Pharisees and scribes – considers himself superior and the first heir to all his mother has, is full of anger and jealously and berates the mother’s celebration. The mother’s answer to the eldest son — which is Jesus’ final word to the scribes and Pharisees — is not one of returned condemnation but of compassion. Jesus resists the temptation to set the Pharisees and scribes as the evil enemy but instead affirms his love even for them … and invites them into the celebration.
A few things to chew on:
*The forgiveness in this parable is extreme. The younger son asking the mother for his inheritance is another way of saying “I wish you were dead.” Yet there was a love there that even the worst insult or injury couldn’t break. Often we think relationships are beyond repair … either because the injury has been so great or because it just seems too hard or too much work to reconcile and fix it. What relationships in your life need reconciliation right now? Does this parable speak to any of them?
*”This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them!” The Pharisees are scandalized by the people Jesus associates with. People who have *gasp* really screwed up in their lives. People who are even notorious for their unseemliness. The message here is that the community of Christ is supposed to be a place where we are honest about our sinfulness … because only when we are honest about it — when we “come to ourselves and then return to God” as the prodigal son did — can we receive the love of God and the embrace of the community. Is this how you feel about our church community? Is All Saints Church a place where you can be honest about where you have and are screwing up. Or is it a place where you feel you have to project an image that is different from who you really are? Why or why not? And what can you do to make it more of a place where people say of us … these people welcome everyone and eat with them!
Try This:
Jesus describes a moment in the younger son’s life “when he came to himself.” It was a moment when he was able to step back and look at himself with some perspective and see how far he had fallen. This week, take a few minutes at the beginning and the end of the day and try to put yourself in that place around one thought: “God delights in me and celebrates my life.” At the beginning of the day, ask yourself how you might live this day in a way that shows you believe that. At the end of the day, ask yourself how you lived in a way that shows you believe that. Then share with a friend in church on Sunday how that experience was for you.
What’s in it for me?
Ray: I have done everything I’ve been asked to do. I didn’t understand, but I’ve done it. I haven’t once asked what’s in it for me.
Shoeless Joe: What are you saying?
Ray: I’m saying, “What’s in it for me?”
As we move into baseball season, I’m brought back to one of my favorite old baseball movies – Field of Dreams, where an Iowa farmer, Ray Kinsella, finds reconciliation with his father through building a baseball field so his father’s hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, can come back and play again.
At the end of this movie that in many ways is a parable of the Prodigal Son parable itself — Ray (Kevin Costner) has had it. He has risked losing his farm and alienating his family and suffered the ridicule of just about everyone by plowing under his corn and building a baseball field. He has followed a strange voice to Boston to pick up an old writer … and now that writer – and not Ray – has been invited to go do something extraordinary.
And so Ray, who has been completely faithful, feels like he has been unappreciated. And he finds himself asking the most human of questions to Shoeless Joe Jackson, who appears to be calling the shots:
“What about me?”
As Americans (particularly Americans who enjoy privilege of race, gender and sexual orientation), we have an innate sense of justice that says that hard work should pay off. And even though we know plenty of cases where that isn’t true, there is still the small child inside us that wants to scream “But, it’s not fair!” when we see someone else who didn’t seem to work as hard … or didn’t work at all … getting the spoils.
It’s nothing new. It’s the cry of the elder son in Jesus’ parable. His slacker younger brother has blown the family savings, and he’s the one who gets the party. And so he cries:
“What about me?”
“It’s not fair!”
“What’s in it for me?”
The mother’s answer to the son is the same as Shoeless Joe’s answer to Ray.
“Is that why you did this Ray, for you?”
What Shoeless Joe reveals to Ray is that he never did this for himself. It was never about him. It was all an act of love for his father … in his case a father he had become estranged from. And that relationship … that relationship was the real gift, the only thing that matters.
The parable of the prodigal son is not only a reminder to us that no matter how far we stray that God is always ready to receive us back. It’s a reminder that the reward for our faithfulness isn’t wealth or fame … or even a great party. The reward for our faithfulness is a relationship with a God who loves us without end.
The reward for our faithfulness is a relationship with a God who says: “Child, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”
The reward for our faithfulness is a relationship with a God that God is always willing to invest in, and that we have to invest in as well.
If you build it … God will come … because God is already there.
Pray this throughout the week as you gnaw on this Gospel.
Gracious God, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be
the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread,
that Christ may live in us, and we in Christ; who lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
