Part 2
November 21, 2010
Texts: Luke 15:1-2, 11-32
II Cor. 3:1-6
This is my second of three sermons on the strange God of the Bible. By strange I am referring to God as other. By other I mean other than our culture, other than our psychology, other than our politics, and other than our theology. What I am being cautious about is becoming overly familiar with God. As I said last week, every time I think I have God figured out, something presents itself that jars or even shatters my certainty.
In this sermon series I want to lay out, as best I can, how God in Jesus Christ gives us deep confidence toward the one God of the universe who is simultaneously both part of us and other than us. This is a paradox – God being part of us and other than us. This is what makes the Gospel difficult to grasp. That is why I requested this opportunity to preach for three straight Sundays to establish some building blocks for understanding this paradox which is at the heart of the Christian Gospel.
My text for these three sermons is II Cor. 3:4 “Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God.” I gravitate to the infinitive “toward” before God because that’s what we are urged by the Bible and Christian community to do – to think, to look, to love toward God. Maybe every now and then one of us or someone we know will have some special vision where God seems as close as breathing. That, I submit, is rare. I’m not denying that it happens, but I think it is really rare. For most of us, and this is my story, being spirit filled is receiving the freedom to think, look, love toward God and have that make sense. This is the source of Christian confidence, not the occasion peak experience but the daily thinking, looking, loving toward God and receiving what God is offering each day.
I call this “feet on the ground” Christian confidence. That is way participation in Christian community and thoughtful study of the Bible are so essential. Each reminds us that God is both within us and other than us. There’s that paradox again.
There is another critical paradox in doing Christian theology in its classic understanding. By inserting the word “classic” I am differentiating the Christian faith that I am talking about from conventional morality or to put it another way “common sense Christianity.” In common sense Christianity, there is no mystery. It is simply the application of universal principles. This is what Thomas Jefferson understood Jesus to be about. I am talking about something else.
This is because the Christian Gospel, as I understand it, moves primarily from outside to inside. It is public before it is private. Its power resides most powerfully in community from which it overflows onto individual persons. We in the western world have been sold a bill of goods that says it almost always works the other way – that is to say, the individual is the center of the universe and everything flows outward from the individual, even our understanding of God. The Bible calls that idolatry.
Last week I held up two main themes in the parable of the lost sheep: joy and repentance. The theme of joy comes out in the shepherd finding the lost sheep and then restoring it to the fold safe in the village. This is a strange kind of joy that the world doesn’t understand, but we in Christian Community get it. We as a community are called by Jesus to the front lines where he is at work. Everybody knows that the front lines can be a dangerous place. You can fall on your face and fail. You can get hurt. But who of us hearing a call and receiving a gift to move that call forward does not count it joy – what the parable frames as the joy of restoration or, I think, better put, the joy of new creation.
The same parable images repentance as being found – not as doing anything like getting up and walking but simply being found. Jesus was trying to lead his critics to think differently about the sinners pushing so hard to get close and hear what Jesus was saying. Jesus reached out to the despised and rejected and establishing community by inviting them to eat with him and to have conversation with him. It was in that experience of community with Jesus and one another that they were being found. It was from this experience of being received in community just as they were that the energy to follow Jesus started flowing. These rejected people were becoming new creations, as Paul describes it, through their reception into community with Jesus and his disciples. Through the ages the Christian church has learned this and forgotten this.
Let us turn now to the parable of the prodigal son also in Luke 15. Most of us have been raised to understand this as a story of forgiveness. The younger son messes up real bad. He takes his inheritance and goes far away to make a new start. He makes big mistakes and he fails. When he has run out of options he comes home and throws himself at the feet of his father asking for forgiveness and his father forgives him.
There’s nothing wrong with this interpretation of this parable, but there is much more in this parable than one-on-one forgiveness. If we read the parable through the eyes of Middle Eastern villagers in Jesus’ time and today, as Kenneth Bailey helps us do, we will see that this is really a communal story. It is far more than two individuals, father and prodigal son, or three individuals if you throw in the older brother.
The story is about reconciliation, not just between two people but of a family and a village. Forgiveness in the story happened before the son ever started home. Before repentance even entered his mind, the father had already forgiven his son and probably himself. Children seldom get screwed up by themselves. That usually involves parental help. All of us parents know that. Before the father forgave the son he had to forgive himself. Then he could act forgivingly toward his younger son and his older son.
But as I just said, this story is not primarily about forgiveness. It is about family and village or community reconciliation. It is about the creativity and the cost it took to bring about this reconciliation. Like the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the prodigal son lays a foundation for understanding what Paul meant in II Cor. 5:14-15 “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”
Paul is saying that Jesus took a public action in subjecting himself to the cross that creates a brand new situation – what Paul calls a new creation. We will get to that next week, but I want to suggest that this parable of the prodigal crafted from ordinary life prepares us to grapple with Paul. In the parable, the father takes a public action which turns that village and that family upside down. Stay with me as I trace this public action with the help of Kenneth Bailey.
Middle Eastern villagers in Jesus’ day lived in tight quarters. Some were better off than others. Some worked as servants to others. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. There were no isolated farmhouses. Everybody lived in the village and those who owned land went out every day with their servants to work the land and came home every evening.
The request of a son for his share of the family inheritance and the right to sell it before his father died was unheard of in that culture. That would be interpreted as wishing that his father were dead. Also the land provided a good living for the father, the older brother and the servants who worked for the family. It was a business and the son by his request was cutting the business in two. The family and their servants had that much less land on which to grow crops and earn a living.
Although we are not told this information every villager would read into the story that the older brother had the responsibility to talk sense into the head of his younger brother, get him to apologize to his father and withdraw the request. He did nothing. Apparently this was such a dysfunctional family that no one talked to anyone else. They just worked the land together and went about their private lives. The younger son wanted a more adventurous life – now. He did not want to wait compliantly until his father died to cut himself free.
The father for some strange reason or no reason went along with the outrageous request. His motivation is unimportant to the story Jesus was crafting. Jesus is not giving common sense advice about family life. He is crafting a story that leads to a particular climax.
The young man takes the title to his share of the property and goes around the area looking for a buyer. He is hot to get out of Dodge and potential buyers know a bargain when they see it. Most land deals in the Middle East take months to settle as they bargain back and forth for the best deal. This guy is ready to sell below market value in order to get his money fast and escape his family, village and a life he detests. Now everyone in the village is following the action, and by now this dude has no defenders.
So he gets his money and takes off for Gentile country. This is important to the story. The father and the village expect him to fail. The brother hopes he will fail. And he does so in short order. However he may have matured enough from the experience to make it on his own, but just as his money runs out, the region is hit by a severe famine. The young son goes to people of means who partied with him when he first got to town with lots of cash. He doesn’t ask for a handout. He asks for a job so that he can feed himself. The text says that he “glued himself” to a farmer of that country. He is desperate. The farmer has been through this before in other hard times and he knows how to get rid of such people without violating the rules of hospitality. He offers this Jew a job that would be so offensive to a cultural Jew that he will move on - taking care of pigs. The young man is so desperate he accepts the job anyway. In short order he is so hungry he even tries to eat the bitter carobs the pigs eat which have no human nourishment whatsoever.
He is now at the bottom. He is starving and the farmer and God and the world are letting him starve. He is really on his own. He is down but he is not broken. He still has a mind and an independent spirit. He conjures up a plan to go to his father, ask for forgiveness, take responsibility for his own support, and promise to pay his father back for the lost money by working for him as a hired man. That means his father will probably have to lay off one of the villagers but he thinks if he comes across sincere enough his father just might forgive him and give him a job. That way he could live independently in the village and have as little as possible to do with his older brother.
So he heads back to Dodge with this neat plan and apology carefully worked out. He knows he will meet an avalanche of criticism and maybe even rock throwing as he returns home, but he is so hungry he will do anything to get food and this is his last option.
What happens? Remember as I said last week, the climax, the main truth of Jesus’ parables is not at the end but in the middle of the story. His proud father expects his son to come home a failure. When he hears that his son is approaching the village his father leaves the house, hitches up his robe and runs to get to him before the news of his return spreads through the village. Can you imagine this scene of a proud older man hitching up his robe, exposing his unsightly naked legs and running down the road? This is the stuff of comedy. Prominent older men in that culture did not do that sort of thing. This father had obviously been thinking about what he would do for some time. He knew that given the depth of feeling in the community against that son, that if his son was to have any future in that village, he the father had to reconcile the son not only with himself but with the rest of the village.
So he takes a preemptive action. He takes off running down the road with his puzzled servants trailing obediently behind. The son, still rehearsing his apology, sees this strange scene of his aging father, servants and a growing crowd of villagers rushing toward him. He plans to throw himself at his father’s feet, confess his wrongdoing, ask for forgiveness and a job as a day laborer so that he can eat. Before he can do this his father grabs and hugs him. The son starts his speech, “Father I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But before he can get out another word his father cuts him off and takes over. He says to his servants, “Quickly bring out a robe – the best one – and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it. So shall we celebrate his return.”
Jesus’ audience would immediately pick up the powerful significance of every instruction. Don’t wait for him to bathe, put the best robe in the father’s closet on him. Put on his finger the ring signifying authority to seal legal documents. Put on him sandals signifying the status of a free man rather than a slave. Lastly, kill and cook the fatted calf. We are throwing a party for this community to celebrate. What could the servants carrying out these orders and the villagers witnessing this scene do but fall into line and celebrate alongside the father? This is the main point. What the father acts with this decisive preemptive action which restores the prodigal son to full status, no critic had a leg to stand on. The robe, the ring, the sandals, the fatted calf and the son belong to this father. He is free to act as he wishes. The village takes its clue from the father. They join in the celebration. The son, by letting go the rest of his speech - his careful strategy for survival while keeping his distance – and accepting this graceful act is born again. He goes through a conversion. Here we have it – public to private, individual risk taking leading to community transformation leading in enduring new creation.
But what about the older brother who despised the younger so much he had filled in all the blanks in his imagination about what the younger brother had done with the money - buying sex, drinking and gambling and living like a God denying Gentile. As the older brother approaches the family home in the village he hears the vibrant music and smells the food of the banquet being prepared. He asks one of the neighborhood kids what is going on. The kid tells him and the older brother is enraged. He refuses to join the party. He stays outside stewing in his violent anger. The text says that the father goes out to the older brother to reason with him and ask him to join the celebration. Note that the text says that the father goes out to both sons. He takes the initiative. In neither case does he wait for either son to come to him as would be expected in that culture. I am cutting short my discussion of the father with the older brother because the climax of the parable, as I said last week, is in the middle – in the scene where the father runs the gauntlet of village animosity and reaches the son before the angry villagers do, treats him as a beloved returning son and thereby transforms the situation.
In the older brother part of the story the father goes out to him as though he were a bleating sheep immobilized in his anger. He tells this son that he loves him and urges him to join the celebration with the rest of the community. The story picks up on the theme of the parable of the lost sheep. The older son is urged to turn toward the joy of the father and celebrate the transformation that has just occurred. The story ends unfinished with the older brother stuck in his bleating. Does he cool down and then join the celebration? Does he wake up years later and regret what he missed and then take steps toward his father and brother? The story ends without us knowing.
At the beginning of this sermon I promised that I was going to help you get clearer about the confidence that we can have in a faithful God, where this confidence comes from, and how we’re given it. Kenneth Bailey says that in this parable we have the beginning of a theology of the cross. Whoever the father in the story represents – whether it be God or Jesus or the Christian disciple – or all three – he runs the gauntlet of community hostility to save the younger son from himself and from community revenge. He does this not to appease anyone but out of joy that his son is back and at last accessible to radical love. To receive the love offered him the younger son has to throw away his life script, his regrets, his suffering and to receive the father’s embrace like a child starting over.
The parable ends with asking another man - and us - to die voluntarily - to our self created identity, to long years of hurt, to deep disappointment. Perhaps I have let you down in sticking so close to the text. Perhaps engaging with this story is tearing at your life script and it doesn’t feel good. I could respond by saying cavalierly “Welcome to the strange God of the Bible.” This is not what I mean to do. I don’t think that God is cavalier in requiring that we die in order to live. But we shall get to that next week as we work with II Corinthians chapter 5.
I am going to stop now and open the floor for your comments. Please keep them brief so as many as want to can come to the mike and share. Please work with the content of this parable and this message? What has been said that challenges your mind – and touches your heart?