Luke 15:11-32
Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them. “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ So he got up and went to his father. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate. “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’ “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’ “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”
I imagine this is a familiar story to many of us, so I want to spend a bit of time exploring it from the perspective of the older son, and then offer a poem which accompanies a painting as a way of entering the story from a different angle. First though, I have some questions about why the lectionary has given us this passage today. It wasn’t in the original lectionaries at all, except as an alternative text somewhere around Pentecost, and was only added when the Revised Common Lectionary was published in 1992. Mothering Sunday had already shifted towards Mother’s Day by then, so why choose an image of fatherhood for a day given to motherhood? Why not swap passages around so that today we could hear Jesus describe himself as a mother hen?
I am going to generously assume that the lectionary writers weren’t doubling down on the language of God as Father in order to prevent any attempt to speak of God as Mother, and suggest that we might approach this as one of the most beautiful and provocative images that scripture offers us of God as Parent. There are cultural reasons why it needed to be a father in the story Jesus told. It would have been the father as head of the household who held land and property, and therefore had the authority to give the younger son his inheritance early. And it would have been the father as head of the household who acted as host at any feasts, and therefore made the decision to welcome the younger son home with a party. Family dynamics have changed over the past two thousand years however, and now we might easily rewrite the story with a mother at its heart.
You might remember that last time I preached on this passage, we heard it alongside the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, which does in fact feature a mother. She sends her naughty child to his bedroom, and from there he runs away to the place where the wild things are and becomes their king, but eventually he longs to be where someone loves him best of all, so he returns to his room to find his supper waiting for him, and it is still hot. I wonder if it changes the story for you to imagine it with a mother in place of a father?
I said I wanted to explore the story from the perspective of the older son, so let’s get to him. He has watched his little brother take a chunk out of the value of the land he is still working on, bring scandal to his family by wasting his money on wild living and then working among animals their culture considered unclean, and then return home to be greeted not with disapproval but with a feast and the symbols of the head of the household. It’s no wonder that at the end of the story we find him outside of the party, not just sulking but angry.
Last week we heard the invitation given through the prophet Isaiah for the thirsty to come to the waters and drink, and for the wicked to return and find mercy, and I said that God isn't fair because God is generous and loving and compassionate, and that is more than fair. This story is absolutely that invitation in narrative form. The father’s behaviour is not fair by any reasonable definition. Fair would have been telling the younger son he could wait for his inheritance like everyone else was expected to do. Fair would have been giving both sons their inheritance to do with as they saw fit. Fair would have been telling the younger son that he had received what was his and he couldn’t expect any more. But the father doesn’t act fairly at any point. Instead he is generous enough to give what the younger son is not yet owed, he is loving enough to understand that his sons need different things from him, and he is compassionate enough to not only welcome the younger son home but also to seek the older son out.
That’s a detail that’s easily missed, but the father doesn’t trip over the son in the dark when he sneaks outside for some fresh air. He goes out and pleads with him, and my instinctive reading of that is that he goes out in order to plead with him. The father is the host of this party. A fatted calf would feed around one hundred people, so this isn’t just a family affair, and there is music and dancing, so it really is a big event. He would have been expected to stay at the party to entertain his guests, and so he risks causing further scandal and even offence by slipping out. Much is made of the father chancing his reputation by making what would have seemed a foolish decision to give the younger brother his inheritance, and then throwing his dignity to the wind by running to welcome him home, but he defies expectation for the older brother too, because he loves him just as much.
So the father goes out to speak with the older brother, and I want us to pay attention to the dialogue here. The older brother speaks of the one who has returned as "this son of yours”. We can almost hear him spitting the words out, and it feels like there is a deliberate attempt to cut off their relationship. The younger son is the father’s business now, he wants nothing to do with him. But then the father responds by speaking of “this brother of yours". He reforges the connection between them, because ultimately this story is about reconciliation, and that needs to happen between the father and each son, but also between the two brothers.
We don’t know if that will happen. We are not told whether or not the older brother goes back into the party and embraces his younger brother, choosing to celebrate with the father that the one who was lost has been found. And we don’t know if the younger brother plays the part he needs to play in that reconciliation, recognising that he has sinned against his older brother too, and seeking forgiveness for the hurt he has caused. But perhaps that is significant, because this is the point at which the story is handed back to us, and we remember that it is a parable, a story which has something to say about us and God, a story we can step inside and be taught and transformed by.
When reflecting on this story, we are often invited to consider which of the brothers we are. Are we the younger brother, off making decisions which are hurting us and those around us, needing to come home and set things right? Or are we the older brother, so tightly bound to ideas of fairness that we cannot celebrate God’s grace, needing to get inside and join the party? Perhaps we are not either this morning, but I am sure that we all have days on which we are the younger brother and days on which we are the older brother. On those days it is good to remember that the father loves both of them, that God loves each and every one of us. It is also good to remember that the father wishes for his sons to be reconciled, that God wishes to restore our relationships with one another.
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
This short piece of scripture from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is a great companion to or commentary on the gospel passage we heard earlier, picking up on several of its themes, so I want us to spend a little bit of time with it. The passage begins “so then”, which suggests that it is very much connected to what has come before, so that is a good place to start. The verses just before say this: “If we are crazy, it’s for God’s sake. If we are rational, it’s for your sake. The love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: one died for the sake of all; therefore, all died. He died for the sake of all so that those who are alive should live not for themselves but for the one who died for them and was raised.” I think the idea of being crazy for God’s sake is really interesting in the light of the story of the lost son, where all of the father’s decisions would have seemed absurd to those around him.
It’s a common theme in Paul’s letters, the idea that the ways of Christ seem foolish to the world. I don’t think that means that being thought foolish by the world is evidence that we are getting things right, and being thought wise by the world automatically means we’ve been warped by culture, as seems to be the attitude in some corners of the church. What is good in the church is good in the world and what is good in the world is good in the church, and when we get things really right, everyone will see that what once appeared madness is actually the way things are meant to be, we just have to be willing to make ourselves look silly along the way. There is strong evidence that the early church had female leaders, which will have looked like madness to much of the world. At some point the church lost the courage of its convictions and women were excluded from ministry, so that centuries later it found itself having to catch up and relearn its own truth from the world. I wonder how different the history of the church and the world might have been if our ancestors in faith had been a little more willing to appear crazy for God’s sake and continue to affirm the ministry of women? I wonder in what way we must appear crazy in order to live for the one who died and was raised.
So that’s the setting for the passage, now on to the text itself. Paul says “from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view”. I find this interesting because the tension at the end of the story of the lost son is precisely because the older brother does regard his younger sibling from a worldly point of view. He sees that his brother has wasted his inheritance, and his worldly understanding of fairness says that he should deal with the consequences, not be welcomed back with signet rings and fatted calves. He is looking at what his brother has done, squandering his wealth, not at who he is, a beloved child. And as the guys at Pulpit Fiction reflect, he misses the point because really the banquet does not celebrate the younger son as much as the father’s grace. How often do we do the same thing, putting judgement before mercy? Like the older brother, if we are going to join the celebration, we need to switch out our worldly ideas of calculated fairness for a heavenly commitment to unlimited grace.
Back to Paul’s letter, and he declares that “the old has gone, the new is here”. I had always understood that on a very individual basis, and I do think there is something here which reflects the second chance offered to the prodigal son when he is welcomed back into the family home, although I would suggest that in truth we are renewed or refined not recreated. God doesn’t screw us up and start again from scratch, because there is already good stuff to work with. There has always been that of God in every one of us, as our Quaker friends would put it. But reading the passage again this week, I started to wonder if there is more to it than individual renewal. “The new creation has come.” That doesn’t sound purely personal to me. We are awaiting a new heaven and a new earth so perhaps this is about more than new people. Perhaps when we live in Christ we contribute to the making new of the whole of creation. I said earlier that a fatted calf would have fed around one hundred people, so we can suppose that the father invited wider family and friends. I wonder how that community might have been changed by this radical act of grace. When we are renewed we renew the world around us, so that the act of new creation keeps on going and grace keeps on flowing. Isn’t that wonderful?
The rest of the passage from 2 Corinthians is concerned with what Paul calls “the ministry of reconciliation”. His focus here is on being reconciled to God, but I don’t think that’s all he is concerned with. An important bit of context here is that he and the Corinthian congregation had a serious conflict that he was seeking resolve, so this letter is itself an outworking of this ministry of reconciliation. And just as we saw that the brothers being reconciled to their father also meant them being reconciled to one another, so us being reconciled to God has to mean us being reconciled to one another. As Desmond Tutu said in reflecting on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in post-apartheid South Africa, “For our nation to heal and become a more humane place, we had to embrace our enemies as well as our friends. The same is true the world over. True enduring peace—between countries, within a country, within a community, within a family— requires real reconciliation between former enemies and even between loved ones who have struggled with one another. How could anyone really think that true reconciliation could avoid a proper confrontation?” That final question reminds us that it is not easy and may not be entirely painless, but it is necessary.
I want to leave you with three questions which I think these passages raise. I’ll give a moment for the questions to settle, but really I want you to take them away with you into the week ahead and spend some time reflecting on them. Take them to God in prayer, take them to someone you trust in conversation, bring them back to me if there are more questions you need to ask.
- Is there a person or a situation you need to stop regarding from a worldly view?
- What new creation do you long to see in yourself or in the world?
- Do you need to be reconciled with God or someone else this week?
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