Scripture readings:
Ephesians 2:11-22; Luke 15:11-32
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| Walking near Lower Crab Creek, Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA January 2016 |
Some women were talking about different experiences
they had as mothers. One of them confessed that she had taken some classes in
child development in college and when she had gotten married she had three
favorite models of child-raising that she wanted to try. In the end, she said
that she had three children and no more theories.
The Pharisees were a strict sort of teachers and they
found fault with the kind of teacher Jesus was. They thought Jesus was
rewarding the wrong sort of behavior. It was as if they had a different theory
of child-raising than Jesus had. So Jesus told a story about a father who
raised two sons.
The story is called “The Parable of the Prodigal
Son”. “Prodigal” means wasteful and reckless. The younger son treated his
inheritance that way, but the bigger point is that he treated his father the
same way. If we thought about it, we would see that the story is really about
both sons and, even more, the story is about the father.
The story should be called “The Prodigal Father ”. In Jesus’ mind the story is about his own
prodigal father and about himself as the most famous prodigal son of them all.
In the story as Jesus told it. The neighbors in the
village would have considered the father the original prodigal. The father was
the one responsible for all the trouble.
When the younger son asked for his share of the
inheritance it was an insult within that ancient Middle Eastern culture. It
would be the same as if he said, “Father
I wish you were dead.”
Any father with any sense of decency would have
disowned that son on the spot. A decent father would have driven that son away.
He would have kicked that son out of the family.
The Father
had no sense of decency. He had no sense of honor. He had no sense of the
importance of the family’s dignity. Clearly that crazy old man was waiting,
every day, for his prodigal son to return. The father must have sat outside his
front door for years. That’s why he was ready for him. He spotted his son
coming up the valley from a long way off.
The villagers just laughed at the father sitting
there day after day. If they had spotted the son, or seen him in their village,
they would have mobbed him, and dragged him out, and pelted him with rocks and
donkey dung. They didn’t want riff-raff like him living in their town.
The father ran, in part, to protect his younger boy
from that mob-scene. He risked getting a pelting himself. Once they got home,
he dressed his son up in some of his own best clothes and had the fattened calf
killed to make a feast.
The fattened calf was a special item for a rich
family living in that time and place. A calf was raised and fed and sheltered
to stay tender into adulthood.
It would be like the famous Japanese Kobe cattle. No
matter how big it was, it was always called the fattened calf. It was saved for
a visit by some governor or other dignitary. A full-grown fattened calf could
have been at the top of the menu for a feast of a hundred guests.
The father must have invited that whole hateful
village, in order to obligate them to accept the prodigal. That would be just
one more piece of evidence for how prodigal, and wasteful, and reckless the old
man was.
A feast of barbequed roast beef was just too good to
pass up. Most of those people hardly ever had a chance to eat beef. If they had
meat it was chicken, or goat, or lamb. Beef was food for rich people. The
villagers would go to the feast, and laugh behind the father’s back (behind the
whole family’s backs) even though accepting the invitation solemnly obligated
them to treat the son politely and not drive him away.
The prodigal father was so reckless and wasteful that
he became a dishonor to his own family. The ancient world in the Middle East was honor-bound, as that part of the world
still is (as dishonorable as that part of the world sometimes seems to us).
People were honor bound to kill members of their own family who dishonored the
family.
My old friend Dick Cochran and his wife Eloise (who
has since passed away) served as missionaries in Iraq
and Lebanon
The father’s problem was his love. His love was
wasteful and reckless. The Pharisees, who were so critical of Jesus, were
forgetting that this was the same as the love of God.
There is a special Hebrew word that describes God’s
love. The word is often translated in the King James Version as
“loving-kindness”. In the Revised Standard Version it is often translated as
“steadfast love”. There is a musical version of one of the places where this
love appears in the Psalms. Psalm sixty-three verse three says, “Thy loving
kindness is better than life.”
The people who think that they know God and the
scriptures best often forget this special word. It describes the love that
binds God to his people.
They forget that the key to this love is that it is,
in fact, never deserved. It describes the love that binds a faithful God to a
faithless people. It describes the love that binds a holy God to a sinful
people. God’s love is wasteful and reckless and it is given to people who don’t
deserve it. Maybe the people who think they know God best haven’t forgotten the
true meaning of this love, but they have forgotten who they truly are in the
sight of God.
They are God’s beloved children. This specifically
means that they are beneficiaries of God’s love because God’s love is prodigal,
wasteful, and reckless. They need to know that, if God’s love was not prodigal,
and wasteful, and reckless they would not be loved at all.
We don’t know why the younger son was so desperate to
get away from home. He might not have been so desperate to get away from his
father. He might have been more desperate to get away from that older brother.
You know, this suddenly made me think that churches
sometimes work the same way as that family worked. People may not leave the
church because of God, but because of the brothers and sisters who act like the
older brother of the story. I think that is one way to describe why my family
stopped going to church.
If the church is like a family, the reason why the
younger son came back to the family was because he was transformed by the
memory of his father’s wasteful, reckless love. The memory of that love made
him feel like the sinner he was. The prodigal’s sin was not against his
brother’s awful goodness. The younger brother felt that his sin was against his
father’s wasteful, reckless love.
The older translations tell us that, because of this
memory, and because of the crisis that he was going through, the prodigal “came
to himself”. He didn’t “come to his senses” as some more modern translations
put it.
The prodigal came to himself. He finally met himself
for the first time in his life. He remembered that there was this love and
there was his failure to enter into that love. He finally saw himself. He was
wasteful and reckless in his escape from a great love.
He came to himself and he saw what he was made for
and where he belonged. He was his father’s son and so he came to himself. He
found himself in the father’s love.
He was transformed. Transformation is the wonder and
the miracle of being a Christian. How has the wastefulness and recklessness of
God’s love transformed you?
We don’t know how the older brother’s part of the
story ended. Did he kill his father to preserve the honor of the family? Or was
the older son transformed at last?
The father had this older, serious, careful, son whom
he was told was sulking outside the house and outside the feast. The father did
with the older son the same thing he did with the younger.
He followed his heart. He went out to that son who
was holding back and refusing to join the feast of reckless love. The father
went out to him instead of waiting for him to come to his senses. The father
knew that the oldest son was much too sensible to see the sense of the feast.
The father wasted his own joy by going out in search of the sulking boy.
Do you know that if you are a serious, sensible,
careful Christian you might be the older brother? Do you know how reckless and
wasteful God really is and how much your life depends on this?
The Bible tells us that God was so wasteful and
reckless with his love that he left his own fun. He left the feast of heaven.
God went outside of all that for you and me. God went out of heaven to enter a
very deadly, serious world.
That world had such a serious view of what God was
supposed to be, that it couldn’t make anything out of him when he showed
himself. The only thing this world could do was to kill God in defense of this
world’s honor and independence. God came in Jesus and refused to take the
world’s values seriously. God in the flesh (in Jesus) flaunted his loving
kindness on all the wrong people.
The prodigal God, knowing what would happen, died for
the sins of the world.
Look at this world! He died for the world that so
much frightens us and angers us. He died for the world that makes us indignant.
He died for the world that is indifferent to him. He died for the world that
destroys the innocent.
More than we know, this is the same world we look at
when we see our own reflection in the mirror. It’s a wonder to know that the
prodigal God loves such a world as our world.
It’s the same world we see when we look out our
windows every day. Every day we share our lives with people who live in such a
world and they have no idea of what kind of love overhangs them and reaches out
to them all the time. When we see such a love and allow it to come into us, we
are transformed by it, and we have something to share with others.
God is so reckless with his infinite love that it has
the momentum to transform everyone who has been struck by it. His prodigal love
has the power to give to those who embrace it the transformation of dying to
themselves and living a new and everlasting life.
If the older brother could have his blind eyes
opened, and have his lost heart found, and find that his shriveled up love was
bursting to life, then he would have been transformed. He would have hugged the
prodigal father and the prodigal son. And he would have laughed a wonderful
laugh. He would have forgotten his old self and he would have come to his true
self. He needed his own story of transformation.
I am the oldest child and (believe me) I am much too
serious for my own good. Someday I hope to laugh with all my heart at the sight
of how silly all my seriousness has been.
I have never rebelled in my life. My only rebellion
was to go to church, and stick with the love of Jesus as the Bible tells me so,
and go into the ministry. That’s my rebellion. In my own way, this was the most
wasteful and reckless thing I could do for the love of Jesus and our Father .
Somehow this was my transformation. And I see
everything differently because of it. But I am still much too serious for my
own good.
God is wasteful and reckless with his love. If we
don’t treat others with the same scandalous love, then we are not living out
the transforming power of God. If we don’t love the people outside these walls
wastefully and recklessly we cannot offer transformation to anyone.
There is nothing more exciting than to be transformed
by being recklessly and wastefully loved. Most of the people we know have never
found such a love as this. That is the simple truth.
We represent what our neighbors and the world around
us can never imagine. Everyone hungers for this love without knowing it. But we
might have forgotten what we have. Or we might not have found God’s
transformation and received it for our own.
The older brother in the story may never have become
the prodigal son that he was born to be. We don’t know, but we can see that he
needed this more than anything else that he valued in his peculiar brand of
awful goodness.
How can anyone around here find the prodigal God,
unless we become prodigals too?
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