Introduction
Trust the Lectionary to use Mothering Sunday as the occasion to throw up a Gospel story about a father. (Although note Sally Coleman’s imaginative retelling of ‘A Mother’s Tale’.)And a story that is so familiar, too.
So let me use this famous parable to explore the mission of Jesus, as he justifies it here, and as he calls us to participate. And let me approach it as I generally do the parables, with these principles:
1. Christians classically believe that ‘Jesus is the answer’ – the answer to the world’s problems and to individual need, and so he is. But in the parables and elsewhere it’s less a case of ‘Jesus is the answer’ and more a matter of ‘Jesus is the question’. I’d like us to see this parable as one where Jesus is posing us some challenging questions.
2. Rather than talking about whether we know the Bible, the parables can be stories where it’s truer to say that the Bible knows us – or, better, that Jesus knows us. So if we reflect on the characters in the parable we may see Christ’s revelatory insight. And because we may each see ourselves in different people and places in the parables I resist the popular idea that parables only make one point.
3. I also don’t believe that we should approach the parables as cosy, comfortable stories. Early on in my preaching experience I heard a minister say that the key to understanding the parables was to look for the shock. And that’s what I want to do with this parable.
The questions, the characters and the shocks, then, are my keys to reflecting on the parables. We’ll bear in mind the questions and the shocks while looking at the characters – the younger son, the elder son and the father.
1. The Younger Son
‘I want you dead.’ That – I think – is what the younger son says. He wants his share of his father’s inheritance – so Dad might as well be dead. Does that sound familiar or not? There are people who wish their parents dead, but perhaps more who wish God dead.
And there are plenty who – although they would deny they want the demise of the parents – cannot wait to get their hands on what will be theirs in the will. When we come across such families where there is a war to grab as much of the family silver as possible we recoil in horror. It doesn’t need to involve the vast sums of money as when the former model Anna Nicole Smith recently died and the fights began for her money and for custody of her infant daughter – so similar to when Smith’s eighty-nine-year old billionaire husband died a year after their marriage. No, we can witness this kind of grabbing for money in ordinary families, too.
But even if we look on with disapproval at this behaviour the young man is still closer to some of us than we might like to acknowledge. His attitude, in the words of a song by Queen, is, ‘I want it all and I want it now.’ And that’s very contemporary. We see something and have to have it instantly. Gone is the culture that saved assiduously before buying something. Now, if we have the money we ‘splash the cash’. And if we don’t, there’s a rectangular plastic card with curved edges in our pockets that will enable us to take it away. Buy now, debt problems later.
Now imagine how such a young son would be viewed in Jesus’ time, when respect for parents and elders was a much stronger value than it is today. Jesus’ hearers are not going to be sympathetic to this man. They will be scandalised by his request and further horrified when he gets his way. And once he does they are glad he leaves town. They wouldn’t want someone like him back. He can go. He is as good as dead to them.
He goes to ‘a distant country’ – good as far as Jesus’ listeners are concerned, the further away the better. But how many of us cry tears over children who literally or figuratively have gone to ‘a distant country’?
And if that isn’t bad enough, look what happens to him when he is down on his luck. He ends up with the pigs. Jesus is telling this story to a Jewish audience: pigs are the epitome of uncleanness. You will recall the prohibitions in Old Testament law against eating pigs: the younger son is so hungry that he would eat the pigs’ food if he could. How shocking is that to Jesus’ audience? It’s like us hearing that a young woman is so desperately short of money that she enters prostitution. It’s like hearing the tragic stories of poverty-stricken families who sell their children into slavery.
This is how bad it has got for the younger son. He is a selfish man who wishes his father dead, he wants instant gratification and when it all goes wrong he resorts to ethically questionable survival methods. He is not what has commonly been called ‘the deserving poor’. He is one of the ‘undeserving poor’. Imagine the response of many people to the story of the 42 stone Chelmsford mother who claims she is being left to die by the National Health Service. Many think she is not deserving of treatment; Jesus’ hearers will have a similar attitude to the younger son. He doesn’t deserve love or assistance.
And presumably he’s just the sort of person we wouldn’t want in our churches. Isn’t he? In terms of our mission isn’t he the kind of character we should be prophetically condemning as a blight on society, as one who is causing the breakdown of our culture and civilisation?
2. The Elder Son
The elder son, on the other hand, is the paragon of virtue. He is all that his younger brother is not. He has not demanded his share of the inheritance (and he was entitled to twice as much under Jewish custom – he stood to gain more). He has stayed loyally working for his father. He is a pillar of society, hard working and dependable. We need more people like him, don’t we? Surely he would have been one of the younger men they would have had their eye on in the synagogue, just as surely as we would welcome people like him into church membership and leadership. He’ll get his hands dirty when we need a willing volunteer. We need fine, upstanding, morally upright people like this at the heart of our churches and societies. Don’t we?
And yet we can’t read about the elder son pretending we haven’t heard the story before. And so we’re uncomfortable with him. I once preached on this story at the beginning of a sermon series on the parables and a woman said to me that her husband couldn’t ever listen to this one because he always saw himself as the elder son.
And perhaps he wasn’t alone. Maybe there are many ‘elder sons’ in our churches. Loyal, faithful, generous givers, solid people without anything flaky in their characters. If a job needs doing you can be sure the elder son will volunteer, however many other responsibilities he is carrying at the same time. And yet, and yet …
… he has a weak point. Touch him on the subject of his younger brother and you will feel the pain. ‘It isn’t fair.’ However mature he looks on the outside, out comes a raw reaction from the inner child. ‘He doesn’t deserve a party when I haven’t had one. Look at the mess he’s made of his life and your money, Dad.’
Jealousy and injustice – just like a small boy. A small boy who does not know grace. And if he can’t have a party then no-one else can, especially not one of those uncouth undeserving types who are lowering the tone around here.
And so I suspect my friend’s husband isn’t the only ‘elder son’ in our churches. We become elder sons when we cross the line from moral principle to self-righteousness and forget that we are sinners saved by grace. Indeed elder sons tend to be unfamiliar with grace. I recall being on my last Methodist Guild Holiday with my parents, when I had not long started to work in what was then still called the Department of Health and Social Security. A woman on the holiday asked me what my job was and I told her I worked in Social Security. ‘At least you’re on the right side of the counter,’ she said – just like an elder son.
Elder sons characteristically think that their hard work for the Father is what earns his approval, and this is their fatal mistake. The Father loves, not because people earn his favour: he loves because he loves.
And that’s the missionary crux of the parable – the mission of Jesus is all about grace. It’s all about undeserved mercy. The whole message is of love richly lavished on the last, the least and the unlikely …
3. The Father
… And so the climax of the parable is the character of the Father. We know this story as ‘The Prodigal Son’ but the great German preacher Helmut Thielicke called his sermon on it ‘The Waiting Father’. If we’re shocked by the dissolute behaviour of the younger son; if we’re scandalised by the elder son’s self-righteousness; just wait until we see how outrageous the father is in Jesus’ story.
He doesn’t cut the younger son off from the family. Far from it. He is waiting and looking for his wayward son’s return. The culture dictated that such a father should wait at home for the move to come from the errant child. But no, he goes out looking.
And when the son comes into sight over the horizon he girds up his robe and runs to embrace him. Again, it’s the opposite of cultural expectations, which would have dictated the father remain standing, arms folded, so to speak, while the son came and prostrated himself in utter humiliation. The younger son knew this and attempted this posture. But for the father this is not a time for dignity. For a father to run and kiss his son as this one does in Jesus’ story is the very depth of undignified behaviour. It breaks etiquette, it’s bad manners, and you can bet the neighbours are watching with disapproval from behind the first century Palestinian equivalent of net curtains.
But of course Jesus is giving us a vivid and, yes, shocking picture of God. Contrary to certain crude pictures of him, God is not waiting until we have grovelled enough before grudgingly forgiving us. He is actively looking for our return and longing with love for us to find a way back to him.
And when people return to him he does not make them servants, he confers the status of beloved children. The prodigals are family to the Father. And such is his delight that his instinct is to repudiate all sense of standing on ceremony in favour of wildly throwing his arms around his children and splashing out on party.
He is the God of what one songwriter called ‘Outrageous Grace’. His outrageous grace is spent without regard for cost on the prodigals. And his outrageous grace outrages elder sons, to whom he was speaking – for the beginning of Luke 15 shows Jesus responding to the criticisms of the Pharisees and scribes that Jesus welcomed tax collectors and ‘sinners’ and even ate with them. It’s an experience a vicar friend of mine recently had when after a service someone in his congregation accused him of having ‘too much gospel’ in the service. And although the parable ends with the father telling the elder son why they had to celebrate, we know what the response of the real-life elder sons, the Pharisees and scribes was. It was, ‘We’re going to kill you.’
But it is this Father, this God of outrageous grace, is the model for our mission. He is the one who is actively looking for prodigals – those who are not respectable, the disreputable, the wasters and losers. He sings the song that woos them home. He prepares the feast and is on the starting block ready to sprint towards them.
And he offers the same outrageous grace to the elder sons whose hearts are hardened towards the prodigals. For he knows that only grace like his can soften such hearts, if they will consent. For those of us in the church who have elder son tendencies our greatest need is to encounter the Father of outrageous grace who persists in offering his love even when we threaten to kill him, because it doesn’t match up with our idea that divine approval should be earned by good performance. But he goes on offering, even as our ‘no’ to his grace puts his Son on a cross.
So it is embracing the heart of this Father that is the key to Christian mission. We may be prodigals, lurking nervously in the shadows of the Christian community. But his voice is the one that says ‘Welcome’ above the noises of those who would shut us out.
And for the rest of us he enables us to see prodigals as he does, and reach out with his love, for that is to reflect his heart. And where we mirror the elder son it is his desire that his grace softens such hearts so that we may become partners in his mission and not his opponents.
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