The Good Father
Today’s Gospel passage is often called the story of “The Prodigal Son.” But the word “prodigal” just means “wastefully, or recklessly extravagant.” We don’t have to do all the things the younger son in this story did to be wasteful. But we often try anyway. The passage, however, is not about being wasteful; it’s about repentance and forgiveness, so I think we’d be better off thinking of the passage as the story of “The Good Father.”
When we hear this passage, we usually picture ourselves as the son who transgressed our loving Father through our sinful lives. Whatever our own particular sins may be, we relate to, we long for, we even expect, a loving God who’ll throw his arms out wide and come running to greet us. Our awesome loving God would do no less, and Jesus confirms it for us in the parable.
But as Americans living more than 20 centuries after Luke wrote this Gospel, we overlook a few things that would have been readily apparent to the average listener in 1st-century Israel.
Life was different then, although much of that culture still remains in the Middle East today. The behavior that Jesus mentions would have been shocking — if not downright unbelievable — to his listeners. Not the son’s behavior so much — rude children have been the bane of every parent’s existence since time began. Rather, it’s the father’s behavior that would have shocked them right out of their sandals.
For a son to ask for his inheritance from his father who is still alive is the same as saying “You’re worthless to me as a father! And by asking for my inheritance I am wishing that you were dead! Why don’t you just pretend you’re dead and give me my money now? That way I don’t have to pretend to mourn at your funeral.”
Not the kind of sentiment we’re likely to see on any Hallmark Father’s Day cards anytime soon.
Dishonoring the family is a serious thing. In many cultures — including the one Jesus was addressing — disrespect at that level was punishable by death at the hands of the father. Leviticus 20:9 states: “If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head.”
Some of you may have wished — even if just for a brief moment when your own children were teenagers — that a similar law was in effect here. Regardless of whether we agree with the penalty or not, this was the law of the culture at the time Jesus told this parable.
By verse 15, Jesus’ Jewish listeners were no doubt ready for the story to end. In fact, there’s a 2nd-century Jewish story that ends similarly: the son gets what he deserves — he is reduced to the low, horrible level of feeding the most unclean animals in Jewish culture. At this point the son is cut off from the Jewish community and from any financial charity it would have otherwise offered him.
In that culture, fathers are revered and adult men of any social standing walk with regal stature – they don’t run. Children and servants may run, but not an adult male, and not a father who has children to run for him. Thus, a returning son would be brought to the father, not the other way around. And in no instance would a grown Middle Eastern man take off running with his arms out to greet someone — especially a son who had shamed him and his family as disgracefully and publicly as this one had.
In order to run, the father would have to lift his garment up above his knees. Picture a grown man trying to do that while reaching out with his arms at the same time. Few things look less dignified than that. Yet that’s what the father in this parable did.
When he reached his son, he grabbed him in a big bear hug and called for the best robe, a ring, and sandals for his returned son.
The best robe in the house would have belonged to the father himself, and the ring would have been the family signet ring — a symbol of the young man’s reinstatement to sonship in a wealthy household, even after spending a third of what the father had spent his entire life earning. Slaves did not wear sandals; they went barefoot. So the father is saying that he will take him back, not as a servant, but only as a son.
Yes, this is the type of father we want God to be. Someone who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, and will come running to welcome us home. And the lost son reminds us of ourselves so much. Verse 17 reminds us that it wasn’t the badness of his life that made the young man realize his error; it was the goodness of his father.
There’s another son, however. The one we ignore. The one we think of as trying to prevent the father from welcoming us back. Jesus doesn’t say whether that son comes back into the party or not.
And this had to be a huge party. A calf would be enough to feed the entire village!
The father explains that the celebration is for all of them to partake in – as the lost son was also a lost brother. Remember that the brother refers to him as “this son of yours,” and not “this brother of mine.”
Does that stubborn brother see the father’s point and join them inside, or does he keep his miserable attitude and stay outside? We presume that the father went back in, but we can’t be sure about that brother. His own pride and stubbornness have pushed him from the father’s banquet.
That brother symbolized the Pharisees whom Jesus implied had pushed themselves out of Heaven and away from God. They believed that only certain people were worthy of God’s love. The others were barred from the temple. The prostitutes, tax collectors, and so-called scum of the earth who Jesus ministered to were not even allowed to enter the temple. The Pharisees considered them unworthy and a waste of time and resources.
But Jesus saw them as children of God. Remember, God has no grandchildren. All his children are precious and those who stray but come back to him are greeted by him with joy.
Most of us, however, would probably be shocked to discover that the Father sees us as the older brother, instead of as the lost son. And most of us are living up to that role. Think about it. If you’re here in this room, there’s a good chance you’ve already come back to the Father through Jesus. You’ve repented for your sins and accepted Christ’s sacrificial death to bring you eternal life.
How many of us would be thrilled to learn that Osama bin Laden prayed for forgiveness and received it, and will go to heaven when he dies? Or that Saddam Hussein accepted Christ’s forgiveness just before he was hanged?
How would we feel if we got to Heaven and discovered Hitler living comfortably there in full glory? If those ideas make us feel a little uncomfortable, we’ve got more of the older brother in us than we’d like to admit.
We set the bar low for our own salvation, just not so low that other sinners can get over it also.
People have told me “those people aren’t worth saving.” We have similar difficulties with getting volunteers to help the homeless, although people tend to have a little more compassion and pity in their tone when they decline to help.
For some reason, after God lovingly welcomes us back into his kingdom, we tend to believe that makes us his chosen protectors of the realm — to enforce the heavenly dress code as it were, to keep the riff-raff from cluttering up the lobby.
We act as though only certain types of people, with certain types of sin, are worthy of God’s forgiveness.
We each view the minimum level for receiving God’s grace a little differently, but generally it goes something like this: We set Mother Teresa at one end of the scale and put Hitler at the other; then we put ourselves somewhere between those two and calibrate our “salvation meter” to allow God to forgive people at our level or above. We view others through that mental filter, and use it to justify our disdain for them.
In our minds, everyone who falls below a certain pre-determined level on our salvation meters, doesn’t deserve God’s grace. What we fail to realize is that none of us deserve it. If we deserved it, it wouldn’t be grace.
Jesus died for all of us, every one of us, so that we wouldn’t have to. Anyone who accepts that gift from God is saved. As Paul mentions in our New Testament reading today, everyone who is in Christ is a new creation. Whatever they were before has been changed.
Whether we approve of them or not, in Jesus’ eyes, each of us is worth dying for. So how can we think of someone else as being worthless? If we saw the Christ in each of us, we’d treat each other differently.