Fourth Sunday in Lent – Bill Harkins
The Gospel: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 …..
The holy Gospel…according to Luke… Glory to you, Lord Christ.] All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” So Jesus told them this parable: “There was a man who had two sons…
In the Name of the God of Creation, who loves us all, Amen. Grace and peace to you all and welcome to Holy Family on this Fourth Sunday of Lent. The story of the prodigal son is one we know well. It may be one of the best-known stories in the world. But ask “On what occasion did Jesus tell that story?” and it is unlikely many will know. While context isn’t always everything here, it is important. This is especially true of the context of Jesus’ parables. For as John Dominic Crossan has said, parables show the “fault lines” beneath the comfortable surfaces of the worlds we make for ourselves. Parables can be unsettling experiences challenging the reconciliations with which we have become comfortable—the ones, typically, we have created—and replaces them with a deeper level of reconciliation, a reconciliation which is contextually situated at the level of the Incarnation. Among my beloved professors at Vanderbilt Divinity School was Sallie McFague, who lovingly steered me away from law school and toward doctoral work in psychology and religion. She was tough, a New England kind of toughness leavened with compassion, and she taught us that a parable is an extended metaphor. A parable is not an allegory, where the meaning is extrinsic to the story, nor is it an example story where, as in the story of the Good Samaritan, the total meaning is within the story. Rather, as an extended metaphor, the meaning is found only within the story itself although it is not exhausted by that story. While a parable is an aesthetic whole and hence demands rapt attention to the narrative and its configurations, it is also open-ended, expanding ordinary meaning so that from a careful analysis of the parable we learn a new thing, are shocked into a new awareness, often about ourselves! How the new insight occurs is, of course, the heart of the matter; it is enough to say at this point that the two dimensions—the ordinary and the extraordinary—are related intricately within the confines of the parable so that such “God-talk” as we have in the Prodigal Son is an existential, worldly, sensuous story of human life.
This parable is a dangerous story for several reasons. One danger is that it is so powerful and clear that it can take on a life of its own. It runs the risk of becoming mythic in nature. Myths are designed to do just the opposite of parables. They are designed to make us comfortable with that which is familiar. Yet Luke was quite careful in providing a definite setting for the story. It’s in a context which discloses a deeper, richer meaning in an already powerful parable. Luke establishes the setting in a single, clear sentence; “The tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to him, but the Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” Jesus responds with a defense of table fellowship with outcasts, and this time his strategy is to tell a story. His narrative grabs us because it is stories like this that are the everyday stuff of our lives. Such stories are sacred because they are how we come to understand who we are in relation to ourselves, others, and God. As familiar as it is, this parable is full of surprises. And the essence of these surprises is nothing less than a metaphysic of joy. The first surprise is that that the younger son, realizing that he is no farmer, dares to ask his father for his inheritance “pre-posthumously!” This is a dis-honorable request in most any culture, including ours. The second surprise is that the eldest son says nothing. We are surprised that the father goes along with the request. Indeed, the family therapist in me is wondering about and imagining the breakfast table conversation between Mom and Dad; wondering if Dad is “enabling” this kid in such a way as to almost guarantee his failure, not to mention going against the “rules” of the Jewish culture of the day. Call me a Pharisee if you like, but this is not a decision to be entered into unadvisedly. What would you have done with this request?
Another surprise is that the younger son decides to turn the property into liquid capital, probably incurring a capital gains tax in the process—and he blows the entire proceeds. A risky investment here, some big spending there, and a little riotous living thrown in, and our protagonist is then reduced to slopping hogs and missing home. This is a form of exile not to be envied. We are surprised when he comes back home. Give him credit for courage and humility, because he has a plan to enter a new relationship with his family as a salaried worker. And his father welcomes him back. He gives his son multiple signs of full reconciliation in the form of a robe, a ring, and sandals– marking the young son as family. We are surprised when the father ensures reconciliation not only in relation to the son, but with the whole village. He does this by celebrating in a radically immanent table fellowship, a huge party with a roasted, fatted calf as the symbolic and literal centerpiece of the celebration. And all are welcome at that table!
The elder son’s bitter reaction upon returning from the field and discovering the party is one of surprise—his surprise at this fathers’ response—when he says, “All these years I slaved for you and never disobeyed one of your commandments.” We can identify with him, can’t we? And this is the parabolic sting of the story. All religions provide some means by which the sinner can return and make restitution, but to come back to a party? That, indeed, is an Incarnational surprise. And all were welcome. What kind of religion can this be? And as Fred Craddock has asked, “Who in the church today would have attended that party?” When we hear Jesus’ defense of his inclusive table fellowship against the charges of the scribes and Pharisees, we find another surprise. In the portraits of the prodigal son and the compassionate father, the tax collectors and sinners hear a confirmation of the reconciliation they have already found in Jesus’ ministry to them. The scribes and Pharisees are invited to contemplate an image of themselves in the figure of the eldest son, who has completely misread his filial relationship as one of slavery—an alternative view to their own sense of relationship. One of the things I love about this parable is its non-binary nature. It’s a developmental achievement to move from living in an either/or, all or nothing world to one that is both/and. This requires giving up control and living in a world that is more ambiguous and messier at times. And this allows us to see reconciliation with others whom we would relegate to the margins…persons with whom we may disagree or even don’t like very much. Reconciliation becomes more than agreeing to disagree. It means acknowledging one’s own vulnerability in ways perhaps uncomfortable at times, especially when our need to be right exceeds being in relationship.
Reconciliation in this parable means to be given more than one deserves, especially by God, who flings wide the gates of generosity. Indeed, our whole notion of karma, and quid pro quo—of reaping exactly what we sow—is thrown open to question. In relation to the God of Incarnation whom Jesus proclaims—and embodies—we can fall from justice; we can fall from faith; we can fall from righteousness; but we cannot fall from grace. This is the context of Luke’s parable, and all our acts of compassion, and of our experience of joy at the open table. Like the prodigal father in this parable…for he, too, had been on a journey, I have two sons and for me, this story is a symbol for all the promises, which were made to me and the energy and care which nourished and created me as a human being, and which I now extend to my sons, and to their families. It has ultimately to do with a sense of the basic trustworthiness of the world and the consequent freedom to commit ourselves to action. We can become through the story a receiver and a maker of promises; this gives a unity of past, present, and future for us, and hence gives him us, too, a “story,” identity. As a student of psychology, I know that our basic attachments, especially early on, speak to the depth of each person’s biography and lie at the heart of all our stories. In the depths of this story lies a keen sense of the holy and the sacred: the basic solicitude of life, which makes graceful freedom possible.
Yes, this parable is dangerous because the context of it is radical table fellowship; the intentional, ritual pattern of eating and drinking and telling stories with sinners. In this case, “sin” means a refusal to grow, and a willingness to be kept in bondage to old narratives—of fear, of needing to be right, and of power and control, of relegating people to the status of the “other” based on gender, sexual orientation, politics, and on and on. The teller of the parable of the Prodigal Son beheld a vision of reality that demanded a breakthrough beyond one-dimensional, univocal language—it demanded metaphor, for such is always the route out of established meaning to new meaning; and metaphor in turn became the proper vehicle for the expression and communication of what they beheld—it is the language for “a body that thinks.” It’s an invitation to go deeper than what we see on social media, which is perhaps the best example of refusal to grow, or the assumptions we make about others based on our fears and former narratives. Jesus was killed for this reason—he showed another way to an Empire bent on exclusion rather than embrace. We are called to remember this, and to weave the meaning of this parable into the tapestry of our own lives. Reconciliation is finally about table fellowship, where we are all at home in relation to the God who, like the father in the parable, waits for us to come home, to celebrate in joy. After all, we are all just walking one another home. Amen.