Embracing Love

Scriptures:        Joshua 5:9-12                           Psalm 32

2 Corinthians 5:16-21              Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

Today’s Gospel reading gives us one of the best-known of Jesus’ parables.  It’s commonly known as the parable of the Prodigal Son.  But it can also be thought of as the parable of the father and two sons – though Jesus told more than one parable of that description.  From another standpoint, it could be called the parable of the Elder Brother.  One meaning of the word prodigal is being lavish and extravagant in the use of one’s resources, to the point of being wasteful.  And from that standpoint, the parable could also thought of as the parable of the Prodigal Father, given his lavish welcome of his returning son.  It may seem like a matter of wrangling over words, but each of these terms – parable of the prodigal son, parable of the elder brother, parable of the father with two sons, parable of the prodigal father – sheds a spotlight on a different part of the parable, lifts up a different character or set of characters as the focus of the parable, gives us a different sense of what the parable is “about”.  And, of course, Jesus’ parables rarely had just one level of meaning, but had many layers of meaning waiting to be peeled back like the layers of an onion.

Context is important in understanding this parable as it is in understanding any parable.  In the preceding chapter, it was the Sabbath, and Jesus had eaten at the home of a Pharisee. It was a tense moment; Luke tells us that Jesus was being carefully watched.  And, Jesus being Jesus, he let them carefully watch him heal a sick man on the Sabbath, which went against their interpretation of the Sabbath laws, but was typical of Jesus’ conviction that in God’s eyes, any time was the right time to bring healing.  Jesus then told his parable of the banquet, in which the invited guests blew off the invitation and ghosted the host – and so the banquet sent his servants to invite everyone they could find, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, even bodily dragging random strangers off the streets and through the door if it came to that.

While Jesus likely made his host uncomfortable, his words attracted many of those who were considered society’s riff-raff.  The motley crew surrounding Jesus drew mutters from the Pharisees – likely including Jesus’ host – and the teachers of the law.  What are these sinners doing here, stinking up the place?  Why did Jesus invite them?   But Jesus being Jesus, what else would he do for those considered sinners and outcasts, folks who likely were rarely invited anywhere, but invite them. It’s doubly striking in that Jesus had just gotten done telling a parable about the host of a banquet who wound up inviting a random assortment of strangers to his banquet…..and now the Pharisees complained because Jesus invited a random assortment of strangers to listen to him. 

In response, Jesus told not one, but three parables.  He began with the parable of the lost sheep, also found in Matthew’s gospel, in which the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to go in search of the one sheep who had gotten separated from the flock.  This was followed by his parable of the woman in search of a lost coin.  In both cases, the lost sheep and the lost coin are found,  and the owner invites the neighbors over to celebrate.

And then Jesus tells the parable we heard in today’s Gospel reading.  The younger of two sons asks his father to give him his share of the estate.  According to the laws of the day, the elder son got a double share of the property, while the rest was divided among the other children.  Normally, of course, a father’s property was divided among the sons at the time of the father’s death….and so the sons’s request doesn’t say much for the value placed by the son on his relationship with his father.  But the father complies with the son’s request, however reluctantly.  We know what happened next – the son collected his possessions, turned his back on his family and community to set off for a distant country – a distant Gentile country, we should understand -  and, as the text states, “squandered his wealth in dissolute living.”  As we would say, he pissed it all away, all that his father had given him.  He ran out of money, and there was a famine in the land, and he began to be in need – as another translation says, “he began to feel the pinch” of poverty.   He hired himself out to some farmers to tend pigs – again, not an occupation to which Jews would normally aspire, to put it mildly – and was on the point of eating the pods he was feeding to the pigs.    We’re told that in that moment, as the son was envying the pigs for their pods, as the son was considering pulling pods up out of the pig slop and trying to wipe the slop off so he could put it in his mouth – in that moment, the son came to himself.  Up to that point, the son had been carried along from one event to the next, from feast to famine, but now the son had a moment of self-awareness, said to himself, “what the heck is this I’m doing.”:  even my father’s hired hands are eating well, while here I am ready to choke down pods garnished in pig slop.  I’ll go home, tell my father that after all I’ve done, I’m no longer worthy to be called his son, but can I go to work for you.  We’re left with questions about the son’s motivation – did he genuinely want to see his father again, or was he trying to get over on his father in order to survive?  Jesus left it an open question, and it’s likely the son’s motives were mixed.  But we remember what happened next – the father, seeing his son off in the distance, discards all fatherly dignity by running out to meet the son.  Now, if I were a father and my son came back to me in that condition, while I’d welcome him in, he’d likely get an earful from me on the need for personal responsibility, and I’d put him on a very short leash henceforth until he earned back his stripes in terms of demonstrating responsible behavior.  But instead, the father clothed him with a ring and the best robe, killed the fatted calf, and threw a banquet. 

At this point, we meet the elder brother, who had been working in the fields.  He heard party music and asked one of the hired hands what was going on….and when he heard the party was for his no-good brother, the elder son was livid.  “Your scumbag son comes wandering in, and  you throw a party.  I’ve worked my butt off for you all these years.  Where’s my party?  Party with your no-account son all you want, dad, but count me out.”  The father learns to his sorrow that both his sons were  lost, one to dissolute living in a far country, the other to bitterness and resentment under his own roof.  But the father goes out to him, as he had gone out to the  younger son, to invite him to the party.  He reminded the older son that he would always be his dad, and that after he was gone, all that his father owned would go to him.  But my younger son is still your brother, and on this day it’s as if he came back from the dead.  And here Jesus invites us to finish the story.  He never tells us whether the elder brother went in or not.

On the back of your bulletin insert I included a very bad reproduction of Rembrandt’s depiction of this story.  The original hangs in Russia.  Unfortunately, my crummy inkjet printer struggled and mostly failed to capture Rembrandt’s subtle shading and use of shadow and light…printing Rembrandt on an inkjet is a bit like trying to draw the Mona Lisa with crayons, or playing Brahms on a toddler’s toy keyboard.  Even so, there’s enough to convey the idea:  the younger son is kneeling before his father, down to his ragged undergarments, his head shaved,  his sandals crumbling off his feet, with only a small sword on his right hip to remind him that he had once known better days in his father’s home.  The father, grey not only from age but from his recent worry and grief, embraces the son with his timeworn hands the father’s arms and robe almost forming a kind of protective canopy over the son.  And at a distance, partly hidden in the shadows, stands the elder brother, looking so much like his father in his robe and beard, but behaving so differently, standing aloof….standing in judgment, we might say, his hands clasped over his chest – we might imagine him with his arms folded across his chest – silent, not saying anything, just observing.  In the background, in the shadows, barely visible, are the household servants. And yes, there’s a bit of artistic license in that Rembrandt’s picture brings the elder son in with the younger son and father, but the body language of all three major characters is just so striking, silently speaking volumes about the varying emotions of the moment.  I am hardly a skilled or observant interpreter of art, and so my comments come from Roman Catholic author Henri Nouwen’s book on this painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son.

Henri Nouwen’s book asks us, “Where do we find ourselves in the story?”   He describes society’s often-conditional love, in which society states that we will love and respect you as long as you are productive, as long as  you are attractive, but when that ends, so does our care for you.  Nouwen compares the search for love apart from God as addiction.  Nouwen writes: “I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.  Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere?  Why do I keep leaving home when I am called a child of God, the Beloved of my Father?”

 By contrast, the elder son is a figure of righteous resentment – perhaps a stand-in for the Pharisees who resent the riff-raff surrounding Jesus.  Speaking of this resentment in himself, which he sees as the shadow side of his good qualities, Nouwen writes: “It is … pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue.  Isn’t it good to be obedient, dutiful, law-abiding, hardworking, and self-sacrificing?  And still it seems that my resentments and complaints are mysteriously tied to such praiseworthy attitudes.  The connection often makes me despair.  At the very moment I want to speak or act out of my most generous self, I get caught in anger or resentment.  And it seems that just as I want to be most selfless, I find myself obsessed with being loved.  Just when I do my utmost to accomplish a task well, I find myself questioning why others do not give themselves as I do….It seems that wherever my virtuous self is, there also is the resentful complainer.”  Nouwen speaks of the need to let go of comparisons to others, and to focus on gratitude.

We may identify more with one or the other sons, the youngest with a scandalous past and a lifetime of regrets, or the elder son, frozen in righteous resentment and rage.  But Nouwen states that our spiritual task is to go beyond sonship, to, in Jesus’ words, “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.” Paul wrote that we are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, provided that we share his sufferings, so as to share his glory.  Nouwen comes to the startling conclusion that while it is far more comfortable to identify with one or the other of the sons, “The return to the Father is ultimately the challenge to become the Father.”  Nouwen writes: “The call to become the Father precludes any ‘soft’ interpretation of the story. I know how much I long to return and be held safe, but do I really want to be son and heir with all that implies?  Being in my Father’s house requires that I make my Father’s life my own and become transformed in his image.”

Clearly we cannot literally become God.  And yet we are made in God’s image, being transformed day by day into God’s likeness, if we allow it, if we can get ourselves out of God’s way.  Nouwen sees Jesus’ parable ultimately as a call and invitation to spiritual maturity, to leave behind the irresponsibility of childhood along with the scorekeeping and resentment of early adulthood, to be transformed by God and our life experience into God’s arms and hands in embracing and bringing healing to the brokenness that surrounds us. 

We are all sinners, in need of God’s grace.  And yet the grace we seek for ourselves may offend and scandalize us when extended toward others.  May we be compassionate as God is compassionate, God whose sun warms and rain waters both the just and the unjust.  May we return from the far country of dissolution and addiction, may we step out of the shadows of resentment, into the warm circle of God’s embracing love – and may we invite others to the banquet. Amen.