Well, I’ve settled down since last week. I have repented of my screaming and fuming.I’ve worked on my sin of self-righteousness and pride and have made good progress I believe.I’ve also made huge strides in the humility department which I am pleased about.
For those of you who weren’t here last week, I got a little steamed up over TV preachers and others who spew a theology that is different from mine.We wound up in that sermon realizing that Jesus was encouraging us all to repent in order to avoid “perishing”…experiencing some destruction that emerges as a consequence of our sinful acts.
Now that I’ve confessed my sin of pride and self-righteousness, I’m all lined up for forgiveness.That’s how it works isn’t it?We confess our sin, say how bad we’ve been…grovel a little bit…and then we find forgiveness—reconciliation.And of course, saying you’re sorry patches it all up and clears away any messes created along the way, right?Let’s find out what Jesus has in store for us in today’s lesson.
Jesus is criticized for hanging out with the wrong crowd by the “in” people—Pharisees and others.To respond, Jesus doesn’t scream at their position (Bill Meier style), but tells them a story or two—lost coins, lost sheep.The kicker is the party that is thrown when the lost is found.Then he tells them a story that cuts them to the core.The prodigal son shames his father and family by demanding his inheritance while Dad is still alive—in essence saying to his Dad “you are dead to me.”The family farm is split up…the older son gets the farm place, buildings and some land…the rest is sold and given to the younger.He then blows it all, prodigiously in a foreign land.
He “comes to himself” then, hungry and broke, and figures out a plan to gain three squares and a warm place in the barn’s hay at his old man’s place—which is now his brother’s.He’s knocked over near the mail box at the highway by his father who’s so happy to see him he’s organizing a party before he can get his note cards out for his confession-speech.The party is on!A prodigious celebration!
Older brother comes in from the north 40 to the sound of the party and is steamed (Bill Meier style) about the whole thing.Dad has to leave his position at the head table to deal with it.He goes out to the courtyard to pursue his son— pleads with him to loosen up and join the party.We see Jesus provide a happy ending for the younger brother.If he were an ordinary storyteller he might have been tempted to finish the story with a sad ending for the other brother (fictional stand-in for the Pharisees he’s talking with), but he doesn’t.He gives the older brother no-ending.The parable ends movie-style, with a freeze-frame. It ends like that with just the father in focus, and the sound goes dead—the servants moving around with the wine and veal in the background—and Jesus shows you only the freeze frame of the father and the elder brother.[1]There’s no ending.Only the Pharisees standing in front of the storyteller Jesus can finish this…only you and I can finish this.
We do finish this story, time and again, don’t we, in one way or another?This masterpiece of Jesus drives to heart of our own stories in profound ways and so it has become the most recognized of Jesus’ parables.We all can fit into this story in some way or another and relate to it.As Barbara Brown Taylor put it,
“Everyone has a weird family. Everyone has at least thought about running away from home. And whether or not you happen to have one yourself, almost everyone knows what a pain a sibling can be—especially when there are only two of you, so that the ‘good child/bad child’ thing hovers over you no matter which one you happen to be at any given time.”[2]
We finish the story in our lives to find that it doesn’t work they way we thought.If we find forgiveness in each other’s arms, repentance and feeling sorry might help, but at core has little if anything to do with it.And forgiveness…reconciliation when it happens doesn’t fix up all the hurt and damage magically.
Marilynne Robinson wrote a sequel to Gilead, her book about a couple of preachers in small town Iowa, called Home.This one focuses upon the Presbyterian retired minister Robert Boughton, and his lost son Jack.Robert is elderly, his wife has passed away a few years before, and because of his frail state (and some other issues) his daughter Glory comes to live there and care for him.Let’s pick up the story at the point where Jack is to arrive home after two decades of virtually no contact.Typical of Jack, he shows up a few days later than he mentioned in his letter.
Then four days passed, and there he was, standing in the back porch, a thin man in a brown suit, tapping his hat against his pant leg as if he could not make up his mind whether to knock on the glass or turn the knob or simply to leave again…
[Sister Glory] opened the door.“Jack,” she said.“I was about to give up on you.Come in.”She wondered if she would have recognized him if she had passed him on the street.He was pale and unshaven, and there was a nick of a scar under his eye.
“Well, here I am.”He shrugged.“Should I come in?”He seemed to be asking her advice as well as her permission.
“Yes of course.You can’t imagine how much he has worried.”
“Is he here?”
Where else would he be?“He’s here.He’s sleeping…” she said.
They talk briefly about his excuses for being delayed.
Then they heard bedsprings [in the next room] and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory!I believe we do!Yes!”And then the slippered feet and the cane.
Jack stood up and brushed his hair of his brow and shook down his cuffs and waited, and then the old man appeared in the door.“Ah, here you are!I knew you would come, yes!”
She could see her father’s surprise and regret.His eyes brimmed.Twenty years is a very long time.Jack offered his hand and said, “Sir,” and his father said, “Yes, shaking hands is very good.But I’ll put down this cane—There,” he said, when he had hooked it on the table’s edge.“Now,” he said, and he embraced his son.“Here you are!”He put the flat of his hand on Jack’s lapel, caressingly.“We have worried so much, so much.And here you are.”
Jack put his arms around his father’s shoulders carefully, as if he were frightened by the old man’s smallness or frailty, or embarrassed by it.
His father stepped back and looked at him again.He wiped his eyes.“Isn’t this something!” he said.“Here I’ve been wearing a necktie for days, waking and sleeping…and you’ve caught me in my nightshirt!And what is it?Almost noon!Ah!” he said, and laid his head against Jack’s lapel for a moment…he then took his cane and started toward the hallway.“Glory, if you could help me a little.After you put the coffee on.”And set off towards his room.
Jack said, “After all these years I guess he still knows when I’m hungover.”[3]
The raw tenderness and power of this scene is wondrous.The gritty mess of it…the humanness of it is real.We finish the parables of Jesus to be sure…but with complexities and ambivalences that continue.
Three things:First of all, this parable tells us that confession, repentance, feeling sorry for what you did is not a necessary prerequisite to forgiveness.It’s nice to be sure, but not necessary.We can make the case that the younger son was repentant … after all, he “came to himself” in that distant land and turned around his life.But we can make an even better case to say that he wasn’t repentant at all— he simply had a plan, a plan to survive.But neither the condition of his heart nor the health of his personal habits is of consequence because the father is too thrilled to see him alive to care.The party was on.This story tells us that confession, true repentance is not a condition of forgiveness, but rather the willing response to it.
Then there’s the elder brother.Stick-in-the-mud, joy-killer, Mr. Responsibility… who never would think of throwing a party for his friends because he’s too stingy and dull to have friends to begin with.He’s fuming at his Dad and own brother, who he will only identify as his father’s son…distancing himself.There’s going to be some awkward silences at the dinner table to come.Messy.
And the Father.All along it has been the father, the finder in these parables that has been the driving force.The joy of the father, the shepherd, the woman, is what it is all about, but in order to get to the finding, real work has to be done—not by a repentant coin, repentant sheep or son, but the finder.The father’s work in this story is that he dies to himself as he splits up his life’s work at the wishes of his son.He surrenders his position in the family and community in shame and becomes as though dead.He sees his youngest at a distance and “runs” to greet him—something never done by an adult male in that culture.Running was considered shameful.He swallows his pride and takes his child back as a full son and member of the community before they could perform a qetsatsah, a ritual of shaming and disowning done at that time to someone who lost their land to a gentile.The father has to leave the head table during the feast (bringing more shame on him) to go and plead with his eldest.
In other words, the father will go to all lengths when it comes to maintaining relationships…even killing his own pride, life’s savings and honor standing in the community.He’s willing to sacrifice everything to have the relationship.
Barbara Brown Taylor says that you cannot have peace and stay who you are; some kind of messy compromise…some give and take is going to be needed.
“You can’t have peace and stay exactly who you are, or even who you want to be. Sometimes you have to make huge concessions, sacrificing things as concrete as fields that have been in the family forever, along with things as intangible as honor, greatness, rightness and self-respect. Sometimes you have to run like a girl to protect your kin, even those who have done you irreparable harm. It’s all a matter of priorities, and for this father, reunion is all that matters. Reunion finds the lost and brings them home. Reunion brings the dead back to life.”[4]
No, the messes remain, even if reconciliation is found.The hurt remains.The memories remain.Forgiveness doesn’t mean “forgive and forget,” it doesn’t mean a clean slate.Forgiveness means simply that one is open to the future of the relationship despite what happened in the past.It means that whatever happened isn’t going to be a barrier to a future relationship.
Let’s close with that freeze-frame in the courtyard.Father and elder son standing still in silence as the loud party goes on around them.The father is going to stay there and love him eternally…until he comes back to life.Jesus is going to wait, in love, for those Pharisees and religious good people (who are so good they are good for nothing) to give up their own goodness long enough to join the party that is going on around them.Can we give up our own goodness, merits, religious credits, long enough to accept the grace of God and join the party too?Can we live life as the father, giving up—dying to self, in order to experience the joy of new life?
