The
Prodigal Son
Pastor Mathew Magera –
4/3/19 – Sermon 341
St. Thomas Lutheran Church,
Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
This
is no doubt one of the most known parables in the Bible, perhaps right behind
the parable of the Good Samaritan. What I love about this parable of the
prodigal son is that no matter how many times you hear it, there is always
something new to be discovered.
Jesus tells this parable in
a succession of parables in which he seeks to teach about finding something
that was lost. There is the parable of the lost sheep. There’s the parable of
the lost coin. Finally, there is this one, the parable of the prodigal son, or
as it may otherwise be known, the parable of the lost son. Lost sheep, lost
coin, lost son. You would think Jesus is trying to drive home a point here or
something.
In fact, Jesus is trying to
drive home a point. Before he speaks these parables, we find him in a position
in which the tax collectors and sinners were coming to hear him teach and
preach. The Pharisees happen to notice. These Pharisees always seem to be
around when Jesus is doing something counter cultural. It’s like they are
waiting for him to mess up just so they can point it out. It’s like people at
an annual meeting at a church waiting for something to be done that doesn’t
comply with the constitution just so they can stand up and point it out. This
is precisely what the Pharisees do here. They mutter to themselves. Pharisees
are good at muttering, by the way. They would be the people in the church
trying to get others on their side, muttering to as many as they can about
what’s going wrong. So the Pharisees do just that. They say, “This man welcomes
sinners and eats with them.” Trying to draw as much attention as they can they
happen to catch the attention of Jesus who proceeds to tells some parables.
Jesus is, of course, trying
to seek out the lost. That’s part of his ministry. But for the religious folk,
it’s social taboo. The religious people like the Pharisees see the lost as
those who are held at a safe distance. The lost are those whose sins are
matters of the second table of the Law, commandments 4 thru 10. They are
adulterers, thieves, fornicators. Their sins are public, they can be discussed
openly. They can be gossiped about. They’re worthless. You don’t want to get
near a crowd like this, the Pharisees say.
So, Jesus starts telling
these parables, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son but he’s not doing
it in a way that affirms him welcoming and eating with tax collectors and
sinners. No, instead, Jesus is addressing those pious Pharisees, those
religious folk that are more concerned about the letter of the law,
constitutions, who can vote at annual meetings, order, and organization. He’s
turning their remarks back to them. Jesus uses these parables in hopes of
reaching the most challenging of the lost to reach, the active members of the
congregation, the ones who feel like they are doing the right thing. In the
deepest depths of this parable, Jesus is targeting the twenty of us here
tonight.
As we enter this story, I
want us to pay attention to who the good guy is here. Whose side can we take?
Who is the upstanding citizen of this parable? How is Jesus using this parable
to address the Pharisees, the pious, the religious folk? Let’s start by taking
a look at the characters one by one starting with the younger son, who seems to
be the main character in the events that unfold.
Younger Son
A father has two sons. We
are introduced first to the younger of the two and the first thing we learn
about him is that he wants out. He’s done. Something has caused him to want to
cut ties early and go off and start a life of his own. This is not such a
foreign concept in this time. The younger son, according to the Law, gets a
lesser portion of the inheritance and is tasked with seeking their own fortune,
whereas the older brother would inherit the farm. So, he comes to his father,
complaining that he wants his share so he can leave. Normally this doesn’t
happen until the father has died so in a way he’s treating his father as if he
is dead, as if he were disposable. He’s cashing out. He’s getting outta dodge.
At this point we can only speculate the reasons why he is trying to get out. To
go so far as to say to his father, “you are dead to me” something must be truly
bugging him. Something is getting to him and he can’t take it anymore.
Already this younger son is
giving us some bad vibes but it gets worse when we see what he does. He gets
together all he had, sets off for another country, and he squanders his wealth
in wild living. The first place he goes is a brothel and gets caught in the
lives of the locals, the gamblers, the prostitutes. It’s a much different life
than the life he knew on the farm. But, we know that when things go wrong, they
have the chance of getting even worse. He spent everything he had but to make
matters worse, a famine came at the very same time. Now he was broke, he was
alone, and he was hungry. Here he is living in the pure freedom that he wanted
when he left home and look at him now, he’s got nothing. The most we can do at
this point is shake our heads at his lack of planning.
Well, he still has some
sense in him and he hires himself out for some farm work where he is left to
tend the pigs. He’s got to get in the mud and the muck with these unclean animals
and care for them. To earn his keep, to work toward a better life, he is
reduced to walking around in the mud, getting dirty, becoming unrecognizable as
the son he once was. He’s in such bad shape that even the slop he’s feeding the
pigs looks like a five-course meal and even in his condition nobody gave him
anything.
He was literally in the pit
when he recognized what was going on. He started to get smart pretty quickly
here. “The servants at my father’s farm get treated better than I do here in a
foreign country. What am I doing here?” And so he makes plans to return home
but knows this would not be a simple task. Why would his family receive him?
He’d left. He’d said, “you are dead to me” and walked away. Why would they want
him back? Perhaps if he can convince his father to hire him as one of the
servants he would have a chance at a better life. But, he better start
rehearsing his plan so he doesn’t screw it up. And that’s exactly what he does.
He starts rehearsing over and over the words he will say to his father.
“Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to
be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.” Over and over he
would say this. When he had it as good as he could, he stepped out of the muck,
covered in mud that consisted of who knows what, smelling like last month’s
leftovers in the refrigerator that got pushed ot the back and forgot were
there, looking nothing like the young man he was when he left. Off he goes
hoping for at least enough compassion to live as a hired servant. He’s getting
closer and he’s getting ready for the moment of true confession.
Older Son
We know what happens when
the younger son comes home and his father sees him and we’ll get to that in a
minute, but I want to shift gears briefly and talk about the older brother. We
haven’t heard from him yet in the story, we just might discover he had been an
integral part of this story since its beginning. Once we get an idea of who he
is, you might look at the story in a different way.
After the younger son comes
home and the party starts, the older brother is found out in the field doing
his chores and he started hearing the sounds of that party starting up. The
celebratory shouts, the music for the dancing. What the heck is going on over
there, I’m trying to work here. When he calls the servants in and finds out
that the reason for this party is because his brother had come home, he was
angry. I mean, this guy was ticked. No one’s ever thrown me a party and now
this idiot comes back and they throw him a party. That’s just wrong. So here we
start to get a sense of who this older brother is. He’s a jerk, one of the
biggest ones in all of scripture too. It’s like when you’re driving down the
road and a car comes up behind you wanting an intimate relationship with your
back bumper and starts laying on his horn wanting you to go faster. That’s the
older brother in this story. Now that we see this, the earlier parts of the
story start to make sense. At the beginning of the story, the younger brother
wants his share of the inheritance and he wants out. Why? If you had to work
with this older brother each and every day, I bet you would be wanting your
share of the inheritance too. He’s wound up tighter than a cheap watch. He’s a
time keeper, a rule follower, his life is lived on a strict schedule, he’s
self-righteous, and he’s always right. It’s enough to make you want to fly away
to a deserted island. Perhaps his father knew of this too and had sympathy for
the younger son and wished him well when he left. Regardless, when this
firstborn son finds out about the party, he’s ticked and he wants no part of
it.
Father
Neither of these two sons,
at this point, are really found in good light. The younger one gives up and
then falls apart. The older one is a vicious tyrant. Let’s look at the father,
now. We might say we have the most sympathy for him in all of this but in all
honesty the father is not much better. When the younger son comes to him
wanting his inheritance, he just allows his son to come in and take what he
wants. The father gives it to him when he had no reason to and he lets his son
go. Not that there is anything wrong with letting him go, but he certainly did
not have to give him his share before he left. We could easily criticize the father
here, “you shouldn’t have done that.” His neighbors likely would have. When we
see the father again, having moved on from his son walking out on the family,
the father sees him while he is still far off. His neighbors would be
wondering, oh I wonder what kind of a lesson he’s going to teach this young
guy. They’re expecting something not very good to happen. But, something
different happens. Forgetting his dignity and the social expectations of his
actions, he hikes up his robe and runs down the road to meet his son. I mean,
how embarrassing. How humiliating. How unlike a father he was. Again, we might
want to say, “you shouldn’t have done it.” But, he did. He threw his arms
around his smelly son and kissed him. He won’t even let his son finish his speech.
He interrupts and calls for a party.
So, now we find ourselves at
the party. But, someone’s not there. Someone’s out pouting in the field,
kicking rocks around, swearing under his breath. He’s no doubt getting what he
deserved, shutting himself out. But, the father isn’t done ruining his own
credibility here. In the middle of the party, the father walks out to his older
son and begs him to come in. First, you don’t leave a party when you are the
host. Second, you don’t beg your children to do anything. This father, as word
is likely getting around, is losing all of his credibility here. He is a
disgrace of a man.
* * *
Who’s the good guy here?
None of these characters can be seen in good light. The Pharisees Jesus was
telling this parable to likely had a fit with each of them. Sure, it could be
called the parable of the prodigal son. It could be called the parable of the
lost son. But, I think more appropriately named, we can call this the parable
of the dysfunctional family. Everyone in this story has a problem. The father
is an enabler and he’s weak. The younger son is emotionally unstable and a
disgrace to his family. The older son is a self-righteous jerk.
But, even if we can’t
determine the good from a family like this, where are we in the story? We’re
right in the middle of it. We live in this reality. We have dysfunctional
families too. We have dysfunctional churches, dysfunctional communities. We
know each of these characters. We know the enablers like the father. We know
those who are emotionally unstable and those disgraces to society like the
younger son. We know the self-righteous jerks too.
I said you can read this parable time and time again
and see it a different way each time. This time in my reading of it, I see the
older son as the subject of the parable. I see him as the one who is lost.
While we, without thinking much of it, may see the father as the good guy and
the godly character, one thing I notice at the end of the parable is that not
even the father can make the older son come in. He stands there at complains to
his father and his father does his best to reassure him that he’s in the best
of situations if he would just pull his head out of the ground and look around.
But, when the story ends, he’s still lost. And so are we. At the end of the
story, there’s a party going on, but you can only imagine that first
interaction between the two brothers, and it won’t be pretty. You can only
imagine what ridicule the father will receive when word gets around town what
he’s done. It’s at this point, in the complexity of these questions, when we
need to take our eyes off of the story and onto the story teller.
Where’s Jesus in all of
this? Well, there he is. He’s right
there. There is no resolution to the story without him. He’s coming to see us.
He’s meeting us in Word and Sacrament. He’s saying this is a good place for him
to be, with us. There’s enough sinners around here to keep him busy. He gives
himself for us. He’s who the older son needs to provide him a way when he’s
lost. He’s the one we need to provide us a way when we are lost. Jesus does
have many of the qualities of the father. Jesus can’t keep us from walking away
like the younger son does. We can’t keep Jesus from hiking up his robes and
running to us like the father did when the younger son returned. Jesus can’t
force us to come into the party. We can’t keep Jesus from inviting us in.
Still, while the story ends with us questioning what happens to the lost son,
we are met face to face with the storyteller, the one who is the answer to
those questions we have. Jesus cannot be held back. Jesus could condemn all
three of these main characters but instead a feast is prepared and we are the
ones invited to the table. Grace is spilling over. Even while the older brother
is a jerk. Even while the younger brother squanders his gifts. Even while the
father breaks expectations, grace spills over. Jesus has gathered us and taken
us, the lost, into his care. This is what God’s grace looks like. This is Jesus
being Jesus, trying to meet the self-righteous jerks like the Pharisees, the
religious ones who are hell bent on rules, organization, and proper order.
Jesus meets the ones who mutter about his ministry. Jesus meets the ones who
think they have it right.
Just like the father brought
in the younger son, he’d like to bring in the older one too. Jesus would like
to bring in the Pharisees. He love sinners, even those pious religious ones
too. And he loves us and he keeps calling. He keeps calling that older brother.
He keeps calling you. He’s not going to stop caring. He’s not going to quit.
Come into the party. You have a place at the table. To God be the glory, now
and always. Amen.