We’ve been having a great time
over the past couple of weeks on Wednesday nights for our “Common Ground”
discussions between Christians and Jews. Rabbi Josh and I have been really
excited—we had more than a hundred folks last Wednesday night at Temple Har
Shalom and we’ll be back here this week talking about the nature of God.
though, are the ways in which we believe so much in common, yet also have
significant differences. Christianity shares its foundational roots in Judaism,
but there is also a significant difference when it comes to Jesus and in how we
view God’s engagement with the world.
book What’s So Amazing About Grace? tells
the story of a conference on comparative religions held in Britain several
decades ago.
A group of theologians and other religious intellectuals were discussing
whether any single belief was totally unique to Christianity. Different
possibilities were put forth. Perhaps the Incarnation? No, other religions,
including the Greek and Roman mythologies, had stories of gods becoming human
in form. Resurrection? No, other religions also had stories of people returning
from the dead.
The debate continued for some time, when writer C.S. Lewis wandered into the
room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked.
They told him they were discussing what Christianity’s unique contribution
might be among world religions. Very forthrightly, Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s
easy. It’s grace.”
After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. The concept that God’s love
comes to us free of charge, with no strings attached, opposes every bit of
human logic. The Buddhists have an eightfold path to enlightenment, the Hindus
have the concept of Karma, the Jews seek to adhere to the Torah and Muslims
have their code of law from the Koran. Each religion has its own way for people
to earn divine approval. Only Christianity dares to declare God’s love
unconditional — grace.
about—a scandalous text in Jesus’ day, a text that’s all about grace. It is
perhaps the most famous of Jesus’ parables because it expresses in powerful
ways how Jesus viewed the nature of God. The genesis of the story occurs when Jesus
is confronted by a group of religious leaders who demand to know why he has
taken the extraordinary step of eating with tax collectors and sinners—people
on the outside, people whom religion was condemning. In response, he tells this
famous story, using a few different scenes that remind us of the uniqueness of
Jesus’ own mission of grace—a mission that turns failure into triumph.
a kid with his hand out, demanding (not asking) that he get his share of
inheritance right now, up front. A kid with his hand out isn’t an unusual
picture, as any parent knows, but in this case it’s a particularly shocking one
given the cultural conventions of the time. Jewish law dictated that when the
father passed away, the eldest son would get two-thirds of the estate (a
“double portion”) and the next youngest son one-third. But, as Jesus tells it,
Dad was still alive and well. So the younger son commits an egregious gaffe by
basically saying, “Pop, I wish you were already dead. Forget the family
business and, for that matter, the whole family. I’m outta here.”
Although it wasn’t unusual for a father to distribute property in advance, as
in the case of marriage, Jesus strongly implies that the younger son’s demand
is disrespectful, rebellious and foolish — a clear violation of the commandment
to honor one’s parents (Exodus 20:12). In a culture where family and community
always took priority over the individual, the kid’s self-centered demand would
have raised the eyebrows of those hearing the parable for the first time.
They’d definitely lump him in with those “sinners” that the Pharisees and
scribes were accusing Jesus of befriending.
As if to hammer home that very point, Jesus offers scene two: the suddenly wealthy kid living it up in some
foreign (read “Gentile”) country. There he “squanders” all the property (the
Greek word can also mean “scatters”) by living a wild and undisciplined
lifestyle. But after he’s blown it all and is flat broke, he hires himself out
to a Gentile pig farmer, which is about as un-Jewish as he can get. Pigs were
an abomination to Jews (Leviticus 11:7; Deuteronomy 14:8), and people who cared
for swine were cursed. The picture of a young man, hungry and destitute,
sitting in the filth of a pigsty envying the slop his porcine charges were
horking down would have qualified as a major failure. Jesus seems to be making
the point that this kid is even farther gone than any of the “sinners” with
whom he’s sitting down to dinner.
But the pigsty is also a place of revelation. In the midst of piles of pig poo,
the boy “came to himself” and decided to go home. Notice, though, that at least
initially it’s more of a pragmatic decision than a penitential one. He’s a
hired hand to the pig farmer and gets nothing, so he figures that if he goes
home he can at least get hired on to the family business and get what the other
servants are getting, which is way better than pig fodder. Yeah, he’ll have to
do a mea culpa, but at least
he’ll have a full belly.
Of course, we know the next scene — that of the father racing down the driveway
to embrace his long-lost sinner son and calling for a major-league party to be
thrown in his honor. Here we might picture Rembrandt’s beautiful painting The Return of the Prodigal Son, with the
penitential son kneeling at the feet of his father, whose face reflects a deep
love and sense of relief. It’s a picture that Christians have looked to for
centuries as a reminder of God’s love.
In a first-century context, however, Jesus’ hearers might have been more likely
to initially assign the biggest
failure in the whole story to the father, who is really more the subject of
the parable than the prodigal son for whom it’s more readily known.
In the first place, the Pharisees and scribes would certainly have been shocked
at the father’s willingness to give the boy his inheritance in the first place.
A good father would have squashed such rebellion in a child rather than give in
to it. And then, after the insolent boy has the nerve to actually show his face
back on the family farm, the father disgraces himself by running out to meet him “while he was
still far off” (v. 20). In first-century Israel, it was considered the height
of indignity for a man, especially a family patriarch, to run anywhere for
anything, let alone to run out from the house to meet the one who had
dishonored him. Not only that, but the father actually forgives the boy and
restores him to the status of son, even though the kid had disowned himself
from the family. Where was the rebuke? Where was the lesson? Where was the
justice in all that? Dad was a failure, here, for sure.
The older son thinks so, too. He can’t believe that Dad is doing such a heinous
thing for his stupid kid brother. He stands outside the party and angrily
pouts, so the father once again disgraces himself to come out and “plead with
him” (v. 28). The older son gives dad a tongue-lashing, reminding dad that he’s
been a loyal son the whole time but he has nothing to show for it (except
two-thirds of the inheritance, which Dad points out in verse 31). The big
brother wants justice, wants retribution, wants what’s coming to him, but all
Dad says is, “[W]e had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours
was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found” (v. 32).
Read the gospels and you see that Jesus had a habit of turning failures into
the heroes of his stories. The “Good Samaritan” (a first-century oxymoron, as
we learned last week) in Luke 10 and the “Dishonest Manager” (Luke 16:1-13) are
just a couple of examples that frame this particular story in Luke. Jesus
picked losers such as tax collectors to be his disciples and partied with
people who everyone in polite and pious society would have considered to be
failures on a whole lot of levels. He didn’t seem to mind being pictured as a
failure because he knew that was the only way that the people who were seen as
failures would come to him. The parable of the loving father and his two sons
was designed to invite self-righteous Pharisees and scribes to see how they had
become the older brother, failing to experience the joy and celebration that
God does when wayward sinners come home. But it was also designed to remind us
all of the embarrassing lengths to which God, in the person of Jesus, would go
to make that homecoming a reality.
do we know that there is grace in abundance. When we expect wrath, God
surprises us with forgiveness, meeting us on the way back home.
more than 25 years ago, a youth walking by the old log Muskego Chapel on the
Luther Seminary campus in St. Paul, Minnesota, peeped in its window and noticed
a beautiful chalice sitting on the altar.
He broke into the chapel and stole it. Naturally, the young boy didn’t know
that this chalice had been a gift to Luther Seminary in 1936 from Norway’s King
Olaf. In October 2006, Pastor Glenn Berg-Moberg from St. Anthony Park Lutheran
Church, a neighbor of the seminary, called Luther President Rick Bliese, asking
for a meeting to discuss “an interesting matter.” The boy who had stolen the
chalice, now a grown man, had visited his congregation. He was dying of cancer
and had one request: He wanted to return the stolen chalice to the seminary. He
had kept the pewter chalice in perfect condition. It had sat on his mantel for
25 years. Finally, its presence had become a source of discomfort and disease.
Before the man died, he wanted it returned to its rightful owner and place,
Luther Seminary and Old Muskego Chapel.
President Bliese received the gift of “the prodigal chalice” with surprise and
delight. Letters were written to this dying man expressing appreciation, as
well as forgiveness for his deed. The lost had been found; now the blind were
gaining their sight. The man received the letters with gratitude and died soon
afterward.
Now this chalice has become doubly special because it was returned after
serving the purpose for which it was really intended: calling sinners to
repentance and forgiveness. It has become a powerful sign of Luther Seminary’s
mission.
A chalice as a sign of forgivenss—a beautiful image. But Christianity’s
ultimate sign is an even more iconic reminder that God will go to great lengths
to forgive us. Lent reminds us that the story of Jesus inevitably moves toward
the cross, the ultimate picture of failure and disgrace. Jesus was willing to
risk the embarrassment of being stripped, beaten and hanged naked to die and to
be held up as a failure for the whole world to see on that Friday. It is
through failure that God chooses to save the world. As Paul would later put it,
the cross was and is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God
and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and
God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:23-25).
In his book Six Hours One Friday,
Max Lucado wonders if Jesus used his hands while telling the parable of the
loving father and his two sons. When he got to the point in the story where the
overjoyed father runs out to meet his broken-down son, did he open his arms
wide to illustrate the point? “Whether he did that day or not, I don’t know,”
says Lucado. “But I know that he did later. He later stretched his hands as
open as he could. He forced his arms so wide apart that it hurt. And to prove
that those arms would never fold and those hands would never close, he had them
nailed open. They still are.”
who will go to embarrassing, painful lengths to welcome us home. In a world
that wishes God was dead, a world that is constantly running after pleasure,
wealth, and a multitude of false gods, a world that finds itself wallowing with
pigs…Jesus tells us that God still has not abandoned us. God waits for us to
come home.
you a prodigal, having run from God? Are you like the elder brother, thinking
that you deserve something better? Hear the good news—God wants to meet you
today.
