A Man and His Sons: Prodigal

Photo of The Very Rev. Dean Terry White by The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Last Sunday night millions of Americans tuned in to watch Hollywood’s annual celebration of the Academy Awards.  Sometimes we watch because we are rooting for a particular actor or movie to win an Oscar. Sometimes we tune in to enjoy the entertainment or marvel at the fashions on display. And a few of us watch because “someone else watched basketball all day and now it’s my turn, and besides I’ve hidden the remote” – at least I’ve heard that happens in certain households. 

To enrich Oscar-watching I’d like to devise the Acceptance Speech Game. Scoring is based on if a speech is sincere, spontaneous or memorized, funny or boring, and extra points are awarded for a speech “worth remembering at all.”  Last week, when Sandra Bullock thanked her mother, that speech would score high points.

There was an earlier speech that night that got my attention. Joe Letteri won the Oscar for Visual Effects for his work on Avatar. He concluded his remarks by saying: The world we live in is just as amazing as the one we created for you. (You can read the entire speech or watch it here.)

On a night devoted to honoring much that is not real, from animation and costumes to the enhancements courtesy of Botox and cosmetic plastic surgery, those words would have been easy to miss:  The world we live in is just as amazing as the one fantasy creates for us.

One of the most amazing realities of this real world that God has created is forgiveness. The power and new life that comes from both giving and receiving forgiveness is truly amazing. 

In this fifteenth chapter of his Gospel, Luke tells a series of parables in response to the grumbling of the scribes and Pharisees.  The cause of their grumpiness has to do with the amount of time Jesus is spending with sinners. Luke chooses his words carefully. The issue is, Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them.  In response, Jesus tells parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and our Gospel for today which is often referred to as the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

The adjective “prodigal” has two meanings.  When used as a noun, prodigal refers to one given to wasteful luxury or extravagance.  Similarly, the first meaning of “prodigal” as an adjective is: rashly or wastefully extravagant.  But the second meaning simply reads: giving or given in abundance; lavish or profuse. In light of both definitions, all three main characters in this parable are prodigal.

In his book The Parables of Grace, Father Robert Capon puts his spin on what he names The Parable of the Father Who Lost Two Sons. (I’m paraphrasing extensively here.) He writes:

The story begins with the younger son saying to the father, "Divide the inheritance between me and my brother." What he’s in effect saying is, "Dear Dad, drop dead now, legally. Put your will into effect and just retire out of the whole business of being anything to anybody, and let us have what is coming to us." The younger son gets the money and the older brother gets the farm, and the younger brother heads for the big city. What he does is spend all his money on wild living. When he finally is in want and working, slopping hogs for a farmer and wishing that he could eat what he’s feeding the pigs, he can't stand it. He comes to himself and thinks, "You know, I've got to do something. How many of my father’s servants have bread enough to spare, while I'm starving? I know what must do."

Almost every preacher makes this the boy's repentance. It's not his repentance.  No use of the Greek metanoia here. This is just one more dumb plan for his life, triggered by an empty stomach. He says, "I will go to my father and I will say, ‘Father, I've sinned against heaven and before you.'" That's true. "And I'm no longer worthy to be called your son." He gets that one right, too. But the next thing he says is dead wrong: "Make me one of your hired servants." He knows—he thinks he knows—he can't go back as a dead son, and therefore he says, "I will now go back as somebody who can earn my father's favor again. I will be a good worker." This is not a real repentance, it's just a plan for a life.

But, whatever it is, is enough to get him headed home.

What follows is that the father is sitting on the front porch of the farm house that doesn’t belong to him anymore. He’s sitting in a rocker that belongs to his older son who is now the owner of the farm. While sitting there he sees the younger boy coming down the road from far away. He rushes off the porch, runs a half mile down the road, throws his arms around the boy's neck and kisses him.

This is all that Jesus does with this scene. In the whole parable the father never says one single word to the younger son. In telling this parable Jesus makes the embrace and the kiss say, "I have found my son."  
In this scene, the boy who has come home from wasting his life, never gets his confession out of his mouth until after the kiss, until after the embrace. What this says to you and me is that confession is not a pre-condition of forgiveness. In this scheme, it’s something that you do after you know you have been forgiven. Confession is not something you do in order to get forgiveness. It’s something you do in order to celebrate the forgiveness you got for nothing. That’s the very definition of grace. Nobody can earn forgiveness. The Prodigal Younger Son knows he's a dead son. He thinks he can't come home as a son, and yet in his father's arms, because of his father’s forgiveness, he rises from the dead and then is restored to his family.

Next, the father, saying not a word to the younger son, turns to the servants and says, "Bring the best robe, bring a ring for his finger and shoes for his feet, kill the fatted calf and let us eat and be merry for this, my son, was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found."   Now all that matters is to celebrate the finding of the lost and the resurrection of the dead.

Father Capon continues: What has happened so far? The father died at the beginning, when he gave his sons their inheritance. The younger son died in the far country. He came home dead and the father raises him.

The party is in full swing. Next, Jesus, in telling the story, points to the third main character: Mr. Responsibility, Mr. Elder Brother. He hears the music and the dancing and asks one of the servants, "What is this all about? I’m in charge. I didn't commission a party." The servant says, "No, no, your brother has come home and your father has killed the fatted calf because he received him safe and sound." The older brother is angry. He is in the midst of the party but he will have no part of it. And he let’s his father have it.
"Look," he says to his father, "all these years I served you and I never broke one of your commandments and you never even gave me a stringy goat so that I could make merry with my friends. But when this your son (he doesn't say, ‘my brother’), has wasted your substance with riotous living and harlots, when this prodigal, wasteful son comes home you kill the fatted calf!"

The father goes out in the courtyard to plead with the older son. He goes out there in the same way as he ran to meet his younger son: he wants to raise the elder son from the dead. This father never gives up on either of his sons.

Here Capon creates a speech he imagines the father making:  "What do you mean I never gave you a goat for a party? If you wanted to have a great dinner for all your friends every week of the year, you had the money and the resources. You own this place. You have the resources to build enough stalls and buy a calf to fatten for every week of the year, but you didn't. And why didn't you do that? Because you're a bean counter, son. Because you're always keeping track of everybody, including their faults, including mine. And that's your problem. But I have the solution for you. Go in to the party, kiss your brother, and have a drink. Let this other stuff go, because right now you are in hell, and I came to point you to the way out.”  [http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/Capon_4414.htm]

I would add to the father’s speech: Join the party. Forgive. I know what I’m talking about. I, too, have been in hell. And I know what it means to be forgiven, as well as to forgive another.  It means new life. Grasp it before you waste another day not being able to forgive, before you spend another day dead.

How did Luke begin this 15th chapter? By telling us the religious experts grumbled because Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them. The scribes and Pharisees saw sinners, not brothers and sisters, not prodigals to be welcomed home. They didn’t count beans- they counted the sins of others, and failed to see their own.  Jesus saw sisters and brothers to run to, put his arms around, and throw a party for, for the lost have found, the dead have been raised.  Our Lord is a Prodigal Savior.  And he calls us to be the Prodigal Church.

This Gospel comes to us at the mid-point of Lent.  We are journeying toward the Passion, God’s prodigal response to a prodigal humanity.  God’s lavish, extravagant love forgives, cleanses, and restores each and every one of us, raising us from death to life, before we even say we are sorry.  In the Passion the Father runs to us and throws his arms around us and makes us daughters and sons.

In a few moments as we lift our hearts to the Lord and offer God, our Prodigal God, our thanks and praise, the celebrant will pray: “You bid your faithful people cleanse their hearts and prepare with joy for the Paschal feast.”  The door to the feast is forgiveness.