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The Fourth Sunday
in Lent-C-RCL
Joshua 5:9-12 Who Is That Prodigal?
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the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, There’s one in every family – a prodigal, I mean. Chances are good that there’s one in your family. Do you miss him or her? How long has it been since you spoke with that person? Do you know where they are and how to get in touch with them? There’s one in my family, but it’s too painful for me to talk about him, so I’m going to pry into other people’s families. I guess I’m about to quit preaching and go to meddling. By definition a prodigal is wasteful. A prodigal is someone who wastes the family’s love and attention – and the family’s money – throws it away on people who we think don’t deserve it. Maybe that prodigal is you. Maybe it’s me. Someone in our sphere of influence is a prodigal. Someone we know is so wasteful that they are alienated from family, friends, and maybe even from God. Maybe we could be a neighbor to a prodigal. Every time we read this story in Luke’s Gospel we are prone to say, “Shame on that younger son. He should never have asked his daddy to cash in that annuity he had stashed back for his son’s inheritance. He should never have spent the big bucks on a fast car to impress the young ladies. He should never have gotten into the party scene because look what happened. He had friends while the money lasted, but those drugs took him down and he lost everything. Now he is taking work that is beneath him if he can even get that. Here he is trained as a chef and he is feeding swine. This is embarrassing. If only he had exhibited a good Protestant work ethic instead of being so foolish and so wasteful.” But it gets worse before it gets better. What he had really wasted was his relationship as his father’s son. Even when he decides to return, the younger son mentally squanders his sonship. He remembers that hired people in his father’s house have enough to eat. So he devises a plan to get hired at the farm, but he is still running away. Hired people were not his father’s sons, so they had a different relationship with the father. If they did not like the wages or the circumstances they faced, they could leave when the chips were down. Thank God that the Father in this story did not let him get away with that. There are those who want to let the Prodigal Son off the hook and say that he had a severe case of teenage rebellion. He was just growing up and since he was the baby of the family, his dad had found a new way to coddle him. But in the culture of that day, asking for your inheritance was a way of saying to your father, “I wish you were dead. I don’t want to be in this family any more.” The minute the younger son had those thoughts – before he ever asked for his inheritance – he was already in a far country. He had already isolated himself. Are there people in your family or in this church family who have withdrawn or isolated themselves? Pray for them and try to draw them back in. If they physically head off to a far country, you might not see them again for many a year. Meanwhile back at the farm, we don’t pay much attention to the older son until the situation explodes. Maybe that’s because we think he is taken care of. We have checked him off our list of people to pay attention to. We might also think that since the older son had it made, he should be happy. He was set to inherit twice as much as the younger son in the first place. But on second glance, we see that he was not behaving as the one who would inherit it all. The older son did not live into his sonship if he was “working like a slave” and not enjoying the daily presence of his father. We might say of him, “Look at how he squandered the father’s love and said a radical ‘no’ to his inheritance. All this time he was living in the father’s house and had everything at his disposal, but he behaved as if none of that was his. His grudges brought him to the boiling point. Whom was he trying to impress with his false humility?” He wound up with an “us against them” attitude and became a nay-sayer and joy-killer upon the return of his brother, who he did not even want to claim. In such an abundant household, there should have been plenty to go around – plenty of food, plenty of love, plenty of grace. Why should he be so legalistic? And finally in our parable, there is the father. He squandered his love on both his sons. One thing that is just so annoying about God is that when it comes to sinners, God has absolutely no taste. God will take in every one of us, regardless of how far afield we might have gone. God knows what we need before we ask, and God gives us more than we can ask or imagine. God probably wastes a lot of lavish love on us that we don’t even notice. In our Gospel reading for today, the initial complaint against Jesus is that “he welcomes sinners and eats with them.” By this time in Jesus’ ministry, the complaints against him were mounting. Jesus was seen as wasteful – prodigal. Jesus knew that those who collected taxes for the occupying Roman government were outcasts from society. They had wasted their Jewish heritage, yet he welcomed them into his presence. The Pharisees, who were guardians of the law, made sure everyone knew that. God knows that Pharisees need love, too. In Jesus’ parable, the younger son comes to his senses, but the story is open-ended. We don’t know whether the older son ever came to his senses. We can meditate on this for years and overlay our own stories and the stories of others onto it. At any given time in our lives we might be the wasteful younger son. We might be the wasteful older son – the one who holds grudges and won’t welcome the sinner. Or we might have flashes of spiritual maturity and behave like the father – eyes strained from looking for the straying one to return, welcoming that person with open arms. In a moment of maturity we might try to make peace between the returning person and the one who has always been there. Pastors might take a lesson from this and celebrate with those persons who are faithful in tending to their spiritual lives. Maybe at some point in this Lenten season, it will dawn on us that Easter is coming when the church will baptize not only infants, but also adults who are returning to God after a trip to the far country. In the early church, such people were given long white robes to show that they were welcomed home in the communion of saints. God’s love is abundant, prodigal, wasteful. I hope we can enjoy that. Let us pray: (“Abundance Prayer for the Wasteful” by Mary Gordon) O God, in Your
benevolence We pray to You,
whose love is prodigal,
On the grounds of Honey Creek
The Rev. Linda McCloud, Pastor |
