A sermon on the Prodigal Son, Luke 15: 11-32 Lent 4 2022

Most of us know and love the story of the prodigal son. – it’s one of those stories that stick in the mind –that’s the mark of a really good story. Perhaps we’re too familiar with it. If we heard it first at Sunday School, we learned that it’s a parable about God’s enduring love, even for the lost and straying. And, of course, it is! But it’s also a great deal more than this.

We’ve lost the dramatic impact it had in its first telling. Our culture is so very different from the group of people surrounding Jesus when he told this parable. We can even have a different take on the prodigal son. We’re used to our young people going offshore for their big OE. They can be gone over the horizon for years, and sometimes there are long stretches of time between contacts home. Maybe not so many now as there were when I was young, what with email and text messaging and skype, but there can still be spaces of time when they want to do their own thing without advice from home.

We’re a very mobile society. We’re used to our young people leaving home for a whole variety of other reasons. For education, for work, for marriage. We’re used to them making their own decisions about their careers. We don’t have a general expectation that children will follow their parents into the family business or trade. Even for our farmers, there’s no guarantee that children will take over the family farm. (Although at least we’ve lost the tradition that it’s only sons who can take this on!) We may even think it’s OK for youngsters to sow their wild oats before settling down – although we certainly don’t want them to go completely off the rails. And, mostly, they don’t. So we miss some of the impact of this particular story in its particular context. Because there, in Jesus’ time and place, children –or at least sons – didn’t move out. Their life journeys were made within the context of family and small community, where everyone knew everyone else.

We can miss something else too. In rural eastern cultures today, as in first century Palestine, the way the son behaved was absolutely scandalous. It’s more than scandalous – it broke apart family and community mores. When he asked for his inheritance – and sold it off to finance his high life – he not only divorced himself from his family. He also put himself outside the community. He did more. By asking for his money while his father was still living, he was saying that he wished for his father’s death. He made himself an outcast in every possible way.

Jesus’ hearers would all have got that point. And it made the father’s behaviour even more shocking. Adult males simply didn’t run in public –something else that our culture doesn’t recognise as undesirable. Nor would they make the first approach. It was the son’s duty to approach his father. But we do recognise that this story of lavish love and forgiveness is a metaphor of God’s love for us!

Let’s look a little further into this story. Which of the three main characters do you identify with? Who are you in the story? Probably most of us would say we’re not good enough to identify with the father. But I think all of us have aspects of each of these three at different times of our lives. The story still speaks to us today, even in our very different culture.

Take the younger son. We don’t have to pack our bags and catch the next plane out to leave home. How many of us have turned away from our home base at one time or another? Sometimes it’s because we want to break out and take risks. The life we’re living seems flat, boring, unexciting – something else beckons on the horizon, and we’re off. Sometimes we leave almost without noticing it. We drift along aimlessly, ‘taking things as they come,’ and all of a sudden, there comes a time when we’ve lost sight of something we once held dear. The life we live, and the community we live in, with all its seductive calls for us to succeed, to make money, to look after ourselves, can be a powerful magnet.

Of course, there are times when taking risks is the right way forward – what we need is the wisdom to see when to strike out in a new direction, and the courage to make the move. But there are times when the choices are the wrong ones, and we come to ourselves in a strange landscape. If we’ve left in our youth, it’s often in the middle years that the realisation comes to us that we’ve lost the way.

The great Italian poet Dante gave us one of the most terrifying images of a man becoming aware of loss and sin, blocking his path to God. He wrote, ‘in the middle of this life we are bound upon, I came to myself in a dark wood’ and the abyss was opening at his feet. He was suddenly aware of himself, in a misery so great that he would not willingly remember it – except – that his way home led him, in the end, to ‘the source and occasion of all joy’ – the hill of Zion.

In Luke’s story, this son went far off into a foreign land and lost everything he took with him – even his identity as a son. And for us, the further we run – or drift – from an awareness of God, the less able we are to hear God’s voice, and the more we are entangled in the manipulations and power games of the world around us. We can come to the point when we don’t even think it’s possible to have a safe home. The more we try to be like all those others around us who look more successful, the more we’re likely to brood about ourselves as failures, and the more we’re likely to allow envy and resentfulness a place.

Luke’s prodigal son became fully aware of how lost he was when no-one around him took the slightest interest in him. He was profoundly isolated. It took the shock of this realisation to bring him to turn around and choose life. Once he made that choice, he could find his way home. We may never get to that point of despair, but there will be times when we become aware of our lostness. Whenever this happens, God desires us to choose life, and to reclaim our identity as loved children of a loving God. The way is open for God to bring us home. But, like the prodigal son, we do have to take those first steps back.

And then there’s the elder son. We’ve been there too. The elder son is the one who’s conscientious, hardworking, dutiful, and responsible. The one who makes sure that elderly parents are looked after, that the bills are paid on time, that buildings are maintained and gardens kept in order, that the work is finished and the deadlines are met. Good, solid, civic and family virtues, all of them. Probably the elder sons among us, if they have a church affiliation, will be faithful sons and daughters of the church, and be on all the committees and work parties.

The danger for us, as for the elder son in Luke’s story, is that we might turn all this into duty without joy. There can be an edge of envy for those prodigal ones who have so much more fun. There can even be a self-imposed martyrdom because here we are, doing all this work so that everything runs smoothly, and no-one gives us any credit for it. They don’t notice us. It’s those flamboyant prodigals that get all the kudos. Maybe there’s even a little niggling regret that we didn’t seize opportunities and spread our wings, and a fear that we’ve become boring in a society that puts so much weight on having the approval and admiration of others. We might also come to a place where we start to lay claim to the work we do and the talents we offer, forgetting the giver of all gifts.

There’s also the very real danger that we won’t be able to accept the prodigal’s return. That there’ll be a nagging feeling that it’s all too easy. The one who left, and had a riotously good time – or so we think -, and a whole range of experiences that we’ve never come near, shouldn’t have had an easy passage home. The prodigal should have been left in exile – even when he or she had reached the bottom of the pit. After all, we stayed home and kept our heads down. We want our rights. Just coming back and saying sorry, isn’t enough for us. Like deathbed repentances it’s not just – it’s not fair – it’s favouritism at its worst. And feeling this, we’ll stand forever outside the celebration, turning our backs on the light and the music and the feasting, full of wounded pride, narrow, stiff and sad.

Both sons needed healing and forgiveness. Both sons needed to come home. Both sons needed the embrace of a loving father. But the paradox of Luke’s story, and probably of ours as well, is that the one who found the conversion hardest was the one who never left.

And then there’s the father. Everything in him is subordinate to his joy in a son restored. The whole tone of the story shifts when the prodigal son comes into sight – suddenly there’s pace and movement. The father runs to meet his son, he bustles the household into action – he’s everywhere at once making sure that the celebration will be complete. What we sometimes miss is that he goes out to bring in the elder son as well. He moves towards both of his children. God desires all of God’s creation to turn towards God, and God will rejoice whenever any created being makes that choice.

But – why is it so hard for us to identify with the father in this story and so easy to identify with either or both of the sons? Yes, we all have some seeds of greed and anger, lust and resentment, frivolity and jealousy somewhere within us We act out our human brokenness in many different ways. But why do we dodge the issue at the heart of this story? The real question isn’t ‘how do you feel like the sons?’ but ‘do you want to feel like the father?’ Do you want to be not just the one who is forgiven, but the one who forgives? Not just the one who is welcomed home joyfully, but also the one who opens wholehearted welcome. Not just the one who receives compassion, but also the one who offers compassion.

It is hard. It’s hard enough for us to live as though we truly believed that all our neighbours are the objects of God’s amazing love. Whenever the Church proclaims this – and the members say yes! – there have been some unvoiced exceptions to this statement that all are citizens of Zion, with all the rights and responsibilities that go with that. For a long time ‘everyone’ meant ‘everyone except women and slaves and aliens.’ Then we included the women. Then we included slaves. Then we began to recognise the aliens. It’s a work in progress. Today we’re asked to make that affirmation regardless of faith traditions, or sexual orientation, or new technologies of assisted reproduction – regardless of how a child comes to be born.

We’re not called to stay as totally dependent children all our lives. As Paul said: ‘God’s Spirit joins with our spirit to bear witness that we are children of God. And if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – provided that we share his sufferings so as to share his glory.’ Jesus said: ‘be compassionate, even as your Father is compassionate.’ This is the radical heart of the gospel. It calls us to move from belonging to the world to belonging to God, and to love without conditions, as God loves us.

This is the only world and time we have. We have to start with the people we move among, even though we’re wildly different from each other. Like the duck and the squirrel and the cat, we have to learn friendship, and compassion and caring and sharing and loving and generosity and celebration.

Rev Dr Barbara Peddie, 27 March 2022