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RCL YEAR C, Lent Four, March 18th, 2007
Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; St. Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
St. Edmund’s Episcopal ChurchThe Reverend George F. Woodward III
Bishop Lightfoot of Durham was a great biblical scholar. Commenting on this passage from 2 Corinthians, the passage that calls us ambassadors for Christ, he wrote: “The ambassador’s duty is not only to deliver a definite message, and to carry out a definite policy; but he is obliged to watch for opportunities and study characters, to cast about for ways to place his message before his hearers in its most attractive form.” If this is true for an ambassador for the civil realm, Lightfoot goes on to say, how much more certainly true for those summoned to represent Jesus Christ.
God is making His appeal through us, says St. Paul, and the appeal is to be reconciled to God, and to God’s strange ways; to one another and all creation.
The parable of the Prodigal Son shows us just how radical that appeal is, and shows us also that any reconciliation with God has tangible manifestations. We like to talk about “spirituality” as something airy, wispy and indefinite here in LA. But the witness of Scripture is that genuine spirituality is quite concrete.
To better access the familiar story of the prodigal and press behind those understandings which linger from childhood, we would do well to remember some of the differences between first century Palestine and contemporary Southern California.
In Palestine, most of the population was rural and almost everyone was a farmer. Even the big city of Jerusalem had only 35,000 people. If infancy were survived, life expectancy was about 40. Tribal ties and village ties were strong to the exclusion of a developed sense of the individual or of individuality.
So if we are to hear the story of the Prodigal as it was first heard, we should visualize a father between 30 and 35 years of age, and a son of about 16, who should have been married and contributing to the good of the clan, but who was instead a disgrace in some far country.
The younger son has dishonored his father, his family and his village in a culture where honor was absolutely everything, and where social norms were rigidly enforced.
When the son comes to his senses and returns, his father runs to meet him, perhaps so as to arrive on the edge of town before the son can be set upon by the outraged inhabitants! It is significant that the father runs to meet his son, because Middle Eastern men did not do that, and still don’t. It is considered undignified.
The best robe in the house would have been the one the father wore on ceremonial occasions, the killing of a whole calf implies that the entire village was invited to the feast, and implies also that this party was the father’s way of paying a social debt because of his son’s behavior, thereby asking the village to accept the young man back into the fold.
It would be an understatement to say that Jesus’ hearers would have found the actions of the father in this story surprising. The father’s welcome of the son that has dishonored him is nearly inconceivable. The father’s love is profligate and renders him socially and financially vulnerable. He risks his possessions and the honor of his family in order to receive his prodigal. The reaction of the older son underscores the father’s risk.
This, says the Gospeller, is the way that God loves you. God holds nothing back from you. God is profligate and excessive in His love for you. It doesn’t matter a whip-stitch what far country you have been wandering in. It only matters that God has you in His arms once again; that you have been restored to your loving Father. The kicker, of course, is that you are to go and do likewise with others.
A contemporary Jewish author, Joseph Klausner, wrote a book called “Jesus of Nazareth” in which he admirably tries to understand Jesus from a Jewish perspective. He writes that Jesus was a better Jew than the great Rabbi Hillel, deeply concerned with devotion to God. The problem with Jesus, Klausner writes, is that he risked Israel’s national life “on the Altar of an extremely one-sided ethic.” Nothing was more threatening to national Judaism, Klausner understood, than a one-sided ethic of love and forgiveness. How can you reinforce cultural values and cultural boundaries and limits and law and nationalism with an ethic like that?
The story of the Prodigal Son is told by Jesus in response to critics who grumble because Jesus eats with sinners (Luke 15:1-2). Jesus upsets the social order. His manner of life was subversive. It will subvert our ways also, if we understand that we are to practice radical forgiveness of those who have wronged us, wounded our honor, violated our trust, and treated us shabbily. The challenge to live according to God’s extravagant love begins in our families, as it did for the dear old Dad of our parable. The next proving ground is the community of the Church, though truth be told, St. Paul and the authors of the New Testament would have put Church before family. And the final challenge is how we practice reconciliation in our larger culture, and in relation to the issues of our own day. It will almost certainly disturb the social status quo if more of us decide to be ambassadors for the way of Christ.
You may have read that the Roman Catholic Church has moved to silence Father Jon Sobrino of El Salvador. His work for the country’s campesinos has long upset his nation’s insular privileged. When the Salvadoran military murdered six Jesuit priests in November 1989, Sobrino would have been among them had he not been out of the country lecturing. Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, found Sobrino’s teaching alarmingly non-traditional a long while ago. But Father Sobrino has had some timely things to say about how the teachings of Christ challenge social inequality, because he knew and cared for the people of his adopted nation.
We have been entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation, appointed as ambassadors of Christ…should we not each of us expect to contest now, for a different sort of order, pressing forward the Gospel message? Shouldn’t the environment be of concern to us; the need for reconciliation between the use of the earth and its depredation? Knowing the cost of war, shouldn’t Christians be less sanguine when war is proffered as solution. On this fourth anniversary of the commencement of the war in Iraq, 3,000 Christians marched from the National Cathedral to the White House Friday night. I don’t know that I would have joined them had I been there…a mirror of the march occurred in Hollywood, and I stayed home. I confess to significant confusion as to how the U.S. might best conclude in Iraq. And while our own sentiments may be less certain than those of the marchers, it seems a good thing to me that these Christians spoke out when so many others have seemed eager to rubber stamp this campaign.
We like to keep our spirituality wispy, but Jesus was awfully concrete. People didn’t like it one bit then, and I’m not sure we much care for it now. The respectable older brother of our parable is the one most offended by the extravagant love displayed by his father. As Cain refused to be reconciled to his brother Abel, we can see the stirrings of enduring resentment in the figure of the older brother. “I come not to bring peace, but division,” said Jesus some verses back in Luke 12. This extravagant love, this eating with sinners, this extremely one-sided ethic is unsettling stuff, and brings out the worst in some.
As you know the missional endeavors of the Episcopal Church have created some consternation for certain provinces of the Communion and we have been told to stop this welcoming of people to the Altar, this eating with the undesirable. We’ve been given an ultimatum which is really not achievable without undermining the polity of our Church, and we ought to ask ourselves if perhaps this isn’t one of those junctures where Christ’s promise of division rather than peace, might apply.
Now is a moment to grasp our opportunity to witness as a Church, and to place our convictions before the world in an attractive form. What else can we do but strive to be true to the message of God’s excessive embrace in our context, as we have discerned its application in our time and culture? Father Jon Sobrino knew how to preach the Gospel to poor campesinos because he lived with them, and we understand our context better than those who do not live here. Our best course is to appeal to our disgruntled brother to put aside his resentment, and be reconciled, and join the feast, even as we guess that this will not be our brother’s choice.
We have been entrusted with this ministry of reconciliation, rooted in the disciplines of extravagant forgiveness and practical love, and with implications for every aspect of life. When Jesus was confronted over his associations, He told this parable of the Prodigal, and of the division caused by the prodigal’s reception back into the family fold. We are appointed ambassadors for Christ, and ambassadors consider definite policies, and watch for opportunities to move their message forward. This local embassy is to press the cause, and live in such a way as to give challenge to Cain, hope to the prodigal, and a wide embrace to all. Amen. GFW+
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