Sermon delivered Sunday, March 20, 2016 (The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, Year C) at
St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Luke 19:29-40, Luke 22:14-23:56
Palm Sunday brings us face to face with one of the most difficult truths about human nature: our inclination to follow the crowd.
We begin the service with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds gather around and hail him as King, but soon, the mood abruptly changes as we hear the story of how the crowds turned against him and demanded his death just a few days later.
Although cramming the remembrance of these two events together on the same Sunday is in some ways a concession to the fact that not everyone will come to church during Holy Week (We’ve gotta make sure you hear the story of the crucifixion today, in case you don’t come on Good Friday!), there is also some meaning, I think, in feeling the dissonance of these two completely opposite moods juxtaposed beside one another.
They are both, at their core, stories about crowd mentality – joyful crowds celebrating Jesus and angry crowds torturing and killing Jesus – made all the more poignant by the fact that there were likely some – perhaps many – who were part of both crowds. This is not a pretty picture of humanity’s tendency to follow the crowd, no matter what the morality or ethics of what the crowd is doing. We have the ability to love someone one minute and hate him the next, to make someone our leader one minute and then put him to death the next.
The pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd squelches individual conscience and sense of responsibility. Psychological studies on conformity show that people tend to think that if everyone in a group is doing something, it can’t possibly be wrong [1], and they feel less legal culpability or personal responsibility for what happens when an action is taken by multiple people at the same time – no one person can be easily held responsible, so individuals who have an issue with what the group is doing are more likely to go along rather than to resist [2].
A recognition of this tendency to distance ourselves from wrongdoing committed by a group for which we are not “personally responsible” is behind the wording in the confession of sin we’ve been using from Enriching Our Worship: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us: the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” In saying this, the liturgy reminds us that we are complicit even in sins we did not personally commit when we are part of the unjust structures that allow or even encourage them to exist.
Palm Sunday forces each of us to look inward and ask ourselves, In the face of the pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd, do we have the ability to stand up for what we know to be true and right, even if our very lives are threatened? Peter, that “rock” on whom Jesus chose to build the church, didn’t. The same guy who promised Jesus, “I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” winds up vigorously denying that he even knows Jesus when questioned in the courtyard of the high priest.
If the first among the apostles, Peter himself, wasn’t able to resist this instinct to conform for the sake of self-preservation, perhaps we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much about it if we can’t, either, we might think. But before we excuse ourselves too easily, we must remember that at the same time, there were others who were able to resist that instinct, like the women who remained at the foot of the cross to the bitter end, or Joseph of Arimathea, “who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action” and who asks Pilate for the body of Jesus so that he can give him a respectable burial after his death.
The tragic story of the crucifixion plays itself out again and again throughout human history, anytime we allow ourselves to get swept up by a crowd into doing or saying things that internally raise all sorts of red flags for us. But the pull of the crowd is so strong, and the fear of rejection or even physical harm if we dare to resist is so powerful, that we become just a grain of sand tossed about by the power of the wave.
This week, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a “Word to the Church” that warns us of the ways this crowd mentality continues to play out in our world today, specifically in this election season in the United States. The bishops write:
“On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power… In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we are troubled by the violent forces being released by this season’s political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbors, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.”
We in the church, of all people, should know the dangers of crowd mentality. At the center of our faith we have a paradigm case of mob rule gone wrong, a story that we remember and recite year after year after year. Our bishops have reminded us that that story is not an isolated incident from 2,000 years ago. Mob rule continues to crucify innocent people today, and we are complicit in that if we do not actively speak against it.
The bishops’ call to us is clear: “No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else.” As people committed to follow the way of Christ, we must always remember that he chose the role of servant, not ruler; that he advocated love of enemy, not revenge; and as much as his death illustrated the worst of what humanity is capable of, his resurrection showed us that violence does not have to have the last word; in fact, that it will not have the last word in reality.
The bishops write, “On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead…unmasking the lie that might makes right.”
“Unmaking the lie that might makes right.” How easily we are seduced by that lie. Some scholars even think that seduction was at the heart of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus – that Judas thought by calling in the authorities, he would force Jesus’s hand and get him to lead the armed uprising against the occupying Roman forces that everyone expected the Messiah to lead. But Jesus tells the disciples to put away their swords when they try to defend him. He heals the ear of the slave of the high priest after one of his guys cut it off. And then he prays for God to forgive his executioners even as he hangs on the cross dying at their hands. He resists all the basest instincts of human nature that lead us to turn against one another, to follow the crowd no matter where it leads, and he shows us a way out. A way out of the cycle of violence, a way out of being held captive to the lie that might makes right.
My prayer is that the power of the story we retell this Holy Week would remind all Christians everywhere that we have a way out. That Jesus has shown us another way. That we have the power to resist the forces of fear and anger that would lead us to betray one another. And that with God’s help, we will do so.
[1] Greenberg, M.S. (2010). Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, cited in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
[2] Summarizing views of Gustave Le Bon, as described in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Sunday, March 13, 2016
"You will not always have me" -- a call to cherish the times God shows up in our lives
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 13, 2016 (Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C), at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA (where I am serving as long-term supply priest).
(John 12:1-8)
As we close down the season of Lent and prepare to move into Holy Week next week, our Gospel passage today gets us ready for that transition. The story we hear today is set six days before the Passover, and so we’re hearing it approximately the same amount of time ahead of Holy Week as it took place before the events of the actual Holy Week. Jesus is having dinner at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus of Bethany, and Mary pours a jar of expensive oil on Jesus’s feet and wipes them with her hair. Judas protests that this use of the oil was wasteful and that Mary was not being a good steward of her wealth; “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” he asks?
Interestingly enough, the story of the anointing of Jesus is one of the few stories that appears in all four of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all have slightly different accounts of the story; the woman is not always the same, nor is the person who objects, but the core elements of the story – that it took place at a dinner in someone’s home, that a woman poured expensive oil over Jesus and someone protested that that was an extravagant and wasteful act – are consistent across all four accounts. In all of the Gospels except for Luke, Jesus’s response to those who criticize the woman is some variation of:
“Leave her alone. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
This famous one-liner is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted sayings of Jesus. Throughout the centuries, Christians who wanted to justify neglect of the poor and extravagant, lavish displays of wealth in the church would turn to this passage as a biblical basis for the use of solid silver chalices and vestments adorned with rare and precious jewels, and enormous marble churches with gold-gilded ornamentation. To anyone who would protest that perhaps this spending was a bit excessive and maybe more good could have been done with that money in the community to help those in need, well, you know, Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” and that woman in the Bible poured out that jar of oil on Jesus that would have been worth an average laborer’s entire yearly salary, so as long as you’re spending lavish amounts of money to express your love for Jesus, it’s all ok.
Sometimes I think Jesus looks down on us and just shakes his head, going, “Seriously?” Like, “that’s where you went with that?” And I’m probably not too far off in my imagination, since Jesus did a lot of shaking his head at the disciples while he was with them on earth, expressing in many ways some version of this sentiment: “You’ve been spending time with me for HOW LONG and you STILL don’t get it??”
Somehow I don’t think Jesus was making known his desire for lavish, expensive gifts in his defense of the woman’s actions in this story. I personally think Jesus could care about less where we worship him and what we wear when we worship him and what kind of objects we use to worship of him. His defense of the woman was not about condoning extravagant displays of wealth. It was about encouraging us to cherish the sacred moments in our lives.
Jesus tells the woman’s critics that she has anointed his body for burial. That’s the key aspect of this story – Jesus’s death is near. “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial,” he says in John’s version of the story that we heard today. This woman, despite her seemingly wasteful use of money, “gets it.” While the disciples are quibbling about finances and expenses, not really aware of the gravity of the situation and the preciousness of every last moment they have with Jesus, this woman realizes her time with him is limited. She realizes that Jesus’s days are numbered and she wants to give him the best send-off she can. So instead of waiting until he is dead to anoint his body with oil, as was the custom, she chooses to do this for him while he is still alive. How many times have you sat at a funeral reception and wished the deceased could have heard all the wonderful things that are being said about him or her? So often we wait to honor people until they are dead, but this woman wants to honor Jesus while he is still with her. She wants to express her love for him before it’s too late.
I am reminded of a TED Talk I watched recently by Janine di Giovanni, a journalist who reports from war zones around the world. In her talk, she mentions that in 2004, after the birth of her son, her foreign editor sent her back to Iraq to continue her coverage of the war there when her son was just four months old. She says she was crying on the plane because of how difficult it was to leave her son, and an Iraqi politician who knew she had recently had a child said to her, "What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with [your son]?" And she said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004, which was the beginning of an incredibly bloody time in Iraq, and she felt a sense of responsibility to bear witness to the atrocities and bring the stories of those people who were suffering to the world, as she had done in places like Sarajevo and Rwanda years before. "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it," she said. And the politician said to her, "Go home. Because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war."
There will always be another war. This is what I think Jesus meant when he said “the poor you will always have with you.” He meant what the politician meant when he encouraged the reporter to go spend time with her son. By saying that, he didn’t mean that the suffering and death in his country wasn’t important, or that the stories of his people didn’t need to be told. He didn’t mean that on a cosmic level it would be ok to neglect their stories and the stories of countless others who suffer. What he meant was, there is an endless amount of suffering in the world. You can’t capture it all and see it all and fix it all. You can only do your part, and right now your part is to focus on this beautiful miracle that has been given to you, this new life which, in a few blinks of an eye, will be a full-grown, independent man.
When Jesus said, “the poor you will always have with you,” he didn’t mean that helping the poor was unimportant, or that it was ok to spend lavish amounts of money on worship instead of giving to those in need. Jesus was one of a long line of prophets in the Jewish tradition who called the people to care people in poverty, who taught that you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. But this particular saying of Jesus actually has very little to do with people in poverty and has everything to do with recognizing the preciousness of each moment you have with the important people in your lives, whether that be God himself in the form of Jesus for the disciples in the first century, or whoever mediates God’s presence to you in your life today.
For me, this Lent has brought news of the deaths of several beloved parishioners from former parishes I have served. From Atlanta to Nashville, the stories of their deaths have come to me across the miles, and I am reminded of the most basic truth behind Jesus’s comment in today’s Gospel reading: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
You will not always have me. Our days with our loved ones are limited, so spend time with the ones you love before they are gone. Don’t miss a precious, irreplaceable moment focusing on something that will still be there for you to take care of later.
This truth is perhaps hardest to hear when the limitations of our time and money force us to make impossible choices – to choose between visiting a sick child of a parishioner in the hospital or going to our own child’s soccer game – to choose between paying the hospital bill for our parents’ stay or to make that annual donation to our favorite nonprofit, a donation we know provides the bulk of their operating expenses – to choose between spending time with our dearest friend in a time of crisis or giving an educational presentation about the very topic our friend is struggling with, to a large audience where we have the potential of touching thousands of lives. Whatever your deepest calling is, the thing that gives your life meaning and which you feel God has uniquely gifted you to address, whatever work you do that has the potential to bring hope and healing to many people – put that in the place of “the poor” in Jesus’s statement:
“__________ you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
There will always be another ________. What is that for you? What is that thing that you do, even if noble and important and sacred and holy, that threatens to blind you to the times God chooses to show up right in front of you?
Jesus’s point, I think, is that even if you are doing good work, like caring for the poor, if you are doing it in such a way that you miss the precious, beautiful moments life has to offer you – the incarnational moments, the times when God is in your midst – and do not stop and celebrate or acknowledge them appropriately, then you miss the point just as much as if all you do is praise God and neglect to care for the poor. We must do both – acknowledge and marvel in God’s presence and go out to do the hard work he calls us to do. Each of us has a tendency to err toward one extreme or the other. The key is finding a balance, that Anglican via media, the middle way, between the two extremes.
“You will not always have me.”
Our time with those we love is precious. Our experience of God’s presence in our midst is often fleeting and temporary. Don’t let anything keep you from reveling in those moments and soaking them up. Like Mary anointing Jesus before his burial, pour out lavish amounts of thanksgiving and praise whenever you encounter God in your life. Remind yourself: “There will always be another war. There will always be another societal ill to address. There will always be poor among us. But there will not always be this.” – and cherish it while you can.
(John 12:1-8)
As we close down the season of Lent and prepare to move into Holy Week next week, our Gospel passage today gets us ready for that transition. The story we hear today is set six days before the Passover, and so we’re hearing it approximately the same amount of time ahead of Holy Week as it took place before the events of the actual Holy Week. Jesus is having dinner at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus of Bethany, and Mary pours a jar of expensive oil on Jesus’s feet and wipes them with her hair. Judas protests that this use of the oil was wasteful and that Mary was not being a good steward of her wealth; “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” he asks?
Interestingly enough, the story of the anointing of Jesus is one of the few stories that appears in all four of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all have slightly different accounts of the story; the woman is not always the same, nor is the person who objects, but the core elements of the story – that it took place at a dinner in someone’s home, that a woman poured expensive oil over Jesus and someone protested that that was an extravagant and wasteful act – are consistent across all four accounts. In all of the Gospels except for Luke, Jesus’s response to those who criticize the woman is some variation of:
“Leave her alone. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
This famous one-liner is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted sayings of Jesus. Throughout the centuries, Christians who wanted to justify neglect of the poor and extravagant, lavish displays of wealth in the church would turn to this passage as a biblical basis for the use of solid silver chalices and vestments adorned with rare and precious jewels, and enormous marble churches with gold-gilded ornamentation. To anyone who would protest that perhaps this spending was a bit excessive and maybe more good could have been done with that money in the community to help those in need, well, you know, Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” and that woman in the Bible poured out that jar of oil on Jesus that would have been worth an average laborer’s entire yearly salary, so as long as you’re spending lavish amounts of money to express your love for Jesus, it’s all ok.
Sometimes I think Jesus looks down on us and just shakes his head, going, “Seriously?” Like, “that’s where you went with that?” And I’m probably not too far off in my imagination, since Jesus did a lot of shaking his head at the disciples while he was with them on earth, expressing in many ways some version of this sentiment: “You’ve been spending time with me for HOW LONG and you STILL don’t get it??”
Somehow I don’t think Jesus was making known his desire for lavish, expensive gifts in his defense of the woman’s actions in this story. I personally think Jesus could care about less where we worship him and what we wear when we worship him and what kind of objects we use to worship of him. His defense of the woman was not about condoning extravagant displays of wealth. It was about encouraging us to cherish the sacred moments in our lives.
Jesus tells the woman’s critics that she has anointed his body for burial. That’s the key aspect of this story – Jesus’s death is near. “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial,” he says in John’s version of the story that we heard today. This woman, despite her seemingly wasteful use of money, “gets it.” While the disciples are quibbling about finances and expenses, not really aware of the gravity of the situation and the preciousness of every last moment they have with Jesus, this woman realizes her time with him is limited. She realizes that Jesus’s days are numbered and she wants to give him the best send-off she can. So instead of waiting until he is dead to anoint his body with oil, as was the custom, she chooses to do this for him while he is still alive. How many times have you sat at a funeral reception and wished the deceased could have heard all the wonderful things that are being said about him or her? So often we wait to honor people until they are dead, but this woman wants to honor Jesus while he is still with her. She wants to express her love for him before it’s too late.
I am reminded of a TED Talk I watched recently by Janine di Giovanni, a journalist who reports from war zones around the world. In her talk, she mentions that in 2004, after the birth of her son, her foreign editor sent her back to Iraq to continue her coverage of the war there when her son was just four months old. She says she was crying on the plane because of how difficult it was to leave her son, and an Iraqi politician who knew she had recently had a child said to her, "What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with [your son]?" And she said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004, which was the beginning of an incredibly bloody time in Iraq, and she felt a sense of responsibility to bear witness to the atrocities and bring the stories of those people who were suffering to the world, as she had done in places like Sarajevo and Rwanda years before. "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it," she said. And the politician said to her, "Go home. Because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war."
There will always be another war. This is what I think Jesus meant when he said “the poor you will always have with you.” He meant what the politician meant when he encouraged the reporter to go spend time with her son. By saying that, he didn’t mean that the suffering and death in his country wasn’t important, or that the stories of his people didn’t need to be told. He didn’t mean that on a cosmic level it would be ok to neglect their stories and the stories of countless others who suffer. What he meant was, there is an endless amount of suffering in the world. You can’t capture it all and see it all and fix it all. You can only do your part, and right now your part is to focus on this beautiful miracle that has been given to you, this new life which, in a few blinks of an eye, will be a full-grown, independent man.
When Jesus said, “the poor you will always have with you,” he didn’t mean that helping the poor was unimportant, or that it was ok to spend lavish amounts of money on worship instead of giving to those in need. Jesus was one of a long line of prophets in the Jewish tradition who called the people to care people in poverty, who taught that you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. But this particular saying of Jesus actually has very little to do with people in poverty and has everything to do with recognizing the preciousness of each moment you have with the important people in your lives, whether that be God himself in the form of Jesus for the disciples in the first century, or whoever mediates God’s presence to you in your life today.
For me, this Lent has brought news of the deaths of several beloved parishioners from former parishes I have served. From Atlanta to Nashville, the stories of their deaths have come to me across the miles, and I am reminded of the most basic truth behind Jesus’s comment in today’s Gospel reading: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
You will not always have me. Our days with our loved ones are limited, so spend time with the ones you love before they are gone. Don’t miss a precious, irreplaceable moment focusing on something that will still be there for you to take care of later.
This truth is perhaps hardest to hear when the limitations of our time and money force us to make impossible choices – to choose between visiting a sick child of a parishioner in the hospital or going to our own child’s soccer game – to choose between paying the hospital bill for our parents’ stay or to make that annual donation to our favorite nonprofit, a donation we know provides the bulk of their operating expenses – to choose between spending time with our dearest friend in a time of crisis or giving an educational presentation about the very topic our friend is struggling with, to a large audience where we have the potential of touching thousands of lives. Whatever your deepest calling is, the thing that gives your life meaning and which you feel God has uniquely gifted you to address, whatever work you do that has the potential to bring hope and healing to many people – put that in the place of “the poor” in Jesus’s statement:
“__________ you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
There will always be another ________. What is that for you? What is that thing that you do, even if noble and important and sacred and holy, that threatens to blind you to the times God chooses to show up right in front of you?
Jesus’s point, I think, is that even if you are doing good work, like caring for the poor, if you are doing it in such a way that you miss the precious, beautiful moments life has to offer you – the incarnational moments, the times when God is in your midst – and do not stop and celebrate or acknowledge them appropriately, then you miss the point just as much as if all you do is praise God and neglect to care for the poor. We must do both – acknowledge and marvel in God’s presence and go out to do the hard work he calls us to do. Each of us has a tendency to err toward one extreme or the other. The key is finding a balance, that Anglican via media, the middle way, between the two extremes.
“You will not always have me.”
Our time with those we love is precious. Our experience of God’s presence in our midst is often fleeting and temporary. Don’t let anything keep you from reveling in those moments and soaking them up. Like Mary anointing Jesus before his burial, pour out lavish amounts of thanksgiving and praise whenever you encounter God in your life. Remind yourself: “There will always be another war. There will always be another societal ill to address. There will always be poor among us. But there will not always be this.” – and cherish it while you can.
Sunday, March 6, 2016
The Prodigal Son: The transforming power of love and forgiveness
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 6, 2016 (4th Sunday in Lent, Year C) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA, where I am serving as long-term supply priest. Audio only (not video) available below.
(2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32)
Jesus is at it again in today’s Gospel reading: answering those self-righteous Pharisees with a parable that gets ‘em right in the gut. “So you’re worried about the fact that I’m eating with ‘sinners,’ are you? Well chew on THIS one for a while!” – and out comes the Prodigal Son, a story that has spoken deeply to the human soul throughout the centuries.
At face value, the message of the parable of the Prodigal Son seems simple, and completely appropriate for the season of Lent: The son repents, the father forgives him. Voila! The God-human relationship illustrated. As the son has sinned and left the father, so we have sinned and left God. As the son realizes the error of his ways and returns to his father, so should we repent and return to God in order to be forgiven of our sins.
But wait just a minute. If we look carefully at the story, it’s not actually that simple. Does the son actually repent? The story tells us that the son “came to himself.” But it’s not entirely clear what that means; whether he actually had a change of heart, or whether the “coming to himself” was him having an “ah ha” moment realizing another way he could continue to continue to make sure he was taken care of at his father’s expense. “How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!” he thinks. “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’” Is this expression of humility genuine, or is he just trying to figure out a way to get himself back in the door in a place where he assumes he will be unwelcome? It’s not like he becomes successful and wealthy and goes home to share the bounty with his father – as is so often the case with children and their parents (and with human beings and God!), he only turns back to the father when he needs something, when he seeks to gain from reestablishing the relationship.
So, we’ve got the problem of whether the son’s repentance is genuine or not, and then the story gets further complicated when the son returns home. The parable tells us that “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The father runs to him while he was still far off. The son doesn’t even have a chance to make his confession, to grovel before his father and ask for forgiveness, before the father sweeps him into his arms with hugs and kisses. The son hasn’t said a word yet that would indicate that he is repentant, that he is sorry for what he’s done. For all the father knows, the son could be returning home to ask for more money – which, in fact, is sort of what he is doing, since he’s asking for his father to again provide for his needs in the form of food and shelter. But the father still runs toward him and embraces him. He doesn’t stand back, eyeing his son skeptically and asking him a bunch of questions about what he’s done and where he’s been and what has happened to all the money he gave him. He doesn’t lecture him on respect for one’s elders or demand an apology before he extends his hand in peace. His love for his son overtakes any feelings of resentment or being wronged. His love is unconditional, offered without any action required on the part of the son outside of just showing up.
“Now hold on there,” our inner sense of justice cries out. “That’s now how the story’s supposed to go! The sinner is supposed to show sufficient remorse and contrition before forgiveness is granted! God forgives the repentant, but the unrepentant he will burn with unquenchable fire… or something like that, right? I mean, there has to be some consequences for this guy’s actions! How can the father throw a party for this guy after what he’s done? Isn’t that like condoning his actions?”
Conventional religious thinking, in the Judaism of Jesus’s time and in many other religions in various times and contexts, tends to think of God as a just judge, concerned with impartially enforcing the law. In this way of thinking, God is ultimately concerned with “fairness,” with making sure that each person gets what they “deserve.” If they are good, they deserve a reward. If they are bad, they deserve punishment. Our relationship with God becomes some kind of balancing scale where we hope that, at the end, our good deeds outweigh our bad and we get in to heaven by virtue of how the accounting works out in some kind of divine judgment book. The elder son in the parable represents this kind of conventional religious thinking, as do the Pharisees who are so concerned about who Jesus is eating with and spending time with.
But Jesus constantly challenged the notion of God as an impartial calculator, crunching the numbers to determine our fate. Jesus emphasized the image of God as a loving parent, like the father in today’s parable, who is overcome with love for his or her children. That love guides his response to them, that love colors and influences her judgment, that love makes allowances for her children’s shortcomings.
When this kind of love expresses itself, it may not look “fair” to those who are keeping the great accounting sheet of rights and wrongs. It may mean that some people get celebrations and parties and forgiveness and acceptance that they don’t seem to deserve. But Jesus’s message is that God’s love and mercy is not something we can earn by doing or saying or believing the right things. None of us “deserve” God’s love or forgiveness based on our actions, however “good” we might think we have been! God’s acceptance and forgiveness of us is a gift freely given – out of a relationship based in unconditional love, a love that will not leave us if we screw up or disappoint or “squander our inheritance in dissolute living.”
This kind of love is more concerned with transformation than with fairness. This kind of love is willing to break all the rules if it means helping one soul to know they are loved and valued.
Can this kind of love be taken advantage of? Could the forgiven and loved prodigal son, after enjoying the fatted calf at his reunion party, have ripped his father off, stolen his valuables, and pawned them for money? Of course he could have. This kind of love is risky. It makes us vulnerable. It opens us to the possibility of being deeply wronged, or even physically harmed, in certain circumstances. But it also has the power to transform.
The main character of Les Misérables, that great novel by Victor Hugo that has been cinematized numerous times and made into a stage musical, is an example of a kind of “prodigal son” who is transformed by this kind of love.
Jean Valjean is released from prison after serving 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. He has become cynical, hardened, and trusts no one. He has nothing to his name and is let out on the streets with no resources and nowhere to turn for help. As he goes door to door begging, he happens to knock on the local bishop’s door. The bishop takes him in and feeds him and gives him a place to stay. That night, Valjean sneaks out in the middle of the night, stealing the silver place settings from the table. When he is caught and the police drag him to the bishop’s door, they tell the bishop that Valjean has told them that the bishop gave him the silver. The bishop surprises everyone, Valjean most of all, when he confirms Valjean’s story. “That is right,” he tells the police. In the poetic wording of the stage play, he responds, “But my friend, you left so early / surely something slipped your mind / You forgot I gave these also / Would you leave the best behind?” – and proceeds to give Valjean the two silver candlesticks from his fireplace mantle.
According to the law, the right and “fair” thing for the bishop to do would have been to press charges, and for Valjean to go back to prison. But the bishop was more concerned with the transformative power of love than the fair application of the law.
The bishop took a risk by following Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5:39-40: “Do not resist an evildoer… if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Valjean could have betrayed his trust once again after this incident, or gone on to do harm to others as well. The bishop had no way of knowing what the outcome would be, but he chose trust over fear. He chose forgiveness over retribution. And it changed a man’s life. This risky act of generosity and forgiveness by the bishop transforms Valjean. His hardened shell falls away and reveals a kind, tender man with a heart of compassion, who goes about doing good for the rest of the story. The bishop responded to Valjean’s behavior not by “giving him what he deserved,” but by giving him a second chance.
As much as Lent gets a bad rep as a depressing season where we are told how bad we are, Lent is actually the season of second chances. It’s the season where we are reminded not just of our sins, but of God’s mercy. The joy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son at seeing his son return home is a metaphor for the joy God feels every time we return to him, no matter what we’ve done and no matter what is in our hearts when we do. God welcomes us home not for a stern scolding, but for a great celebration.
And we are called to do the same. If we are truly transformed by the love and forgiveness God has shown to us, we will offer forgiveness as freely as the father in the parable and the bishop in Les Misérables. As Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians, God has “entrusted the message of reconciliation to us. We are ambassadors for Christ.” We are the ones carrying God’s message to the world, the message that God is ready to throw you a party if you would but show up: no questions asked, no explanations needed. Just come, join us, and feast at that banquet prepared before the foundation of the world. If we are doing our job as Christians, it will also be said of us, “Those folks welcome sinners and eat with them!” Amen.
(2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32)
Jesus is at it again in today’s Gospel reading: answering those self-righteous Pharisees with a parable that gets ‘em right in the gut. “So you’re worried about the fact that I’m eating with ‘sinners,’ are you? Well chew on THIS one for a while!” – and out comes the Prodigal Son, a story that has spoken deeply to the human soul throughout the centuries.
At face value, the message of the parable of the Prodigal Son seems simple, and completely appropriate for the season of Lent: The son repents, the father forgives him. Voila! The God-human relationship illustrated. As the son has sinned and left the father, so we have sinned and left God. As the son realizes the error of his ways and returns to his father, so should we repent and return to God in order to be forgiven of our sins.
But wait just a minute. If we look carefully at the story, it’s not actually that simple. Does the son actually repent? The story tells us that the son “came to himself.” But it’s not entirely clear what that means; whether he actually had a change of heart, or whether the “coming to himself” was him having an “ah ha” moment realizing another way he could continue to continue to make sure he was taken care of at his father’s expense. “How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!” he thinks. “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’” Is this expression of humility genuine, or is he just trying to figure out a way to get himself back in the door in a place where he assumes he will be unwelcome? It’s not like he becomes successful and wealthy and goes home to share the bounty with his father – as is so often the case with children and their parents (and with human beings and God!), he only turns back to the father when he needs something, when he seeks to gain from reestablishing the relationship.
So, we’ve got the problem of whether the son’s repentance is genuine or not, and then the story gets further complicated when the son returns home. The parable tells us that “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The father runs to him while he was still far off. The son doesn’t even have a chance to make his confession, to grovel before his father and ask for forgiveness, before the father sweeps him into his arms with hugs and kisses. The son hasn’t said a word yet that would indicate that he is repentant, that he is sorry for what he’s done. For all the father knows, the son could be returning home to ask for more money – which, in fact, is sort of what he is doing, since he’s asking for his father to again provide for his needs in the form of food and shelter. But the father still runs toward him and embraces him. He doesn’t stand back, eyeing his son skeptically and asking him a bunch of questions about what he’s done and where he’s been and what has happened to all the money he gave him. He doesn’t lecture him on respect for one’s elders or demand an apology before he extends his hand in peace. His love for his son overtakes any feelings of resentment or being wronged. His love is unconditional, offered without any action required on the part of the son outside of just showing up.
“Now hold on there,” our inner sense of justice cries out. “That’s now how the story’s supposed to go! The sinner is supposed to show sufficient remorse and contrition before forgiveness is granted! God forgives the repentant, but the unrepentant he will burn with unquenchable fire… or something like that, right? I mean, there has to be some consequences for this guy’s actions! How can the father throw a party for this guy after what he’s done? Isn’t that like condoning his actions?”
Conventional religious thinking, in the Judaism of Jesus’s time and in many other religions in various times and contexts, tends to think of God as a just judge, concerned with impartially enforcing the law. In this way of thinking, God is ultimately concerned with “fairness,” with making sure that each person gets what they “deserve.” If they are good, they deserve a reward. If they are bad, they deserve punishment. Our relationship with God becomes some kind of balancing scale where we hope that, at the end, our good deeds outweigh our bad and we get in to heaven by virtue of how the accounting works out in some kind of divine judgment book. The elder son in the parable represents this kind of conventional religious thinking, as do the Pharisees who are so concerned about who Jesus is eating with and spending time with.
But Jesus constantly challenged the notion of God as an impartial calculator, crunching the numbers to determine our fate. Jesus emphasized the image of God as a loving parent, like the father in today’s parable, who is overcome with love for his or her children. That love guides his response to them, that love colors and influences her judgment, that love makes allowances for her children’s shortcomings.
When this kind of love expresses itself, it may not look “fair” to those who are keeping the great accounting sheet of rights and wrongs. It may mean that some people get celebrations and parties and forgiveness and acceptance that they don’t seem to deserve. But Jesus’s message is that God’s love and mercy is not something we can earn by doing or saying or believing the right things. None of us “deserve” God’s love or forgiveness based on our actions, however “good” we might think we have been! God’s acceptance and forgiveness of us is a gift freely given – out of a relationship based in unconditional love, a love that will not leave us if we screw up or disappoint or “squander our inheritance in dissolute living.”
This kind of love is more concerned with transformation than with fairness. This kind of love is willing to break all the rules if it means helping one soul to know they are loved and valued.
Can this kind of love be taken advantage of? Could the forgiven and loved prodigal son, after enjoying the fatted calf at his reunion party, have ripped his father off, stolen his valuables, and pawned them for money? Of course he could have. This kind of love is risky. It makes us vulnerable. It opens us to the possibility of being deeply wronged, or even physically harmed, in certain circumstances. But it also has the power to transform.
The main character of Les Misérables, that great novel by Victor Hugo that has been cinematized numerous times and made into a stage musical, is an example of a kind of “prodigal son” who is transformed by this kind of love.
Jean Valjean is released from prison after serving 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. He has become cynical, hardened, and trusts no one. He has nothing to his name and is let out on the streets with no resources and nowhere to turn for help. As he goes door to door begging, he happens to knock on the local bishop’s door. The bishop takes him in and feeds him and gives him a place to stay. That night, Valjean sneaks out in the middle of the night, stealing the silver place settings from the table. When he is caught and the police drag him to the bishop’s door, they tell the bishop that Valjean has told them that the bishop gave him the silver. The bishop surprises everyone, Valjean most of all, when he confirms Valjean’s story. “That is right,” he tells the police. In the poetic wording of the stage play, he responds, “But my friend, you left so early / surely something slipped your mind / You forgot I gave these also / Would you leave the best behind?” – and proceeds to give Valjean the two silver candlesticks from his fireplace mantle.
According to the law, the right and “fair” thing for the bishop to do would have been to press charges, and for Valjean to go back to prison. But the bishop was more concerned with the transformative power of love than the fair application of the law.
The bishop took a risk by following Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5:39-40: “Do not resist an evildoer… if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Valjean could have betrayed his trust once again after this incident, or gone on to do harm to others as well. The bishop had no way of knowing what the outcome would be, but he chose trust over fear. He chose forgiveness over retribution. And it changed a man’s life. This risky act of generosity and forgiveness by the bishop transforms Valjean. His hardened shell falls away and reveals a kind, tender man with a heart of compassion, who goes about doing good for the rest of the story. The bishop responded to Valjean’s behavior not by “giving him what he deserved,” but by giving him a second chance.
As much as Lent gets a bad rep as a depressing season where we are told how bad we are, Lent is actually the season of second chances. It’s the season where we are reminded not just of our sins, but of God’s mercy. The joy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son at seeing his son return home is a metaphor for the joy God feels every time we return to him, no matter what we’ve done and no matter what is in our hearts when we do. God welcomes us home not for a stern scolding, but for a great celebration.
And we are called to do the same. If we are truly transformed by the love and forgiveness God has shown to us, we will offer forgiveness as freely as the father in the parable and the bishop in Les Misérables. As Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians, God has “entrusted the message of reconciliation to us. We are ambassadors for Christ.” We are the ones carrying God’s message to the world, the message that God is ready to throw you a party if you would but show up: no questions asked, no explanations needed. Just come, join us, and feast at that banquet prepared before the foundation of the world. If we are doing our job as Christians, it will also be said of us, “Those folks welcome sinners and eat with them!” Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)