The Real Prodigal Son

3-6-18 (Lent 4C)

2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

The Real Prodigal Son

In my first few years of ministry, I’ve made some surprising discoveries - things they don't necessarily teach you in seminary.  One of the discoveries I’ve made that continues to surprise me every time it happens, however, is that the more familiar a passage is, the harder it becomes to write a sermon on it.  It strikes me as counter-intuitive every time it happens - I know this story.  In fact, it’s long been one of my favorite parables that Jesus tells.  It’s one that is easy to identify with, one that conveys an incredible message, and one that you would think would make for the easiest sermon a pastor could write.

And yet, somehow, this passage has left me struggling all week just the same.  It seems too easy to just put this parable in a box, neatly wrap it in a bow, and present it as we so typically tend to think about the story.  I mean - of course we’re all supposed to realize that we’re the Prodigal Sons and Daughters, that we need to turn away from our own wasteful ways of living to ourselves, and to turn back to God, praying that God shows us the same love and unwarranted forgiveness that the son in the story receives.  But is this the only story that we might be hearing in this parable?  Is the youngest son the only person we’re supposed to even identify with?  Should the title of the parable even be called “the Prodigal son?”  And is the youngest son the only one in the story who is prodigal in the first place?

Perhaps the first thing we should do is open up the question in the first place: who’s the one you identify with the most in this story in the first place?  For many, it may still be the youngest son.  I think we’ve all had those moments where we’ve slipped and fallen behind, realized how bad we’ve messed up, and turned ourselves back over to God.  It’s what makes Lent such an important season for us in the church, after all.  But - nobody has to raise their hands if they don’t want to here - how many of you have felt more like the older brother at times?  How many times have you been flabbergasted at the grace and forgiveness that some people, or even worse, those people seem to receive?  How many times have you found yourself wondering what on earth that person is doing in church on Sunday morning when you know what they were up to on Friday or Saturday night?  Or how many times do you find yourself echoing the sentiments of the older brother, who worked day and night with devotion for all of his life and feels like he got nothing for it, only to watch everything go to the person who only seems to be just starting to get it after all these years?

Or, to take a view that we almost never take as we look at this passage… how many of you can resonate with the father in the story?  Being a parent changes your view on everything - how many of you have had those thundering clashes with teenagers, college students, or even toddlers who think they know it all better than you do?  How many times have those disagreements or clashes led to them doing what they wanted to do, despite your warnings to the contrary?  How many times have you found your child suddenly out in the middle of the road chasing after a stray ball, or deciding to take the car out on Friday night to go to the movies, or wandering off somewhere in the store without telling you where they are going - the paralyzing fear that takes over you as you try to figure out where they are, what’s going on, whether they’re safe… and then the initial wave of relief and joy that you see when they come walking down the row, pulling in the driveway, or when you rush out and grab them out of the road and see that they’re still alive, usually right before you tear into them, ground them, or tell them how worried you’d been and give them the guilt trip in hopes that they learn something.

We take stock of these different experiences, these different moments in the story… and it’s then that we can realize: they’re all prodigals, and so are we.  Each one in the story is wasteful of their situation in a different way.  The youngest son, the one we always call the prodigal son, is the most obvious: he literally wastes away his inheritance.  He walks up to his father and, in a moment that amounts to him saying “I wish you were dead,” asks for his father’s inheritance.  And he wastes it all on empty living.  And even as he comes to the turn in the parable, it’s not clear that the “prodigal son” has really realized the error of his ways - all we know for certain is that he realizes that his father’s servants currently have it better than he does, and so if he goes back to his father again, he’ll at least get three meals a day once more.

But before we make too low an opinion of the younger brother, we have to be reminded that the older brother is no better, himself.  In fact, some might say he’s even worse - sure, he’s been the obedient son in every way that his younger brother was not, but it seems that, when the cards finally hit the table, he’s only been being obedient so that he could deserve all the things that he now sees the father giving his wayward sibling.  And when he sees all that happening, he blows his top, pitches a fit, and yells at his father for giving his brother all the things that he could have had any time he wanted, but never bothered to ask for.

And so now we get to the father, who is just as wasteful as either one of his children - he wastes his dignity as a first-century Palestinian man by openly running to his son, which would have exposed him to great shame because he had to lift his robes up and show his legs to everyone in the neighborhood.  He wastes whatever resources he has left by throwing a huge party for the son who returned, killing the veil calf, bringing out a fine robe and an expensive ring, and giving all that and more to the son he thought was dead but is now alive.  And perhaps even worse than all these other wasteful actions, the father wastes the opportunity to discipline his son, to get in a powerful “I told you so” moment, to scold him and tell him “I hope you learned your lesson.”  By outright ignoring his son’s shortcomings, the father almost guarantees that his younger son is going to get up sometime in the future and do it all again.

And so now we come to the crux of the situation, or so it would seem.  If all of the characters in this parable are prodigal, if the entire parable has its problems and flaws that we can point out… then what do we take away from it at the end of the day?  Who do we still resonate with, what is it that we still find so worthwhile about this story, that keeps bringing us back time and time again to its imagery and lessons?

First and foremost, at the end of the day, it’s still a story of forgiveness and love at just about every level.  The father offers an incredible and unexpected kind of forgiveness to his wayward son.  The father offers the same to the older brother, even though the brother wants none of it because he wants to wallow in his own self-righteousness.  In fact, this kind of forgiveness is so peculiar that the famous theologian Frederick Buechner writes that the “outlandishness of God” in them is so discordant to our understanding that the only way we can truly comprehend it is to think of it as a kind of “cosmic joke.”  In his book Telling the Truth, he writes, “Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church's thing, the preacher's thing, the lecturer's thing. Heard as a joke - high and unbidden and ringing with laughter - it can only be God's thing.”

And when we think about it in that sense, it’s the kind of joke that only God could tell.  A son squanders his father’s worldly wealth and when he comes back, the father doesn’t even listen to his attempt to apologize because he’s too busy commanding a party and celebration for his son’s return.  His older brother, the very model of filial loyalty and dedication, becomes “a caricature of all that is joyless and petty and self-serving about all of us,” as Buechner writes.  Buechner continues: “The joke of it is that of course his father loves him even so, and has always loved him and will always love him, only the elder brother never noticed it because it was never love he was bucking for but only his due. The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his, too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them.”

So we find ourselves together at the butt of one of the greatest cosmic jokes ever told.  Prodigal sons, older brothers, and prodigal fathers all together, we each find ourselves the recipients of a ridiculous grace that we don't deserve.  And in spite of the fact that we’re all too busy making fools of ourselves in one way or another, wasting the grace that we’re given, listing off our own merits even as we complain about the grace being given to others, or running about trying to offer so much grace to someone else that we shame ourselves and fail in the process of making disciples… the joke is nevertheless eternally on us, because we will eventually and ultimately learn that it’s never been about us in the first place, but that it’s always been about God and God’s power to show grace to us in every circumstance, no matter whether we deserve it or not.  At the end of the day, it’s God who gets the last laugh, Love that ultimately wins, and God who deserves all glory.  Amen.