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The Fourth Sunday in Lent; March 14, 2010
Park Avenue Presbyterian Church; Des Moines, Iowa
Texts: Joshua 5: 9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5: 16-21
Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32 *
“There Is Mercy For All Who Wish to Be Freed”
--} Several weeks ago, we began this Lenten season with this story about a valiant King, a dragon, and one of the King’s sons.
Once upon a time, there was a great and noble king whose land was terrorized by a crafty dragon. The scaly beast delighted in ravaging villages with his fiery breath. And though the king led his sons and the knights of the realm in many valiant battles against the dragon, they had never succeeded in vanquishing him.
One day, one of the king’s sons was riding alone in the forest when he heard his name being whispered. In the shadows of the trees, was the dragon. “Don’t be alarmed,” said the dragon. “I am not what your father thinks.”
“What are you, then?” asked the prince.
“I am pleasure,” said the dragon. “Ride on my back and you will experience more than you ever imagined. Come now. I have no harmful intentions. I simply seek a friend, someone to share flights with me. Have you never dreamed of flying?
Visions of soaring high above the forest and hills drew the prince from his horse. The dragon unfurled his wings after the prince had climbed on his back, and with two powerful thrustsof his wings, they were airborne. The prince’s apprehension rapidly melted into awe and exhilaration.
From then on, the prince met the dragon often, but always in secret lest his father and the knights of the realm should discover his treachery.
Then, one day, while the prince and dragon were flying over the countryside, they spied a village in the distance. Before the prince realized what was happening, the dragon was already torching the thatched roofs with fiery blasts from his nostrils and roaring with delight at the sight of people fleeing their homes in terror.
The following day, the refugees made their way to the king’s castle to seek protection. The prince tried to remain in the shadows, so as not to be noticed, but some of the refugees stared and pointed at him. “He was there!” one woman cried out. “I saw him on the back of the dragon.” Others nodded their heads in angry agreement.
“Banish him!” one of his brothers cried out.
“Burn him alive!” another shouted.
Slowly, the king strode toward his son, and the prince steeled himself, fully expecting his father to kill him on the spot. Instead, the king embraced him and wept as he held him tightly. As he held his son in his arms, the king called out, “The dragon is crafty! Some fall victim to his wiles and some to his violence. There will be mercy for all who wish to be freed. Who else among you has ridden the dragon?”
The prince lifted his head to see someone emerge from the crowd. To his amazement, he recognized an older brother – one who had been lauded throughout the realm for his brave battles with the dragon. Soon a steady stream of others were stepping forward, some with tears streaming from their eyes, others with their heads bowed in shame.
One by one the king embraced them all. “This is our most powerful weapon against the dragon,” he announced. “Truth. No more hidden flights. Alone we cannot resist him.”
How interesting this reaction of the King and Father. At just the very moment that the son expects to be killed—and we think, "rightfully so"—his father embraces him. “The dragon is crafty!” And clearly if the King were to kill all those who had ridden the dragon, there would be none left to fight it. And if God dealt with sin in the ways we often proclaim…?
All too often we come to Luke’s parable expecting to engage it by allegory. We like to name the people in the characters. We call the Father God, the younger son, sinful; and we don’t quite know what to do with the older son. He’s probably the one that beckons us, though. Few of us like to admit that we’re “sinful enough” to be represented in the younger son; few of us like to believe that we are called to the great and valiant graciousness of the father to offer such a “return” to his son; and that leaves only the older son, who we find not so savory, either. To come at the parable allegorically though, almost always leaves us with the Father pleading with US to come into the party celebrating the wayward son. And if we’re honest, we never want to be so willing. But maybe there's another way into the parable.
I LOVE how Luke tells us this parable. Listen to the beginning: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Pharisees… think “older son.” But notice that Jesus frames the scene by saying, “ALL the tax collectors and sinners,” by which I think he means “ALL.” So think, in particular, all the government regulators and CEOs who took that bank bailout money and squandered it, Congressional representatives who sometimes listen and are responsible and often aren’t; think sinners and make your favorite list—bank robbers, murderers, thieves, homosexuals, heterosexuals, child molesters, abusive spouses, cheating friends. And gathered together, Jesus would turn to those who would take offense—think older son, the Pharisees, and my guess is all of us… “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them…”—you know the rest.
As Luke tells it, the younger son says to the father, “give me the share of the ousia that will belong to me.” Ousia, is a Greek word we’re all familiar with, but you might not know it. My lexicon for translating biblical passages tells us ousia means “property” or “wealth;” and while that’s accurate enough, ousia is also a word that the Church has fought long and hard over. Not quite three hundred years after Luke is writing his gospel, ousia becomes the word the Church Council at Nicaea uses to define the relationship between God and Jesus. The exact line of the Nicene Creed says, “of one Being with the Father”—or, “of one SUBSTANCE.” It’s a word that conjurs not just “property” or “wealth” being transacted, but perhaps something more akin to “substance”—like God promises Abraham will have a child with Sarah of his very own “issue.” DNA, a last name, family heritage. Read this way, the father in our story appears to be giving more than just money to his son.
What the Church believes about God and Jesus is that they are of one substance. The Son comes to inhabit the earth as a human being with the “substance” of God. Some theologians even suggest the parable of the prodigal plays on that relationship: God the father, Jesus the son who goes far away to another country—earth—to the dissolute living of human beings. But before we go back to allegorizing again, Luke’s story seemingly suggests that father and sons are connected in their very “being-ness”—the father and the younger son, the father and the older son, the older son and the younger son.
Luke throws another twist at us too. Notice that it isn’t the “dissolute living” or what we often call the “sinful behavior” that gets the younger son into the story’s real trouble. It’s true, he squanders, or spends all the money—yes. But it’s the famine that does him in. And famines—like earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, fires, and disasters of all kinds—affect human beings in a variety of ways, the good and bad alike. His trouble comes not because he stupidly spent his fortune and now has nothing; trouble finds him because the place where he finds himself isn’t willing to recognize his ousia. He’s the low man on the totem pole because he’s got no family. No one will give him anything because the rule is, “fools get what they deserve.” If he had family, they would be OBLIGATED to take him in. So the redemptive moment becomes when he decides to return to his ousia—when he remembers his “substance”—who he really or truly is.
Notice too, that this “repentance” is not “forgiveness.” That despite the son’s intention to seek forgiveness the father will have none of it. Grace trumps forgiveness in this story. But what ousia means is that “substance” never wears off. So he still gets the best robe, the ring, the fatted calf, the celebration… no matter what he did. Repentance, “finding oneself” is one thing; forgiveness… that’s another story.
But isn’t Luke’s story able to offer us an important view toward who and whose we really are. We believe that Jesus—the same “substance” or “ousia” as God—comes to earth to live in the same “ousia” as human beings. In a way, that’s how Jesus is able to drag all of us back up to heaven, because he “unites” human beings with God—in the waters of baptism, there in the font; in the feasting at the Lord’s Supper, here in bread and cup; in the word—the logos—proclaimed from forever. In Jesus we are melded to God in that we are even called brothers and sisters with Christ and therefore, we bear some of “God’s ousia ourselves.”
That bears striking resemblance to what we proclaim in the creation story; that God created human beings, literally “breathing into us the breath of life”—the pnuma or Spirit of God. And in imparting life to us, we believe God gives us God’s own image—so that we bear the image of God if not God’s same substance. It’s how we can say in all seriousness that we can see “Christ” in one another. And we believe that we are created by God and that we return to God when we die.
So that at least part of what Luke offers us is a story that seems to bear out that truthful reality that because of Jesus Christ, human beings belong to and are related to God’s own substance. That human beings—no matter who we are or what we’ve done—always have a way home.
What does this mean? I believe it means that we can say of every human being—by “ousia”—you belong to God, you are of God. That fathers and sons can meet with an embrace rather than the business end of a sword. It means that we can say, “we belong to God,” and mean it. It means we know God’s ousia trumps whatever mistakes we’ve made in life—how ever the ways we have “ridden that dragon” thinking we were alone all that whole time, given over to our own desires. God says, “no so”—that’s not your story! “I” am your story!
And people always want to ask, “does this mean the perpetrators of those despicable acts—do they get into heaven, too?” Luke’s parable doesn’t address that. What we’re saying is that “coming to one’s self,” human beings find a way to God in Jesus Christ. We are not saying, “oh you murders, you traitors, you child molesters, it’s really OK what you did, come into the party.” We’re NOT saying that AT ALL. We’re saying that every human being belongs to God no matter who they are or what they’ve done. And that God bears the burden of what happens next. And if the parable’s any indication, don’t we have to believe that at the minimum, God invites them to enter the grand party—by dying to an old way of living and embracing a new one? The same thing God says to us—even if our sins aren’t perceived by us to be quite so bad.
Shall we not dare to say, as the other father does to his son, “There will be mercy for all who wish to be freed.” Mercy and forgiveness are not the same things. Mercy is the way of coming home, of returning, of the door being opened from death to life anew.
“There will be mercy for all who wish to be freed.”
Too often, you and I stand like Pharisees, trying to guard the door, not letting any sinfulness get past. Even for us, “there will be mercy for all who wish to be freed.”
Brothers and sisters… the party beckons.
--+ AMEN.
As always, thanks for checking this out.
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