The Road Less Traveled

A Sermon by Donel McClellan
First Congregational United Church of Christ
Bellingham, Washington

Last week I attempted to present Jesus as a teacher of wisdom—a member of a tradition with deep roots in Jewish tradition. I spoke of two kinds of wisdom, conventional wisdom which is the consensus wisdom of a particular society and subversive wisdom which challenges the assumptions of societies and cultures.

Jesus was a teacher of subversive wisdom and many of his teachings have to be understood from that perspective. If we use conventional wisdom, common sense, to interpret Jesus’ parables we may come to one conclusion. If we use subversive wisdom, the implications of the parables are very different.

In the top-ten favorite parables, just following parable number one—the Good Samaritan, comes parable number two—often called The Prodigal Son. You know this story by heart and really didn’t even need to hear it again to summon up your own feelings about it. The parable reads differently to different audiences. Just imagine what would it might sound like to the judges of the United States Supreme Court? How would it be heard on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. How would this years’ graduating class at Harvard hear this story? What would the reaction be in Walla Walla or Purdy prisons?

Clearly the way we hear the parable changes with our experience. If you have been a rebellions child or have had one, these words carry a certain edge. Not all prodigals “come to themselves” and turn around to come home. Too many are still in a far country and too many mothers and fathers would love to have the opportunity to rejoice. And for every prodiga,l there is a successful sib, ready to misunderstand the rejoicing.

Last Sunday the parables were about tragedies and Jesus’ warning that those caught in calamity are not worse than the rest of us. That news was somehow comforting. But the words that followed resulted in some of the most interesting conversations I have had all week. Jesus said that unless his listeners repent they will end up like the victims of tragedy. That seemed the cruelest cut of all to some people. One friend wrote to express confusion and put the concern very clearly:

I can accept that evil acts and sin are random. Life is not fair and tragedy is not doled out on an equal basis. I can live with that. And it's ok if I have more than my neighbor. I won't complain. But when, on top of the insult of such a horror, I am told to repent and grovel in guilt for my sins - I gotta wonder, what kind of God is this?

I think that is exactly the question Jesus was trying to address in the parable we heard today. You may call it the parable of the Prodigal Brother, or the Parable of the Snarly Sibling, or the Parable of the Indulgent Father. All these titles will fit one interpretation of the story.

But before we even approach the parable, let’s ask ourselves, “What kind of God is this?” Let’s allow the conventional wisdom of our American culture to speak first.

Our culture tells us that God is the ultimate lawgiver who expects all followers to follow the rules. Those who follow the rules will be saved from the terrible punishment that is in store for everyone else. This is the God whose Son had to suffer so horribly—and graphically in the most recent movie of the Passion—in order to redeem sinful humanity.

Our cultural God is testy and vindictive. God is partisan giving enormous wealth to some countries and races, and condemning other nations and races to lives of grinding poverty and violence. This is a harsh and hardly lovable God, controlling every event of our lives and leaving us wondering what good purpose can possibly justify the suffering we see around us.

This is the God we bring to the parable. A God something like the elder brother in the story: dutiful, hard-working, loyal, business-like, ethical, unforgiving.

With this cultural image of God planted firmly in our minds we have to ask “What kind of God is this?” What kind of God allows innocent people to die by the hundreds and won’t even step in to cure a little malignant tumor in one of the most loving and Godly people we know? What kind of God fails to protect us from tragedies which threaten to shatter our lives? What kind of God allows innocent children to suffer with maladies that divinity ought to be able to cure in the twinkling of an eye?

This is the question Jesus addresses in today’s parable. The parable has the intent of knocking that narrow, judgmental, partial God clean out of our heads. There is no way to understand the story if we keep in mind that cultural image of God.

Jesus is saying to his followers, your idea of God is so mixed up that I am going to give you a theology transplant. I’m going to cut out the diseased concept of God you have stuck in your mind, and replace it with an image more in harmony with the God I know. You might say that the father figure in the parable is a counter-cultural God. The parable says something shockingly true about God.

Let’s look at this Father, who is Jesus’ picture of God Almighty. First of all, the father is not infallible. He has two sons—women, please imagine a mother and two daughters if you wish—I cannot do that here because the cultural conditions of the parable require a contrast between the roles of father and mother.

This father has two sons, an elder son and a younger son. He loves them equally, but they are not equal. The elder son has the lions’ share of the inheritance just because he was born first. He is studious and dutiful, loyal to his father and in training by the time he is four years old, to become the master of the household.

The younger son is a dreamer, always imagining a life away from the family farm, a chance to set out on his own and make something of himself. He isn’t as hard working as his older brother and doesn’t do as well in school. It is particularly grating to the elder brother that the father clearly loved his younger son at least as much as the elder. And what is worse, the father plays more with the younger son. Their relationship is closer than that of the elder brother and father.

When the younger son becomes an adolescent, and is considered a man in Jewish society, he comes to his father and says: I want my cut of the inheritance. I want to travel in the world and find myself. I’m sure this has happened many times in history, perhaps even in first century Israel. But what happens next is unprecedented in the Middle East. The father says “Yes.”

This doesn’t shock us because we know the story. It would shock us if we knew the father’s culture. Biblical scholar Kenneth Bailey traveled around the Middle East for 15 years, comparing current practices and traditions with those from biblical times. On his journeys, one of the things he questioned people about was the implications of the son’s request for his share of the inheritance in this parable. The answers he received were always the same. The typical conversation, recorded in his book “Poet & Peasant”, generally runs like this:

Simply by asking for a share in the estate, the younger son was saying, “Drop dead, Dad, and give me what you’ve been keeping from me in life.” What he did was truly awful—an unthinkable thing, in terms of his own culture. He broke all relationship with his father. To him, his father was as good as dead. He threw away his sonship—something he could never get back.^{^[2]}

By saying “Yes” the father became the prodigal, giving in to an unreasonable demand, jeopardizing the family’s wealth by placing it in the hands of an immature and headstrong son. One has to wonder if this father was exercising appropriate parental authority.

And when the lost son returned, the father acted irresponsibly a second time. Once again, New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey sees the father in the parable acting in a way more appropriate for the mother. Mother’s might run to their sons with hugs and kisses, but never fathers. Patriarchs would not run because to do so would require lifting the hems of their long garments and exposing their feet, a very undignified thing to do. Even now, in the Middle East it is an insult to show the sole of your foot or your heel to another man. My nephew Mark Baldwin, sister Pat’s son, is completing a two year contract as a consultant in the United Arab Emirate University. He was at an informal dinner with the Minister of Education and Chancellor of the university who is a member of the royal family. They were sitting comfortably on leather couches and Mark, to make himself comfortable crossed his legs. The chancellor, glancing at the sole of his foot said gently, Mark, you may wish to place your feet flat on the floor.”

Not only did the father welcome the prodigal back into the family, he ordered a party. This father, who is Jesus’ image of God, is not a formal and conventional patriarch. He is unconventional in his behavior, extravagant in compassion, and prodigal in expressing generosity, forgiveness, welcome and joy.

This is the God of unconventional wisdom, the God of the counter-culture, the God of Jesus Christ. That’s what kind of God this is.

So what about the question of fairness? Doesn’t the elder brother have every right to be ticked off? In terms of the cultural God of law and justice, of course he does. But by the measure of Jesus’ God of limitless love for every human child, the brother is way off base. The brother has lapsed into “we and them” thinking, good and bad thinking, dutiful and prodigal thinking, mine and yours thinking. He is as wrong as his brother was wrong. The illusion of superiority is a deadly as the experience of utter failure.

Now we’re back to that touchy issue of repentance. Jesus calls upon us to repent, to turn around and says that if we don’t we will as bad off as the victims of countless tragedies—that is, dead.

Of course he is perfectly right, we are all going to end up dead some day, that’s hardly news. But we get disturbed about the idea of repentance when we mix it up with a God who is just waiting to get us and give us what deserve, sinful, lowly worms that we are. The problem is, according to Jesus there is no God like that. God is like the ever-loving farther of the two sons. So with that kind of God, what does it mean to repent, to turn around?

I think it means to give up the idea that God loves us more—or less—than anyone else. God loves each of us infinitely. And because this God is loving, compassionate and trustworthy we ought to do everything we can to spend our lives in relationship with God. We are invited to the party, the feast of celebration, whenever one of God’s children returns home.

It is not that we know everything about good and evil, tragedy and triumph as God’s children. It’s simply that these things do not threaten God’s children in the same way they threaten others.

Writing about faithful Christians of the past, Phyllis McGinley said, ”The wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers, got hungry, scolded God, were egotistical, or testy or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still, they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.” ^{^[3]}

That is a picture of the Christian – doggedly blundering toward heaven. We make mistakes, we fail regularly, but we are cherished in loving esteem by the authentic God. We can never negate that love, it is always running to embrace us if we will let it.

[1]. Kenneth Bailey, Poet & Peasant & Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables of Luke. Eerdman’s, 1983.

[2]. These images are from The Father Who Lost Two Sons , by Robert Farrar Capon

[3]. From Phyllis McGinley, Saint-watching cited in The Prairie Rambler, February 1993, p. 2.