SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT
14 MARCH 2010
“But when this son of yours came back, having devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf.” (Luke 15:30)
Let us imagine that you are being given a word-association test, in which, upon prompting, you are instructed to say the first thing that comes to your mind. If the prompter said “Parable,” you’d probably respond “Prodigal son.” This story from St. Luke’s Gospel is the quintessential parable --- and a parable, as I have told you I remember from my confirmation class a half century ago, is “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.” Charles Dickens called this parable “the greatest story ever told.” One theologian has described it as “the Christian faith in miniature.” This classic family tale has been the inspiration for musicians like Debussy and artists like Rembrandt. And we know it thoroughly, or do we? Today, I would like to present the parable with what may be to some a new twist; and although I don’t usually give my sermons titles, I would entitle this one “The Prodigal Who Stayed at Home.”
Luke’s rendering of this parable (the only evangelist who tells the story) is full of details, and each one is important. It opens with what may seem like a not unreasonable request. The younger son asks for his inheritance now. But such a request was not only unreasonable; it was an utterance of rank ingratitude and flagrant disrespect. The son was in effect saying, “I wish you were dead” or “I can’t wait for you do die. Why are you still hanging around?” And the simple report that the father divided his property between the two sons simplifies what would have been a complex series of negotiations. In the agrarian economy of first-century Palestine, the father’s wealth would be in land. Therefore, giving one son his “half” meant liquidating assets --- selling off acres and heads of cattle, probably at a loss, given the son’s urgency. But the father complied with the son’s demands, and the son converted his newly-acquired assets into shekels, and went off to a far country, where, we are told, he squandered his property in riotous living. We know this character, by the way. He is alive and well in the 21st century. He is a young man who wants his freedom, rejects authority, and who doesn’t want to listen to his parents and older siblings telling him what to do. He wants to get from under his father’s roof and live life to the fullest. Stereotypically, such a young man today would not mount a camel, but would speed off in a convertible, his first acquisition from his newfound wealth.
We can imagine that when the younger son had plenty to spend, he was surrounded by a bevy of newfound friends, all too happy to eat, drink, and be merry with him. When his money was gone, however, so were his friends, and then, as fate would have it, a famine arose in that land, and the penniless prodigal had to look for work at a time when jobs were scarce, indeed. I think some people miss the significance of the job he was able to land --- feeding pigs. Here is a Jew, forbidden by the Law of Moses to eat pigs or even to raise or feed them, and here he was, forced to earn a living by fattening up these filthy animals he had been taught to despise. Our friend was so desperate and hungry, he would, if he could, have been happy to eat the pig slop to ward off his hunger, or as the KJV puts it, “he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.”
It is this association with swine which was the moment of truth for the prodigal. He had hit rock bottom --- and like any of us faced with the necessity of turning our lives around --- the abuser, the alcoholic, the addict --- the prodigal, mired in the filth of the sty, comes to his senses. He says “What is wrong with this picture?” His father’s hired hands had “bread enough and to spare,” and here he is, dying of hunger. So he resolves to go home and set things right. But he has squandered his right to be taken in as a son and just pick up where he left off. So he concocts a plan whereby he would come back as a hired servant. And like so many of us who want to get back into the good graces of a parent or a spouse or an employer, he rehearses his speech: He says over and over again, “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 servants.”
But a funny thing happened on his way back to his father’s farm (or what was left of it). While he was still “afar off,” the father sees him. The lord of the manor does not stand his ground; wait for his son to come up to him to plead his case. No, Luke tells us, his father, so filled with compassion, ran (something someone of his status would never do) and fell on his neck and kissed him. We can only imagine that he doesn’t even hear the well-rehearsed script when it is stammered out; the father has other plans. He summons his servants to produce a robe and a ring (normally reserved for visiting dignitaries of high rank). He orders his barefoot son to be properly shod, and then he claps his hands and orders the fatted calf to be killed, so that a feast may be had to celebrate his son’s return.
The parable could well end here. In it, we have seen reckless behavior, followed by penitence, followed by God’s mercy and forgiveness, followed by feasting. The fact that the father ran out to the son, indicative of God’s willingness to meet us sinners half way, is lost on no one. The fact that the son, who, totally out of control, had thrown away half of his father’s wealth in dissolute living, had been welcomed back into the loving embrace of his father reminds us that there is no sin so great that forgiveness is withheld by a loving Creator. So the story could end here, and we could all break into a rousing chorus of “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy.”
But the story does not end here. Instead, it shifts its focus to the third party in this little drama, the older brother. He comes in from the fields, sees all the merry-making, and asks a servant what’s going on. It is explained to him that his brother has come home safe and sound, and that his father has killed the fatted calf for him. Junior was not a happy camper. He was furious, and would not go into the party tent. So the father ---- the same father who ran to meet his younger son as he was returning home, now, in a similar gesture, goes out to his older son. He pleads with Number-one Son to come in to participate in the merry-making. Instead, the son, irate and livid, delivers a speech to his father, very much unlike his brother’s speech: “I have been working my fingers to the bone for you for lo! these many years, never disobeyed you, but you never even gave me a kid. But when this your son has come (notice how he disowns his brother) who has (in the words of the KJV) devoured your living with harlots, you kill the fatted calf.” The father pleads with him again, but apparently to no avail.
The older son is even more familiar to us than the younger son. He represents those of us who believe that our sins are better than others’ sins; that our dirt, as it were, is cleaner. Therefore, we believe that God must be a little more pleased with us than with others. The older brother represents what one theologian calls the “unattractive goodness” of so many people whose dutiful Christianity consists of church going, worshipping, paying their pledge (not a bad thing!) loving Jesus and reading the Bible. They believe that a) such behavior renders them a little more righteous and well behaved and well mannered than those outside the church; and b) that all of this righteous behavior entitles them to something! The older brother is like the Pharisee who is blind to his faults. The older son’s favorite poem goes like this:
We are the choice selected few and all the rest are damned.
There is room enough in hell for you; we can’t have heaven crammed
This little ditty speaks to the smug, self-righteousness of the older brother and of so many of us who profess and call ourselves Christians. Both sons were bitter --- the younger one because he found himself in a pig sty, destitute and famished. But his bitterness was assuaged by the realization that he had brought the situation on himself, and he sought a remedy for his predicament. The older son’s bitterness resulted in his hardness of heart, a loveless heart whose principal occupation was to judge other people. He was so judgmental, in fact, that we can be reasonably certain that had the older brother been on the road when his younger sibling returned, he may well have not made it all the way to the farm. The older brother personifies a definition of resentment I heard recently: “Resentment is drinking poison and expecting others to die.”
“Prodigal” is a word that we don’t use much apart from this parable. What does it mean? Its synonyms are such words as wasteful, dissolute, profligate. Both brothers, then, were prodigals --- the younger a prodigal of the flesh, the older a prodigal of the spirit. The younger son wasted his father’s money in the fleshpots of that far-off country he went to; the other son was guilty of far more, wasting his father’s love. We may well believe that the spiritual prodigal was the greater offender. But the parable makes no such distinction. Even to the Prodigal Who Stayed at Home, the father says “You are always with me, and all that I have is yours.”
We are all prodigals, and we pray that we, who have “erred and strayed from God’s ways like lost sheep” and “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,” may hear such comforting words from our heavenly Father.
Let us pray:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness in the sea.
There is kindness in his justice, which is more than liberty.
There is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good;
There is mercy with the Savior; there is healing in his blood.