Psalm 32 (adapted)
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Today’s gospel reading features a parable often known as the Prodigal Son.
I’d venture to say that it is the second most familiar parable in the gospels, only surpassed by the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Among other things, the reading serves to remind us how easy it is to miss subtle clues in ancient literature, literature that was not written for us.
We are told that the younger son has demanded his inheritance and squandered it is in a distant region. The text does not directly describe that distant region as Gentile, and yet it does, for there is a “pig flag” in the text.
There are no pig farms in Jewish towns.
We see this “pig flag” in other places in the Christian Testament as well. For example, Matthew’s version of a story found in all three Synoptic Gospels has two mentally ill un-sheltered men in the cemetery, rather than the one in the more familiar Lucan version of the Gerasene demoniac story. When Jesus exorcizes their demons, the demons move into a herd of pigs. The herd promptly runs into the sea and the pigs drown, which does not thrill the locals. That’s a lot of lost bacon.
We are meant to understand that Jesus is healing people pretty indiscriminately, even Gentiles who didn’t ask to be healed.
Unlike the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which is pretty straight forward, the Parable of the Prodigal Son has been given many interpretations over the centuries, including some that are not only clearly wrong, but are truly dangerous.
For example, the story has been read through the lens of Paul’s binary of faith vs. works, or grace vs. law, the prodigal on the side of faith and grace, the elder on the side of works and law. Since this is a misinterpretation, I’m not going to go down that theological rabbit hole today, except to point out that Protestants have often used this interpretation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son to claim superiority over the Roman Church, and Christians generally have used it to claim superiority over Jews, both justifying hatred and division, and the latter interpretation used to justify Christian antisemtism.
Instead of pitting the two sons against each other as representatives of opposing theological positions Jesus never even imagined, some have suggested focusing on the father’s effort to reconcile the two sons. The problem with that approach is that we have no ending. We don’t know if the brothers are reconciled.
It turns out both grace and reconciliation are keys to the parable, just not in a way we like. In fact, Jesus is making the exact same point here that he makes in the Parable of the Vineyard Workers.
In that story, a vineyard owner hired day laborers in the morning. He continued to hire available laborers throughout the day.
When it came time to pay the workers at sundown, he didn’t pay the workers who were hired last, who had not found other employment earlier in the day, he didn’t pay them a quarter day’s pay. He didn’t pay them a half day’s pay. He paid them a full day’s pay.
The workers who started first thing in the morning were angered by this injustice. They deserved, were entitled to, more pay than the late comers.
We have in our minds an idea of fairness, and are generally willing to see deprivation and even suffering as long as no one gets more than we think they deserve.
Even when we have clear evidence that the system is broken, that many get far less than they deserve and a tiny few get way more than they deserve, as true in that ancient imperial colony as it is in late-stage neo-liberal capitalism, we still grasp at this idea of a cosmos that follows our logic, that is driven by scarcity thinking. We do not like the arbitrary, in nature or in society.
What people deserve or don’t deserve is a driving force in our politics. There is no justice, not even our scarcity-driven human justice, in this economic system, much less the sort of radical compassion and holy generosity promoted by most world religions.
In practice, those who have little want to take from those who have less, and the accidents of birth become entitlement rather than luck, good or bad.
But if you believe that God is the God of all people, that all of us are called and loved, which is to say if you believe in the entire point of the Good Samaritan parable, that “neighbor” is defined broadly, then we shouldn’t stop to ask what the dude did to end up in the ditch. We don’t assume it must have been his own fault that he got mugged. We don’t stand at the top of the ditch and ask if he deserves our help.
And we don’t have a tantrum when our idiot brother finally comes home, repenting of his bad decisions.
Because God is the parent of that idiot son. God is the vineyard owner who wants every worker to have enough to eat.
We are the workers who hope to receive unearned grace, the sinners who mess up sometimes.
God’s justice is not our petty justice, our retributive justice, our justice based in fear and false scarcity.
God’s justice is the justice that sees the improbable unfolding of quarks and quasars, the literary imagination of Zora Neal Hurston and William Gibson, the mathematical imagination of Alan Turing and Grace Hopper.
God is exactly that God of unearned grace, from the moment you wail out your first breath until you breathe your last and return to holy mystery.
Now, there is no question that we have the capacity to move beyond our “I got mine” justice, our retributive justice, move to grace-filled justice, restorative justice. It is hard, but there are so many moments and we tell those stories of generosity and love and sacrifice. But how far should we go?
After the party is over, does the Prodigal’s father sit him down and discuss expectations going forward?
Jesus certainly has expectations for those who would follow him, and in forming the early church, Paul creates systems of accountability. We are told to forgive seventy times seven times, but are we really supposed to be doormats?
The answer to that question, at least the answer of people in power, has mostly been yes, we are supposed to be doormats, because obedient and passive is just how people in power want us, but we must also be vengeful, at least in our judicial system.
That simply doesn’t align with the teachings of Jesus, the announcement of an in-breaking new reality he called the Kingdom of God and we might think of as the paradigm of love.
Human justice turns the prodigal son away at the door. Love wants everyone at the table.
Human justice, misogynist justice, casts the first stone. Love challenges those with stones in their hands to first consider their own sinfulness.
Moses may have been adopted into a royal house, and the gospels may try to position Jesus as the rightful heir to King David, but the Jesus story is the story of an unwed mother and a skilled craftsman living far from the seat of power.
When Jesus went to the seat of power, they gave him human justice, what they thought he deserved, on Good Friday, which we might better name today “Lynching Friday.” God had other plans, and so we have women and an empty tomb.
There was no restorative justice in the room when New York State Corrections Officers murdered Robert Brooks. There was no restorative justice in the room when New York State Corrections Officers murdered Messiah Nantwi. There will not be restorative justice in the room when those corrections officers are tried, just opposing groups trying to pull a bit harder on the levers of retribution.
Jesus healed. In a pre-scientific age, they had different explanations for what was going on, attributing physical and mental illness to demons or divine retribution for sins committed, by the one suffering or maybe their parents. Jesus didn’t care. Be gone demons! Your sins are forgiven! Take your son home, and tend to his wounds for he will have no more seizures. Roll up your mat, and walk.
The story tells us that even on the Cross, we was offering holy reconciliation. This day, you will be with me in God’s house.
This is not easy stuff. As systemic racism came crashing down in South Africa, they embarked on a grand experiment of Truth and Reconciliation, and all these years later, they are still not sure they got the balance between grace and accountability right. And here we are, witnessing war crimes in real time, watching our American Gestapo disappear people for calling out those war crimes, and we must first get down in the ditch and tend to the wounded, must challenge those with stones in their hands, and it is a little terrifying.
But when this is over, there is going to be a knock on the door. And the one who did a foolish and sinful thing will be standing there, asking for forgiveness. What will you do?