Co-missioners,
The Gospel text for this coming Sunday is that parable of parables so often and insufficiently refereed to “The Prodigal Son.”
Last Sunday we sent you a Crossings-style study of this text. Timothy Hoyer wrote it. It calls for your attention.
Today our editor, Jerry Burce, insists on passing along the last of the several sermons he preached on this parable during his twenty-eight years at the congregation he served in Greater Cleveland. He was four months away from retiring when he delivered it. This afforded an angle on the preaching that could well be of interest to others. So too with a certain twist at the end of the sermon that rarely gets mentioned when Christians talk about this parable.
We trust you’ll find both of these contributions helpful as you continue to get ready for the hearing and thinking—the preaching too, perhaps—that you’ll be busy with come Sunday morning.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Not “the Prodigal Son” but “the Lost Sons”; and again, We are the Slaves
A Preacher’s Final Treatment of Luke 15:11b-32
by Jerome Burce,
on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 27, 2022
+ In Nomine Jesu +
The Prodigal Son in misery (BM 1935,0522.3.40) From Wikimedia Commons
Such a story this is. I hardly know where to start with it, though where to wind up, that I do know. It’s with an angle on the story that I haven’t touched on in all my years with you at Messiah. I only tumbled to it—at last—some days ago. I’ve told you before that God’s Word in the Holy Scriptures is the gift that keeps on giving. It really is. Remember that.
As for starting this morning, perhaps it’s with a piece of advice from the old pastor who’s about to be done. Learn this story. Know it by heart. Teach it to your children. Read it to your grandkids. Make sure they get the whole thing, start to finish, including the part about the crabby older brother. I’d like to think—I certainly pray—that at least a few of those little ones will develop a life-long habit of going to church most every Sunday. They’ll turn into the kind of people that others refer to as “committed Christians.” Now if they do—God grant that they do—then that second part of the story is the one they’ll need to have down especially cold.
Saying this, I also take it more or less for granted that any number of our children, our grandkids too, will wind up like the younger brother spending stretches of time in some kind of far country, a place where the God we have in Christ Jesus is laughed off and dismissed as somebody else’s bad joke. These kids of ours will fall for this, perhaps. There’s nothing new about that—it happens all too often to baptized children. So if, God forbid, it happens to your child, you want her equipped in advance with a memory she can grab hold of when she hits the kind of pigsty moment we heard about in the younger brother’s half of the story. In such a moment, you who love your child will want her remembering how madly, outrageously good God really is for her. You’ll want her daring at some point to find out what the Father’s arms will feel like when she lets him wrap them around her again.
So yes, learn this story. Teach this story. Of all the stories Jesus told, make this the first that you take the time to learn and teach and after that return to again and again. Think of this as the story of stories. It lays out the Gospel so clearly—this good news that Jesus died to underwrite as God’s promise to us all.
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And with that, a few things about this story that I want to underscore in what is now my last chance ever to preach about it here at Messiah.
First things first. The standard title for this story is the Parable of the Prodigal Son. We ought to stop calling it that, I think. Show me a child in America who knows what the word “prodigal” means. For that matter, show me one who can say what a parable is. Even parents have trouble with that these days.
In any case, the real issue in this story is not prodigality—wastefulness, that’s what it means. You may have noticed—I hope you did—how the father doesn’t seem to give a hoot about all the money the younger kid burned through carousing in the far country. It’s the older brother who fusses about this. That too I hope you noticed—more on this in a moment. As for the father, money is the last thing on his mind when that younger son comes shuffling up the path after all these years away. He doesn’t bring it up when he runs out to meet him. He seems to take it for granted, in fact, that the kid is flat broke. You can see this in the detail of the ring he calls for to put on the boy’s finger. That’s a special kind of ring, an ownership ring. It grants fresh access to the family finances. As I’ve often said when telling this story, it’s as if the dad is giving the kid a no-limit credit card as part of the big welcome home. Imagine that. Talk about one crazy dad. More on that too in a moment.
That point for now is that the father doesn’t care about the money or the sin of wasting it. He cares instead about the son. He makes that plain when talking later to the pouting elder brother. What matters to him, he says, is that his dead boy is alive, his lost son is found. And he wants this to matter as much to the older son too—that other boy of his who, in his pouting, won’t acknowledge the younger son as his brother and join the party to celebrate his return. This leaves the older son in the field as dead and lost to the father as the younger son ever was during those years in the far country. Now whether the father gets that older son back, this we do not know. The story leaves us hanging.
In any case, here’s the real reason for finding a different name for this great story. The Prodigal Son is the kind the older brother would slap on it. One son. One bad, despicable son. The other kid. The Catholic kid. The Missouri Synod kid, for that matter. The kid who isn’t me. We Christians have been notorious over the centuries for thinking of each other along lines like these. Is that why we’ve been content to stick with “prodigal son” as our name for the story, emphasis on what the kid did as opposed to who he belonged to? As for you, when you teach the story to your children, your grandchildren, be sure to call it what it is: the Story of the Lost Sons, plural. Or perhaps you put it this way: the Story of the Father and his Lost Children, emphasis where it belongs, on the astonishing parent at the heart and center of it.
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The Return of the Prodigal Son – James Tissot (1836–1902)
From Wikimedia Commons
This brings me to a second point—a greater point. It’s the reason of reasons for knowing this story inside out and making absolutely certain that the kids know it too.
What Jesus gives us here is a picture of God that simply can’t be found anywhere else, and certainly not in any other so-called religion. He takes the very idea of God and turns it completely on its head. As he tells it, God is this mad and crazy father without much commonsense—commonsense as we sinners think of it, that is. He’s also the doting father whose love for his children strips of him clean of any shred of dignity.
Look at him as he runs down the road with his robes flapping in the wind, so eager is he to meet that wretch of a brat who’s crawling home only because he has to.
Look at that father out in the field, begging and pleading with the other snotty brat who absolutely disrespects him and the choices he has made in throwing the welcome home party for the brother he can’t stand.
For that matter, look at this father at the start of the story when the younger brat makes it plain that he’s sick of being at home and even wishes the father were dead. In fact, says he, pretend that you’re dead. Give me now what I’ve got coming when you are dead.
“OK,” this father says. That’s it: “OK.” And off the brat goes with a million dollars in his pocket. And no, he doesn’t send back letters from that far country he disappears into.
If I were the father of such a kid and caught sight of him trudging home one afternoon all tired and ragged and dirty, I think I’d lean against a porch post peering at him until he reached the front steps. Then I’d want to hear a story—a really good story—before I let him in the house. I sure wouldn’t be calling for the party of the year, fatted calf and all, until he proved that he had earned it. That would take a year or two. I sure wouldn’t hand him the family credit card until I was absolutely certain I could trust him with it. How long would that take? I can’t begin to guess.
For sure I wouldn’t take the risk of being played for a fool the second time around.
Comes the question—for us, the real-life question: how often does the God we have in Christ allow himself to be played for a fool by the likes of us? Seven times? Seventy times seven times? How about we take that second number and multiply it now by 7,000, or even 7 million? That’s the God and Father you’ve got, says Jesus, the Son who knows him best.
And he says this, remember, on his way to Jerusalem where he’ll pay the price for the Father’s folly in doting on all his human children as absurdly as he does. That’s what’s really going on when Jesus gets crucified. For their part, the elder brother types who oversee the crucifying think they’re doing the world a favor by getting rid of a rascal who tells lies about God. Whopping lies. Dangerous lies. “Agreed,” say all those far-country types who are standing around the cross that day enjoying the spectacle. “How,” they say, “can we trust a God who indulges us the way this Jesus claims he does? The world we know, a world filled as it is with people like us—such a world demands a God who knocks heads from time to time. Anyone with any commonsense at all can see this. So what gives with this Jesus fellow? Does he take us all for fools with these crazy stories he’s been peddling?
That’s the sort of thing people are muttering about on that horrible afternoon as they watch Jesus die. And they’re muttering still. They mutter constantly, as a matter of fact. They mutter even in churches where people ought to know better. No room for you in the house of God, they say, unless you really really repent and quit it already with all your sinning, or at least the kind of sinning that we disapprove of here.
And how does God respond to all this? On the third day after the crucifixion he raises Jesus from the dead to keep the stories going—this story in particular—and then to fill the world with the Spirit of God who alone is able to get the likes of us believing what he tells us.
And here, for example, is what he tells us. “This is my body given for you, my blood as well. Eat. Drink. Enjoy the party.” That’s how crazy good God is in Christ to all of us this morning. That’s how much God dotes on you.
Like I say, our children won’t hear the slightest mention of this One and Only real God in the far countries they’re bound to land in. That’s why it’s so important that they hear it now. Make sure they hear the story—the Jesus story. Make sure they learn it now so that when the time comes they’ll have the sense to head on home and let themselves be saved.
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And with that one last thing, a quick thing—the thing I said I tumbled to at last some days ago.
It has do with church. This church for sure, and every other church too.
There are some people in this story of the Lost Sons that no one ever talks about. I’ve never brought them up before.
They’re the slaves in the Father’s house who do the work when the happy dad starts barking out his orders. They bring the shoes, the robe, the ring. They butcher and roast the fatted calf. They serve the meal, they pour the wine–I assume there’s wine, a lot of it, the best wine ever, like the kind the guests got to drink at the wedding in Cana.
You are the people God relies on to make the party happen at this church. Remember that here as the years go by. Yours are the hands and feet the Father uses to extend his joyful welcome to whatever child of his comes straggling through the doors back there. Yours are also the hands and feet he counts on to get the party rolling in other places. Leo’s Laundromat down the street, for example, or wherever else you might choose someday to put the Father’s heart on display.
I hope you’ll go at it as the servants seem to have done in today’s story. With eagerness, with joy.
I hope you’ll do it as Jesus did it himself on that night he washed some dirty feet of people who didn’t deserve it.
+ Soli Deo Gloria
