+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Something occurred to me this week about today’s very familiar Gospel reading for the first time ever, which just goes to show how God can surprise us when we read his Word (and also, when we’re relying on others to help us, so I hasten to add that this thought is not original to me; it comes from Andy McGowan, Dean of Berkely Divinity School, our church’s seminary at Yale).
Now, this may strike some of you as shocking, but here goes–I wonder if the popular name we’ve given this story for centuries is a bit misleading. What do we call it? “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.” Indeed, the son is “prodigal”, meaning that he spends lavishly and wastefully. But the son’s prodigality is not the point of the story. His defining characteristic is not that he is a big spender, it’s that he’s lost.
You may have noticed that our assigned lesson skipped seven-and-a-half verses. In this case I think that’s understandable. The folks who gave us the lectionary wanted us to realize that this parable is told in the hearing of both publicans and sinners (“the wicked”) and the murmuring Scribes and Pharisees (“the righteous”), but Jesus tells this motley group two other parables in the elided verses–those of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Those parables deserve their own treatment, which they will get later this year, but the point is about how those valuable possessions are lost, how diligently the owners search for them, and how joyful they are upon finding them. Likewise, today’s parable might better be titled “the parable of the lost son,” because it is not primarily about the precise nature of his dissolution–his partying it up in the Ancient Near Eastern equivalent of Las Vegas or Amsterdam–but about the grief of loss and the joy of finding and being found by the one who loves us.
And let’s push it a step further. Maybe, like the other two parables, we are not meant to see the son as the protagonist, the “main character” here. Of course the son does stuff, and he is meant, I think, to symbolize us, all of whom are lost and found at various points in our pilgrimage through life. But are we the “main characters”? Our modern assumption is that we are the main characters in our own stories, and everyone else has a supporting role; or, for my role playing game nerds out there, everyone else is an NPC–a non-player character. No doubt this is a natural reaction to an opposite, equally bad extreme in which the person with power is always the main character and everyone else is a peon, but sometimes the pendulum does swing too far.
If we were to change the title yet again to highlight the person whom I think is supposed to be the protagonist here, maybe we should call this “the Parable of the Prodigal Father.” You see the father is just as prodigal as the son, albeit in a very different, positive way. He’s just as profligate, but he lavishes his wealth not on debauched living, but on celebrating the return of the one whom he loved, despite that one having essentially wished him dead in demanding an early inheritance. He had already cashed in half his retirement savings before turning 59-and-a-half (not a prudent move, at least according to the Church Pension Group), and now he’s throwing a party. Such is the beneficence of a God who would, who did give everything away for every lost child who came back home to him.
This was good news for the publicans and sinners who heard the story, and it was difficult, perhaps enraging news for the Pharisees and Scribes who like the older brother care more about what’s fair than what’s loving. But if those putatively righteous people had been paying attention with an understanding heart they would have noticed that the Father went out to seek and bring back inside the petulant older brother, too. He had thought, perhaps like the Pharisees and scribes, that he was the protagonist instead of the Father, instead of the all-merciful God.
Life is a lot easier and makes a lot more sense when we can just shift that focus to the Lord God as the center of the story. At the risk of embarrassing my wife (which I might do regularly anyway) I think about this a lot when it comes to weddings, and the varied experiences I have officiating them in comparison to my own and others. Sometimes you’ll get a “bridezilla”, but lest I be accused of misogyny, I’ve found it nearly as frequent to encounter a “groomzilla” or a “mom-and-dad-and-wedding-planner three headed King Ghidorah.”
I think our wedding was easy mostly because of Annie’s own view of marriage and mine were worked out before the wedding, and I’m pretty sure we still hold the same view, since I’ve heard heard her say out loud more than once. We’ve been asked more than once by families and friends why neither of us ever got cross with anybody or made unreasonable demands of anybody or ever seemed “stressed out” when we got married. The same was asked about the “layed back” nature of both her parents and mine. I’ll not deny, part of it was that we were both proper adults (both 29, though perhaps that’s now considered young), that my parents had already gone through a wedding with my little sister, and that Annie and I are both pretty naturally amenable people.
But, as much as I like to over-analyze, I think Annie always answers those sorts of questions the same way: well, it wasn’t about either of us. It wasn’t, which doesn’t mean the couple and their relationship doesn’t matter; it does. Nor was it even about the families around us or the friends and the fellow-parishioners who were likewise present. Their presence important, but it didn’t belong to them either. The main character was God himself, the one who owns that marriage, who took the love of two people and made it and continues to make it a a reflection of his Grace. He’s the center, and “it’s not really about us.”
I think that’s what the lost son and the prodigal father realize, it’s what the publicans and sinners must have realized, and it’s what the Pharisees and righteous older brothers among us (myself among their number sometimes) have trouble seeing–it’s not about us. It’s about our Heavenly Father, and Jesus our brother, and the Holy Ghost who gives us mercy in our hearts to offer back to the all-merciful God everything about ourselves, the good and the bad, knowing that he loves us all the same and has bought us, once bondservants to sin, and freed us to live as daughters and sons, and every blessing we enjoy is his and may be a small sign to the world of His infinite grace.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.