Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Sometimes there is a certain serendipity which strikes when presented with the readings appointed by the lectionary and other things going on, either personally or in the world. As it happens, before even realizing that we were to hear the parable of the prodigal son this morning, I had been thinking about father-son-brother (or, more broadly parent-child-sibling) relations. If you pray the daily office, you will have been reading the story of Jacob’s discovery of Joseph being alive in Egypt, both in spite of and thanks to Joseph’s brothers. Thursday we read the moving account of this father-son reunion:

And Joseph made ready his charet and went up to meet Israel his father, to Goshen, and presented himself unto him: And he fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while. And Israel said unto Joseph, now let me die, since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive.

I wonder if our Lord had this scene in mind when he told the parable of the prodigal son, cleverly reversing the characters’ positions.

I also, quite unconnected to this, recently started re-reading The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s magnum opus, (which I haven’t read in nearly twenty years) and I was struck by that author’s inversion of the themes of the parable. I won’t spoil the novel for you, but I’ll just say that one of the brothers, Dmitri, is most certainly a prodigal figure, but the Father, Fyodor Pavlovich, is in every way the opposite of the loving father of the parable, and despite Dmitri’s brother Alyosha being himself the polar opposite of the prodigal son’s angry brother, this leads to a less than happy conclusion.

In each of these stories–that of Jacob and Joseph and his brothers, that of Fyodor Pavlovich and his sons, and that of the prodigal son and his father and brother–we see how filial relationships can be defined by both mercy and wrath, both within literal households, and most importantly for our purposes, within the household of God in which we are all brothers and sisters.

As with so many of the parables, it bears considering where we find ourselves in the story. The more I think about this parable, the more I realize that I’m not best served by thinking of myself as the prodigal son; at least I’m not at this point in my life. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I’m a lot more like the older brother. I’m a lot more like the irritable young man who sees injustice more clearly not when the good are denied their reward but when the wicked and the lazy don’t get their just deserts. I don’t care about the fact that I get the inheritance; I’m mad about my good-for-nothing little brother getting a party he doesn’t deserve.

Understand, I don’t mean this just in spiritual terms. I mean it in very real, material terms. How come that fellow over there gets so much money or affirmation or love or attention when he’s not nearly as worthy as I sometimes think I am? “How come I work so hard,” I say to myself, “and still have to deal with little irritations, with minor perceived injustices, and that guy over there gets a pass?” A few weeks ago I said that Lent is my favorite time of year, but it can also be my least favorite sometimes because it is this time of year when God and his Church really force me to interrogate my own thoughts and fears and motivations. How I need it, and probably a heck-of-a-lot more than forty days out of the year and the minute or two I manage to cursorily accomplish while saying my daily prayers the other 325.

Perhaps you feel more like the prodigal son. Maybe you can even identify with the father who rejoices over his return. Sometimes I can cast myself in those roles, too. But most of the time I’m probably more like big brother.

On the front of your bulletins this week is the most famous artistic depiction of this story, Rembrandt’s painting of the same, and I think it’s such a powerful image because it succeeds in placing us within the story and within the hearts and minds of each of its characters. Henri Nouwen, the famous twentieth century priest, professor, and activist went to what was Leningrad at the time to see the painting made the following observation:

Rembrandt is as much the elder son of the parable as he is the younger. When, during the last years of his life, he painted both sons in Return of the Prodigal Son, he had lived a life in which neither the lostness of the younger son nor the lostness of the elder son was alien to him. Both needed healing and forgiveness. Both needed to come home. Both needed the embrace of a forgiving father. But from the story itself, as well as from Rembrandt’s painting, it is clear that the hardest conversion to go through is the conversion of the one who stayed home.

Now, I don’t know much about Rembrandt’s life. I can only assume Nouwen did. In any event, I take comfort in knowing that someone felt the same connection I do to this less-than-likeable character.

I also take comfort in knowing that the big brother isn’t in charge of the family estate, even if I’m more likely to be the big-brother of the story. I take comfort in knowing that God’s a lot more gracious than I am, even when I don’t like that fact. I take comfort in knowing that whether any of us is on our journey back home or are already there waiting, the rules of the house are based on mercy rather than judgment, generosity rather than stinginess, love rather than indifference.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Streams will not curb their pride

The just man not to entomb,

Nor lightnings go aside

To give his virtues room

These lines, written by Matthew Arnold in his poem Empedocles on Etna, get to a truth which we know all too well: bad things happen to good people. We know this so well that while we may still struggle to see God’s hand in such situations, we would nonetheless be shocked to find that the average Jew of Jesus’ day believed something quite the opposite.

This is why they come to question Jesus about those “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” Most of Jesus’ contemporaries believed in something called a deuteronomic view of history. Some of you might have heard me mention this before, but for those who haven’t, such a view holds that the righteous are invariably rewarded by God and the wicked invariably punished by God, and if you’re experiencing pain or sorrow in this life it’s likely that you did something to bring it on yourself. Those who were slain by Pilate were presumably of the righteous sort. They were making proper sacrifices to the God of Israel, which from an Old Testament perspective embodied righteousness. This should have led, according to the deuteronomic view, to prosperity and security rather than death at the hands of a tyrant.

Of course, this isn’t how it works. Job had figured that out, and Jesus knew it all too well, as he, though sinless, was drawing ever closer to his passion and death. But Jesus makes an interesting move in this morning’s Gospel. He acknowledges that bad things happen to good people, but instead of trying to explain why this was the case he proceeded to call those around him to repentance, warning them “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did”.

You see, even though good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people, our actions are not without consequences, in this world and the next. This is because as moral creatures, as beings made in the image of God, our own thoughts and actions affect us at the deepest level, which is to say that what we do affects our very souls. We prayed in this morning’s Collect “that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.”

While we can do good and not necessarily experience God’s beneficence any more than the next person, while we can do ill and not necessarily feel the wrath of God within our lifetime, both courses have profound effects on our souls. In an 1819 letter to his brother and sister-in-law, John Keats wrote “Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world.” In other words, life and all of the choices it throws at us gives us the opportunities to harm or help the growth of our souls, to either stagnate (thanks to sin) or to grow (thanks to love) into the fullness of Christ.

Jesus doesn’t use such a modern term as “Soul-making”, but he gets at the same thing by use of a culturally significant metaphor:

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’

Here, Jesus is commenting on the soul of a society, as it were. The soul of Israel, cast as a fig tree (then a popular symbol of Jerusalem) had withered. The tree of the culture had not born the good fruits of righteousness. For three years the gardener had seen no fruit. For the three years of our Lord’s earthly ministry he had been rejected by the children of Israel and was about to be crucified. For the next few centuries the Roman Empire, which executed our Lord, was to live in relative peace and prosperity, while faithful Christians would be assailed by those who wished them dead.

Yet it is not the body so much as the soul whose health is most important and whose salvation is paramount. The withered tree may be spared while the fruitful tree is cut down by the merciless vine-dressers of this world. Even so, the good vinedresser, our Lord Jesus, cares for the spiritual fruit, which is the faith, hope, and love borne by the souls of the faithful.

And thanks be to God, that the gardener in the vineyard of the faithful is a patient gardener. Hear again the words of the gardener to the vineyard owner:

‘Sir, let [the fruitless tree] alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’

Just so does our Lord Jesus plead to the Father on behalf of wayward souls. The patience and unbounded mercy of God will give us a little longer, another year, another twenty, in hopes that we too may bear the good fruits of righteousness. He is kind in giving us sustenance in the Sacraments, as the gardener fertilizes the soil around the tree- sustenance our souls require to bear the fruits of faith, hope, and love.

God is patient, but we’ve not all the time in the world. As the psalmist put it:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

We have only a limited time in which to permit God to let us grow, in which to take heed of our souls and the fruits we are capable of bearing with God’s help. May we then, “deeply aware of the shortness and uncertainty of life” but sincerely thankful for the same, be ever mindful of our need and of the power of Christ to tend our souls and help them grow if with humility and repentance we permit him.

+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets.” Jesus’ lament in this morning’s Gospel is a powerful foreshadowing of the death which awaited him after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, after, as he had foretold, the children of Israel had proclaimed “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.”

Jesus’ lament raises a question, one which I believe to be important if we are to get to the center of Jesus’ mission 13and identity. The question is “what is a prophet?” It is a term we use rather loosely, but in the biblical worldview it held a rather specific meaning.

Let’s begin with two definitions of the word “prophet” which don’t quite get at the biblical meaning. First, there is what I call the “History Channel Definition of Prophecy”. Those of you who watch the History Channel will have recognized that much of the network’s programming has given up history in favor of speculation and what is to my mind an unhealthy curiosity with the occult. Anyway, if you were to turn on the television and flip to the history channel, you might see a “documentary” on how Nostradamus supposedly predicted the rise of Hitler or of the Taliban, or about how ancient Mayan oracles predicted the end of the world in 2012. The commentators on the program will refer to these predictions as prophecies and those who promulgated them as prophets.

But this is not the biblical definition of prophecy. Certainly, some of the Old Testament prophets predicted future events. Even so, prognostication about future disasters was not at the center of the prophetic vocation.

A second definition of prophet and prophecy arises from some contemporary Christians. They claim that a prophet is simply one who “speaks truth to power.” Specifically, they would limit prophecy to the promulgation of progressive politics. Certainly, the message of Old Testament prophets was not entirely without political ramifications,particularly seeing as how religion and politics were intimately bound together in ancient Israel. Even so, there is much more to biblical prophecy than what we would call political ideology, and, in my opinion, we would be sorely mistaken to see Jesus’ prophetic identity cast entirely in terms of modern political battles.

So, prophecy includes claims about the future and may have political implications, but these aspects neither exhaust nor define the message of a prophet. What does, then? What makes a prophet a prophet?

Well, in the Old Testament, all of the prophets were concerned with faithfulness, faithfulness to the Covenant which God made with His people. A covenant is an agreement between two parties in which each party has responsibilities. In this morning’s Old Testament lesson, God made a promise to Abraham, namely to give him offspring and land. Abraham’s end of the bargain was simply to believe, to trust in God’s promise: “And he believed the LORD;” the lesson reads, “and he counted it to him for righteousness.” This covenant was sealed in the ceremony in which Abraham sacrificed animals to the Lord, but the principal responsibility given to Abraham was simply to trust God.

Likewise, the Old Covenant given to the children of Israel through Moses was an agreement whereby the Israelites would obey certain moral and ritual laws in exchange for the land of Israel. All of those Old Testament Prophets, from Isaiah to Malachi, were concerned with one thing: namely, calling the children of Israel back into faithful obedience to their end of the bargain.

But, you see, the covenant was not just a legal contract as we might think of one today. It established a relationship between God and Israel which went beyond that. A legal contract operates on both trust and distrust, in a way. We don’t enter into an agreement unless on some level we trust the other party to be faithful to it, but of course we have legal recourse if they aren’t faithful. It’s like that aphorism used by Ronald Reagan with regard to nuclear disarmament in the Soviet Union: trust but verify.

The Old Covenant was a bit different. There was no higher court to which the children of Israel could appeal if they felt God wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain. The children of Israel needed to fully trust that God would be faithful if they were to be faithful themselves. This is a lot harder than keeping a legal agreement, which is generally not predicated on implicit trust to quite the same degree, and this is why the Israelites needed so many prophets to call them back to faithfulness.

So, the prophet’s task is to call someone back into holding up their end of the bargain with God, to bring them back into a relationship of trust and faithfulness. This is why the prophetic task is so dangerous. You can stand on the corner all day long and say that the world is coming to an end or that some unpopular policy is the will of God, and you might offend a few people. In some country’s you might even be thrown into prison, as we’ve sadly seen recently in Russia. If, however, you were to stand on the same corner and denounce the unfaithfulness of this generation, to say that those who passed by were a faithless, disobedient lot who had turned away from God, then you might find yourself in a more precarious position.

This is why Jerusalem killed the prophets. Listen again to Jesus’ words:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city which killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee; How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!

Ye would not. You were not willing. We are not willing to listen to the prophet who tells us that we need saving. We are not willing to admit that we’ve been unfaithful or to permit Jesus to gather us like a brood under his wings, to gather us back to the Father. For, you see, the message of the prophet suggests that we don’t have it all figured out. The prophet convicts us of our unfaithfulness, that we might return, but it is an offensive message to us.

The message was offensive enough to those in Jesus’ day, to those who could not see past their pride to see their unfaithfulness, that our Lord was ultimately killed for it.

But there were those who heeded the call to repentance, who recognized that without a relationship with Jesus they could not remain faithful to God, who rejoiced that in the blood of the lamb, who died to themselves and were saved and put their trust in his resurrection, that in it they were given the promise of new and unending life.

There was a choice, and there still is a choice. We can choose to kill the prophet, to ignore the action of the Holy Ghost in our own hearts, to fight Jesus when he tries to conform us more to his image. We can, however, choose to accept the prophecy which is preached within us by that same Spirit, to amend our lives, to recommit ourselves to God, and to throw ourselves entirely upon his mercy. May this holy season be a time in which we choose not to rebuff the prophet, not to grow offended by his message, but to recognize our own need: a need as profound as the children of Israel under the prophets of old, a need as real as those in Jerusalem at the time of our Lord’s passion- the need to renew our trust in God and our faithfulness to his commandments. Do not kill the prophet because of pride, but receive his message of Grace and forgiveness.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.