“Homecoming”
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 18, 2007
The Rev. Dr. Catherine Taylor
We are getting close to the end of Lent now, Journey with Jesus on the final leg toward home. I missed not being here last week. Robert and I were with the youth at Watson Homestead. The best part of our time together, for me anyway, was not the program, although some if it was good. The best part for me was being together, laughing, playing games and telling stories.
To whom do you tell your very best stories? Stories you practice, stories that take a while to tell and that have that unexpected sock at the end. Is it to your best pals after class, or when you are driving around in the car? Your colleagues around the conference table? Friends or family gathered in your dining room, deck, or den? Or maybe you save your best stories, voices and all, for a grandchild nestled in bed or in your arms. You probably don’t go out of your way to tell the very best stories you know to people who don’t count with you. Jesus told some of his best stories to people you might not expect. Not to his family, or to the disciples, but to the Pharisees. Today’s story is one of those.
The story of the prodigal son is a favorite with many people. It is so familiar, says one commentator, that “we live it in the narrative of our lives.” When we hear the first line, “we run to our familiar readings of it.”
For some here today that reading is the one about a father who is a stand-in for God, a father whose love for both his sons is deep and boundless, even excessive, and misunderstood by them both. For others here the prodigal son is a story about being able to go home and start again after making every bad choice imaginable. For almost 85 percent of people, according to a study I read about, the story is about the stay-at-home brother, the one who didn’t make bad or selfish choices but who did all the right things, and is now hurting because, from his point of view, no one has ever in his life shown him an outpouring of excessive love.
It is hard to preach a beloved story to a crowd that already has such a range of hard and fast interpretations in mind. It is hard, but not impossible. You can compare it to living in an area full of beautiful waterfalls. They are stunning, but so familiar that we don’t even see them anymore. But it is still possible to see them sometimes.
Last Friday morning something wonderful happened. I was driving to work behind a city bus. When it got to the bridge on Lake Street at the base of Ithaca Falls, the bus stopped. Just stopped. No one was getting on or off. It was in the middle of the bridge. More water than usual was pounding over the falls and had been for a couple of days with the brief melt we experienced. The bus driver had obviously stopped just to look at the amazing torrent of water. Maybe he or she was alone in the bus, but I hope not. I hope there were several people on board and that all of them, just for a moment, were looking at the familiar, but still breathtaking, waterfall.
So yes, you know the story of the prodigal son, but it is still one of the best stories ever told. And our bus driver this morning, who will help us stop and look at it again, is not the wastrel son, or the obedient son, or even the loving father. Our bus driver this morning is a Pharisee, one to whom the story is being told in the first place.
It is safe to say that over the years preachers have given the Pharisees a hard time. They are always being blamed for being treacherous religious insiders whose only motivation is to hold on tight to their own way of life. That point of view, or course, comes straight from the gospels. Luke paints them as relentless opponents, always around sneering when Jesus breaks a tittle of the law, always vying for a place of honor at banquets, always following their strict religious code to the point of tithing everything, even the spices in their food, while “neglecting justice and the love of God.” (Luke 11:42) At one point in Luke, Jesus yells at the Pharisees, “You are like unmarked graves, that people walk over without realizing it.” (Luke 11:44) It is hard to image a worse characterization than that.
But it is also true that had you been there to observe them, the Pharisees would have been the best people in the neighborhood, the ones you would think of first to give your keys to when you and your family are going out of town. The kids who always know what went on in class and can give you perfect, readable notes if you were absent. They are the moms who always make it to the meetings at school who you can call when you need to know what’s going on; the dads who are willing to act as chaperones for the school trip or the junior high dance. If you saw them in the context of their day and time, you would get that inner “Aha!” that tells you they were the sturdy church people every pastor dreams of when she wakes up in the middle of the night worrying about church growth.
The gospel is right, of course, that the Pharisees were so hung up on the details of being faithful they completely missed the joy of loving God by loving people who are weaker than themselves. Jesus wanted the Pharisees to look up from their dietary lists and wonder why there was no one who didn’t look exactly like them seated at their dinner tables. He wanted them to look up from their Sabbath prayers and see that there were people needing to be healed now, not tomorrow. He wanted them to look away from their pride in their high standards of behavior and show some love for people who could never compete with them on the obedience scale.
Read through the gospel of Luke up to this point and you’ll see that the Pharisees make Jesus furious. The funny thing is, though, the people who make you furious are usually people you love, people for whom you save up your very best stories.
On this particular day a group of tax collectors and sinners--that other group Jesus loved so much--a group of tax collectors and sinners were gathered around listening to Jesus teach. Sure enough, there were some Pharisees in the crowd. They began to grumble in, saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
Jesus doesn’t take them to task or complain about their pettiness. He doesn’t try to explain to them how sometimes high standards can be a weakness, not a strength. Instead he tells them not one, but three, of his best stories.
The story of the prodigal son comes after stories about a lost coin and a lost sheep, stories in which neither the coin or the sheep have any special value. But the ones doing the looking value them above all else and put everything they have else at risk to find them. Only then does Jesus tell the story we know as the prodigal son.
If the Pharisees are like most of us, they fall in that 85 percent of folks who hear the story from the older brother’s point of view. It isn’t hard to see them shaking their heads in dismay when the father gives the younger son the whole of his inheritance long before it was due. To even ask for your inheritance is like wishing your father was dead. The Pharisees would never have given in to a request so cruel and so foolish.
When the younger son blows it all on parties, booze, and the kind of girl you don’t take home to meet the family, the Pharisees in the crowd may have gotten that “I-could-have-told-you-so-in-the-first-place” look. They probably approved of what happened next. We are told that the younger son “came to himself,” a wonderful phrase that means a lot more than just realizing what a mess you’ve made of your life. It is almost as if he became himself for the first time, the person he had it in him all along to be, the person a father or a mother sees when looking into the face of a daughter or son.
Getting up out of the pig muck to go home was an act of courage that surely people like the Pharisees would have admired. It was when the young man was nearing the house, however, the look on the Pharisees’ faces must have been even more strained. For here comes the father, running. He has seen his son from a long way off, as if he had been scanning the horizon for him every day.
Have you noticed that men of stature and maturity do not run? When was the last time you saw a man of a certain age in a suit and tie and shiny black shoes running full out down the Commons or on the campus of IC, or at Cornell? When was the last time a man dressed in a suit and tie and shiny black shoes ran for all he was worth on the shoulder of Hwy 96 or Route 13? If such men want something, someone else runs to get it. If they are in a hurry, they walk fast. It is a certainty that a Pharisee would never have been seen running in public.
The father, however, runs for all his life, robes flapping, to the son who had been lost all those years, completely unconcerned about decorum. He runs to meet his boy, and embraces him and kisses him. The son can’t even get out his rehearsed confession before the father is calling for the best clothes, new shoes, the family signet ring, and a party with all the trimmings.
It’s my guess that at that point in the story some of the Pharisees got up and left. They probably never even heard the part about the elder brother who was so much like them. It was too much, this homecoming full of love and forgiveness without even a hint of repentance, or an attempt at a promise to pay the squandered money back, even if it took years. That might have been okay with the Phariees, but this? Never.
But some of them must have stayed to the bitter end. It is hard to walk out on a good story. Sitting in the crowd, disapproving and critical, the Pharisees were already in elder brother mode. If you are fair, you can’t help but feel that the elder brother has a point, and the Pharisees do, too.
If there aren’t any standards of behavior that matter, if some people can break all the rules yet still be loved and accepted, then what is the point of honor, or discipline, or effort, or faith?
The older brother wants what the Pharisees want, to be loved as much as they deserve, for the good and right things they have done. Jesus, telling the story, pausing in all the right places, pacing the words just so, Jesus wants the Pharisees to know that God does love them just as the father loves the older son. That embarrassing, full out run-you-down-in the road, arms-around-you love has always belonged to the older son, and for them. But not because of all the right things they have done, or the righteous behaviors they have shown.
In fact, rigid ideas about right behavior are keeping the older son a long way off, in a far country of his own, out in the yard in the dark, far from the wine and feasting and tears of happiness inside the house. There is, after all, more than one way to be lost.
The father loves the older son the same way he loves the younger: as a child in his own right.
The father says as much when he comes out to find this other, missing child.
The story never tells us what happened with the older son. We never know if he comes home to the party. Perhaps Jesus and Luke leave the ending open so that each of us have to decide an ending for ourselves. But we know what happened with the Pharisees. In Luke they stay firmly in the darkened yard, refusing Jesus’ every invitation to come inside like family and be fed. Enough of the Pharisees stay outside in the dark to bring about Jesus’ end.
The cover of this morning’s bulletin shows one small detail from a Rembrandt etching. It is a scene that will happen a few weeks from now when Jesus’ journey home comes to an end. It is Pilate giving the people the choice to free the murderer Barabbas or Jesus. You can look at the etching in a book I’ve put in the Narthex on your way out.
Pilate and his prisoners are standing up on a high porch above the street. But look at the man at the base of the right corner of the porch, the man looking up, who is framed by his own shadow. To his left is a whole crowd of people in peasant clothing. He is off to himself somewhat, dressed in much finer clothes. Of all in the crowd he seems to care most about what is going on above him. His hand is lifted in the beginning of a pleading gesture. That pleading hand mattered so much to Rembrandt that he makes sure we see it by etching it again into the shadow on the wall. In the shadow that forms behind him on the wall, he might even be in prayer.
I haven’t read anything about this etching, so I don’t know who the man represents, but I have a guess. I am guessing he is a Pharisee. He is reaching for something in the tentative way people start to reach out when they are wondering if there is still time. The shadow at his feet is full black, one of the darkest elements in the whole scene. But the man’s face looking up at Jesus is in full light. He might be a Pharisee. Or he might be somebody’s older brother looking in at the window of his father’s house, longing in this moment to make the right choice so that he can finally go home. AMEN.