H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
February 25, 2001
A CERTAIN MAN HAD TWO SONS
Text: Luke 15:11-32
In answer to his critics who murmured about his eating with tax collectors
and sinners, Jesus told three parables: 1) the parable of the lost sheep; 2) the
parable of the lost coin; and today’s parable, the one about two lost sons.
I
He went to his father and asked for his share of the inheritance. His share,
as the younger of the two sons, was one third of his father’s estate. The
first-born would get two thirds.
His request was a shocking insolence. It was like saying, "I wish you
were dead." Inheritances were not to be distributed until the father’s
death. "You are only money to me" was what his request said to the
father; "give me mine so I can leave."
If the son’s request was the supreme insult, the father’s acquiescence to
the request made him a fool. It put the family’s financial future at some
risk. Would the son be around to care for him when he grew old? The father was
divesting himself of a major part of his Social Security.
When the son asked for his inheritance the elder brother had all kinds of
reasons to be upset. He saw the hurt his brother’s request caused his father.
And what if his brother lost all his inheritance and came crawling home? His
soft-hearted father would probably receive him back, and then they all would be
living on his two thirds. He could see his inheritance slipping away.
So the story is off to a shaky start: the younger son’s injuring and
insulting request; the father’s foolish acquiescence; the elder brother’s
brooding anger, calculator in his hand.
II
The younger son went to the "far country" -- Gentile territory,
free from all the religious and social restraints of home. He promptly
squandered it away in wild living -- no details given. Add to his irresponsible
behavior, bad luck. A famine arose and magnified his plight. In desperation he
sold himself to pig farmers to work as a swineherd. For an upstanding Jewish
family this would be the picture of degradation. He has reduced himself to human
slavery; he is feeding pigs, making him ritually unclean. He has cut himself off
from his family, community and faith. He has degraded himself by his actions. He
is lost, in almost all the ways one can be lost.
Imagine watching your own child descend into dangerous and demeaning conduct,
in all kinds of trouble, vulnerable to the worst elements of society, and you
get the picture of the father’s pain.
III
Then comes the moment of turning. A miracle happens. The younger son
"came to himself." We can be lost, any of us; we all have our own far
country. It is as if the cord is cut which connects us with God, with family and
closest friends, and with our own true self. We cannot find our way back.
Picture the self as a series of concentric circles. The innermost circle is
your true self created by God in God’s own image. This is you in your
elemental goodness, you in what Merton called your "hidden wholeness."
Around that circle draw a circle of wounds, traumas, hurt you have
experienced, starting young. No wound or trauma is small when you are young.
Around that draw a circle of shame, for this is how the young self
experiences trauma or pain, as shame. We believe if we have suffered it must be
our fault.
Around that circle draw a circle of compensating behaviors: things we
do, places we go, thoughts we develop, feelings we create to escape the pain and
shame. Grandiosity is one compensating behavior. Compulsive and addictive
behaviors become ways to escape the pain. Food, drink, love, work, exercise,
almost anything can be used to create a secret and safe place to escape. Scott
Peck calls it "the Eden Express." But it is not Eden; it is our far
country. These ways of escaping or self-medicating our pain only create more
pain.
Add another circle of defenses: ways we explain or defend ourselves to
our self and to others. We can be pretty ingenious about this, creating a set of
denials and justifications. We project our inner conflict and create a world of
black and white, good people and bad people. But this circle of defenses further
increases the distance from our true self and isolates us from the love and care
of others.
We live on the outer edge of these concentric circles. How can we make the
journey back through these circles and discover our true self?
Jesus came to be our companion on this journey to the true self. God sent him
into this far country called Earth to find us and lead us home. The Spirit of
God is our non-shaming guide who helps us traverse the painful terrain until we
find that primal place of peace.
Jesus descends into all our hells and leads us to light and life.
It all begins with a miracle of turning. The younger son comes to himself and
says:
My father’s hired servants abound in food, but I in famine perish.
I will arise and go to my father and say, Father, I have sinned against
heaven and before you. I’m not worthy to be called your son; make me
as one of your hired servants.
It is not a speech conjured up for quick forgiveness or to escape the
consequences of his behavior. He does not hope to go back and live off his
brother’s part of the inheritance. He proposes to go back and work as a hired
hand, earning his room, board and pay with all the other servants.
His speech is honest confession. It acknowledges his real debt. He has come
to his true self; he has acknowledged his real condition and the consequences of
his actions. A miracle of grace has happened.
IV
The homecoming scene is one of the most purely joyous in all human
storytelling. While the boy was afar off, the father saw him and had compassion
and running, running, fell on his neck and kissed him with great affection.
The running and the kissing are all out of kilter, culturally speaking. A
dignified oriental gentleman did not run. Ben Sirach says, "A man’s
manner of walking tells you what he is." Aristotle said, "Great men
never run in public." But in this story this father sprints down the road
to meet his son.
He wraps himself around his son’s neck and kisses and kisses him. The verb
describes affectionate repeated kissing. This too is against cultural form. Here
is not a father’s dignified, formalized kiss of greeting. This is a mother’s
kissing her long-lost child. You may have asked, Where is the mother in this
parable? The father, he is mother too.
Middle-Eastern scholar Kenneth Bailey gives us new eyes to see this
homecoming scene. For seventeen years Bailey lived and taught among
Middle-Eastern peasants, who live today much as their forebears did two thousand
years ago. He studied their culture and life, told them Jesus’ parables and
listened to how they heard the parables and responded to them. All this
helped him understand better how Jesus’ parables were originally heard.
This is his reconstruction of the homecoming scene: A wealthy Middle-Eastern
farmer did not live way out of town on a big ranch like J .R. Ewing, but rather
in the village itself. This is not then a pastoral scene of a son running up a
long entrance road to the house and the father running down that road, two
solitary figures, the only ones in the scene.
The father’s house is on the edge of the village, at the end of Main
Street. You have to walk down Main Street to get there. The son must go through
the village -- which probably despises him now -- in order to reach his father’s
house.
The younger son’s behavior has been an offense not only to the family but
also to the village. He has broken the rules which help keep a community intact.
The whole town probably condemned the boy. If he comes back, let him come back a
beggar.
Imagine the scene. As the boy approaches town a crowd begins to gather along
the street. They form a gauntlet of stares, jeers and abuse, which the boy will
have to run in order to reach the father’s house. The father is fully aware of
what the village thinks. They think his boy is no good, no count, and him an old
fool.
When the father sees his son, the boy is beginning to make his way through
the gauntlet of scorn formed there along the main road.
The father has compassion, the parable says (as God has compassion,
Luke underlines). The father begins running down the street toward his son,
running like an old fool through the gauntlet of hostile villagers.
Do you see it? The father runs the gauntlet for his son, taking on himself
the son’s humiliation. He meets him there and kisses and kisses him and takes
him home in his arms.
The story is told of Jackie Robinson in his first year in the major leagues
as the first black major league baseball player. Early in that season, as he
stood at his position at second base, the crowd began to jeer. Louder and louder
the jeers grew until they were deafening. The Dodgers’ shortstop, Pee Wee
Reese left his position, went over and stood beside Robinson. The jeers began to
subside till they were all gone. Then Pee Wee Reese returned to his position.
The father in this scene is setting the tone for the village as well as for
his home. What he says is, "This is my son, this is my son. The time of
humiliation is over. My son was dead, now is alive; he was lost, now he is
found. I’m going to throw the biggest party anybody’s ever seen. Everybody
come!"
He called his servants and said, "Give him my tux! Put a ring on his
finger. (The family signet ring.) Put shoes on his feet. (Sons wore shoes,
slaves went barefoot. The black spiritual gets the point: All God’s children
have shoes.) Kill the fatted calf!
A great feast is prepared. The village is stunned. The father has run the
gauntlet of public shame for his son and welcomed him home. There is room now
only for joy.
This is what God has done for us in Christ. This is what we can do for
others. We stand with them, for them, by them. We set the tone for the
community. We become home to them. People have done this for me. I hope they
have for you. This is the kind of people God calls us to be.
V
The parable, however, is not yet over. There is another lost son, and grace
is not yet through.
The elder son is predictably upset. His younger brother has come home after
disgracing his father’s good name and squandering his father’s inheritance.
For his father to receive him back was not fair! Did his brother expect
to live on his two thirds?
So what does he do but refuse to come to the party! His refusal is also a
public disgrace to his father, but the son is not thinking about his father.
Look, however, at what happens. The father does the same for the elder son as
he did for the younger: he goes out to meet the son. When he meets him,
the elder son is full of self-righteousness and venom:
I’ve worked like a slave for you all my life, and you never so much
as gave me a goat for a party with my friends. But this son of yours
ate up your living with harlots, and you killed for him the fatted calf.
It’s interesting that the parable doesn’t give us the details about how
the younger son squandered the money. It just says, "loose living."
But the elder brother now fills in the details: "with harlots!"
How we love to fill in the details of another’s sins -- often with our own
secretly imagined ones.
The elder son is in a fit of righteous rage. This son of yours! he
says, cutting himself off from both brother and father as surely as did the
younger brother in another way.
The father’s answering speech is often ignored. It is as magnificently
gracious as his response to his younger son.
"My dear child," he begins with most affectionate of address,
"you are always with me and everything I have is yours. Come join us. Your
brother was dead and now is alive, was lost and is found. How can we not be
joyous and celebrate?"
With these words he invites his elder son to put his anger down and join in
the joy.
Joy and anger cannot inhabit the heart at the same time. Lay it down, he
invites his son, and be free. Do you want to be right or do you want to be free?
It is God’s invitation to the pharisee in all of us: Do you want to be
right or do you want to be free?
The father loves both sons, both, thank God, for there’s a generous
amount of both prodigal and pharisee in each of us. We are the prodigal whose
behavior has injured self, others and God; and we are the pharisee who has been
injured or watched someone we love be injured, and we will be damned --
quite literally so -- before we will welcome the prodigal home.
Sin causes a debt, often a debt that cannot be repaid. It cannot be repaid;
it can only be forgiven. We can hold that debt over another forever, or we can
forgive it and let it go. We can hold the debt of our own sin over ourselves
forever, or we can let it be forgiven and let it go.
Forgiveness is the step of finally giving up your attempts to make the past
different. The past cannot be changed; it can only be forgiven.
There is a God who loves both prodigal and pharisee -- and both the prodigal
and pharisee in us. God has sent his Son into the far country of our sin -- our
careless living and our self-righteous fury, our hot sins and our cold sins --
to find us and take us all home.
There are many sad things in this world: to live your life in repetitive
self-defeating behaviors, running from God and from self and from anyone who
really might love you, in hiding, never coming home. But perhaps this is the
saddest:To try to buy what can only be given, to try to earn what is yours
already, to search the world over for a treasure buried in your own backyard, to
live forever trying to earn God’s grace and never see that it is a gift as
free as the sun that shines and the rain that falls from the skies.
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