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Joshua 5:9-12, Psalm 32, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
I think the Lord Jesus must have used this parable frequently in his preaching, as it is so rich in its suggestions and applications. I’m sure that Our Lord embellished it depending on the audience, adding color and description—here for humor and there for poignancy.
The version of the parable that we have today is from the combination of a great author and a great editor. St. Luke was the editor, who shaped it to fit his own narrative, and placed the parable in a specific context and pared it down to concision, with not a wasted word. Even then it invites several applications.
Of course it depicts repentance—the repentance of the younger son, his turning and returning, from where he was to what he had despised before, his suing for mercy. It also depicts the hope behind repentance, that if you do it, you will be taken back with mercy and love, and unconditionally.
What’s easy to miss is the subtlety of how faulty his repentance is. His fault is not that he begins his repentance with self-interest, that he repents because he’s in a very bad spot and he’s got little choice. I doubt that there’s any repentance without some measure of self-interest in it. You don’t have to be so pious that the motive of your repentance is selfless and pure.
The fault is in his careful planning of his repentance—that he wants to control the outcome, and preserve his independence, and not have to endure the radical grace of full and undeserved restoration. He will have his father as a boss and not a father, for the food and the security, and not for the fellowship.
His solution will shame his father no less than his departure did. He had shamed his father by asking for his inheritance ahead of time, which meant, “You are dead to me.” Then he sold if off quick, without bargaining or investing, so that his father had to watch half of his ancestral land being taken by someone else who got it on the cheap. But now for his son to come back as no better than a servant in the fields? The other servants and the neighbors will shake their heads at the father with a son like this, so shameful even in his return. Is it true repentance to further shame his father?
There is something here about how we deal with our guilt, and how we handle the temptations of guilt. The first temptation of guilt is alienation. Alienation is a presumption in the story. The son must have been alienated from his father to begin with, and then he alienates himself totally, living in an alien country. Then his plan for repentance continues the alienation, but right up close.
You can see this in the case of Adam and Eve. Before they ate the fruit, they had easy fellowship with God every evening, when God took his walks in his garden. But when they ate the forbidden fruit they felt naked and ashamed and they hid from God in the trees of the garden. That’s the guilt, when you want to hide. The alienation. The separation from God, and then also from each other, as Adam blamed Eve, and from the world, as Eve blamed the serpent.
I think that the serpent represents the seductive desire of Nature, but if there is a tempter, he is not interested in your actual sin. Human sin is boring to the tempter. His interest is the guilt that results from your sin. We learn from the Book of Job that the interest of Satan is your alienation from God, your alienation from your rightful status as the image of God in the world. Your guilt corrupts you, cripples you, makes you unhealthy, consumes you and slowly kills you, and it corrupts your relationships. The destructiveness of guilt is the topic of half the operas in the opera-house.
And then we try all different strategies to relieve the guilt. Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Otello, Il Trovatore, Boris Godunov. To relieve the guilt while keeping control. To relieve the guilt without humiliation. And that’s the second temptation of guilt—the manipulation that we do to deal with it. Deception, secrecy, our devices on top of our desires. The careful planning of the prodigal son.
The third temptation of guilt is judgment of others. You see that in the older son. He judges his brother. But look how he is guilty too! He shames his father too! He compares his working for his father all those years to slavery, corrupting their relationship. He accuses his brother of spending his money on prostitutes, but how does he know? Is that what he would do? He will shame his father by not sitting next to him at the party. He judges his brother and he judges his father and he alienates himself from both in his self-righteousness.
It’s the third temptation that is the religious one. You know that old joke that basically all religions are the same—it’s just guilt with different holidays! Whenever I see somebody particularly loud in judgment of others, I wonder what his secret is.
The fourth temptation of guilt is also in the older brother, and that is to refuse the radical grace of God who simply cancels the guilt. Our refusing to accept it goes with keeping up the alienation and trying to maintain the manipulation. To accept the grace is to surrender the control. But that’s hard. Your guilt tempts you to believe that there can’t really be a grace that is so free.
Well, you have experience to back you up. Haven’t you had it that you when you did come clean you still had to pay for it? That your full exposure got you in even more trouble? So you find it safer just to deny your guilt, that it was not your fault, that you had no choice, or you didn’t know any better. But the strategy of God is different. The strategy of God is despite it all, unconditionally, to accept you and embrace you, so that in your state of safety and security you can admit your guilt, as much to yourself as to anyone else. God reconciles you first, so that you reconcile yourself.
There is gospel for you here. Your own repentance will always be imperfect, impure, and like the prodigal son always at least a little selfish and self-interested. God knows it, God is no fool, and your forgiveness never depended on your deserving it anyway but on the prodigality of God.
That’s a relief for us miserable offenders, who have no health in us! We can laugh in repentance—the joke’s on us. And that’s in operas too, in the comedies like Falstaff, and Cosi Fan Tutte, and The Magic Flute. It’s a wonderful little stage-play St. Luke has given us—no wonder he’s the patron saint of artists.
There is a deeper layer to this parable. Jesus tells it autobiographically. It’s about himself. The parable depicts these strange words from Second Corinthians, that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting our trespasses against us, and that for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin.
St. Paul understood the deeper parable, that the younger son is a picture of Jesus Christ himself, when he left his Father in heaven for the distant country of human flesh, and squandered the wealth of his divinity. He ate with sinners and prostitutes, the comfort women of Roman soldiers and the mothers who sold themselves to get the cash to feed their hungry children. He ate their unclean food and got unclean himself.
And he brought this back to his Father in his unclean sacrifice upon the cross. Here is Rembrandt’s version of the Prodigal Son. Here is Jesus, the prodigal son of God, with nothing to show for himself but his part in our misery. He who knew no sin became sin for us, in order to bring us back to God.
Notice the older brother. That’s us, the church. Do we stand off in judgment? Do we wonder how to enter in and share it? And then share the reconciliation out, to be ambassadors of this God who in Christ is reconciling the world to Godself. That’s our witness, that’s our mission, and it goes out into the world, reconciling the alienated, loving the manipulators, blessing those who have been judged, and practicing the impossibly unconditional welcome of God’s embrace.
Notice the father and the son. Look at the complexity of God, God in God, the soles of God’s feet, the knees of God, the arms of God, the bosom of God, God in God and this is also you in God. The Father holds the shape of the cross, the Father absorbs all the guilt and despises all the shame on him.
This prodigal God doesn’t care. Let them think what they think and say what they say. But “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, without regard for your deserving it, I will love whom I love, I am who I am, I will be as I will be, I am the Lord, and my nature and my name is Love.”
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
Exodus 3:1-15, Psalm 63:1-8, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9
In Charleston, South Carolina, at the Mother Emanuel AME church, nine people were killed.
In Cairo, Egypt, at the St. Peter Church, twenty-nine people were killed.
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the Tree of Life Synagogue, eleven people were killed at prayer.
In Christchurch, New Zealand, at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre, fifty people were killed at prayer.
In Jerusalem, in the Temple, how many Galileans were killed by Pontius Pilate while they were praying? Sacrificed to Rome while they sacrificed to God. So what if it was legal?
All of the victims were peacefully at prayer, in sanctuaries, spaces of safety and innocence. But they were guilty, in the judgment of their murderers, guilty of being black, guilty of being Christian, of being Jewish, of being Muslim, or of being Galilean patriots. Or revolutionaries. What are you guilty of being? Just guilty of being alive within a violent world? Is no one allowed to be innocent?
In the Gospel story they are saying this to Jesus in order to warn him off. They assume he wants to lead a revolution against the Romans, and they expect Pontius Pilate to slaughter him just like he slaughtered the last ones who tried it.
As usual, Jesus does not answer them directly, but he turns it back on them by bringing up another disaster, the collapse of that tower on eighteen victims. “God did not prevent it. God does not stop the world from being the world. Towers fall, on people. And Romans kill patriots, that’s what they do, and they’ll do it to you if you act like that (which will happen thirty years later). But all of that won’t turn me ’round from doing what I am doing!”
The threat of violence is a temptation. The threat of suffering is a temptation. Suffering itself is a temptation. If you think you might suffer you back off from what you ought to do, or you might do what you ought not do. And then when you suffer anyway you are tempted in a different way, you are tempted to want a reason for it, some cause and effect, some karma—is this payback, did I do something to deserve this?
Suffering is a teacher, but not always a good one, and you can learn the wrong lessons from your suffering and fail the test of your temptation. You get defensive and closed off. You limit your suffering by desiring less, hoping less, believing less, loving less. You figure the world is a hateful and dangerous place—so keep your guard up and get what you can. Defend your school with guns, lock your sanctuary door. That is one kind of humanity, the humanity that ran the Roman Empire in St. Luke’s day. It’s the humanity we are used to, and assumed by governments and nation-states. But the new humanity, of which Jesus is the firstborn, learns a different lesson from suffering.
You will hear Christians say that God does not let you suffer more than you can bear. But this is not true. I have pastored Christians whose suffering was too much for them and it broke them, and it was not their fault. I pastored someone who stays alive against his profound and lifelong inner suffering only because he believes that suicide is an even worse defeat. God certainly allows us to suffer more than we can bear. God does not stop the world from being the world.
But doesn’t St. Paul say that in our Epistle to the Corinthians? He writes that “God is faithful, and God will not let you be tested beyond your strength.” But to interpret this as God not letting us suffer more than we can bear assumes that God sends us our suffering. But God does not send us our suffering. Suffering happens. God lets the world be the world. When you get sick, that is not God testing you. That is your having a physical body and sharing a world with viruses, or even sharing a world with people who have guns and use them. You can be a saint and have troubles, social and emotional, and likewise you can be a creep with a very nice charmed life.
God does test us, not by manipulating our circumstances, but simply by means of God’s Word. Here’s the Gospel, now respond to it—that’s your test. In seventy-odd years you will have to put your pencil down. It is a life-long test. God tests us by God’s Word, which is how God judges us.
God judges us exactly how God communicates with us, in God’s Word—God judges us simply by how we judge ourselves in responding to God’s Word, and God tests us simply by offering us the promises of God’s Word. How you do on the test is how you respond to God’s Word. There is no other testing that God gives you. And God always tells you exactly what is on the test.
Here’s the next point, that the testing is the same as “the way out” of our testing. If the test is the promises of God, those same promises are also the way out so that you may be able to endure it. Even if you fail to act upon God’s promises, God’s deepest promise is for those who fail. In fact, it’s not till you hit bottom that you finally realize all the promises. The test is the way out of the test.
God’s promises test us in our suffering no less than they test us in our prosperity and perceived success. “So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.” Prosperity and success can be a worse temptation than suffering. Just ask King Solomon, just ask King David, just ask Adam and Eve who were in paradise. But when we believe God’s Word and acknowledge our failure we are also comforted by God’s Word, and restored and revived and given hope to endure.
That does not mean passivity, which is a real temptation of suffering. That’s the problem of the fig tree in the parable. It holds itself in, it doesn’t produce, it’s passive. From suffering it’s natural to hold back and protect yourself. You hold your life in, preserve your energy, spare yourself the trials of love, and protect what’s yours. But finally it doesn’t help. You can’t prevent the accident, the tyrant will get you anyway, and you only make it worse by the implicit hostility of your self-defense.
You are not called to passivity, and in the case of violence you are called to more than thoughts and prayers. You can even be angry. The slaughter of Muslims and Jews and Christians at prayer is a genuine cause for anger. But not revenge, because anger is another faulty teacher, and it’s never the solution, only an indicator for purpose, and for action as a kind of witnessing. Your anger and your purpose must be always tested by the Gospel, and always end in acts of love.
Another temptation in suffering is doubt. Doubt has its place. It is natural. Reasonable doubt is the foundation of the scientific method and also of our justice system. So it is natural to doubt the promises of God, whether from prosperity or poverty, success or suffering. And that doubt can come from your own self-awareness. You see that in our first lesson, when Moses doubts that he can do what God has called him to. Moses says, “Who am I that I should go and do this?” He doubted.
God answers him and says, “I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you, that when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship me on this mountain.” That is remarkable, because it’s circular, because he will get his confirmation to do it only after he does it. So, your doubt will be answered only after you have acted against your doubt! If you don’t do it, you won’t know that you could do it! Sort of like our sanctuary restoration, we couldn’t know that God was with us until we did it and found out that God was with us. I think it must be true of everything God calls us to. The Gospel is always a test, both to try us and to get us through the trial.
That means the testing is an invitation. God’s promises, God’s Word, God’s information is an offering. The judgments of God are not punishments but challenges, and open-ended. Listen to the gardener in the parable: “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.” We could translate “manure” more accurately with a certain four-letter word. Let’s just say, “Manure happens.” God will not spare you from the manure that happens, God lets the world be the world. But the gardener digs around you and gives you space. For another year.
And in the strange and gracious calendar of the Bible, it’s always one more year, God always gives you one more year no matter how many years you have wasted, it’s always Today. God is always gracious. The invitation never fails no matter how often you refuse it. God is the lover who will not be spurned. God is not just a teacher but a lover. And not a lover who is always testing you, rather the steady promiser against whom you test yourself, and in the testing to learn how great this Love might be.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4:1-13
This is my twelfth time preaching through the Gospel of Luke, and I’m finally realizing something basic about it, something hidden in plain sight, but suddenly obvious once you notice it.
Last week I said that the Gospel of Luke is the most humane of the four Gospels that we have, with the most human interest, and that’s because one of St. Luke’s distinctive themes is the new humanity that we get in Jesus Christ. Yes, the Lord Jesus is God, and partly so in order to be a human being, the firstborn and founder and leader of a new model of humanity, a new way of being human in the world.
By the time St. Luke wrote his gospel, at least two other gospels were already available. St. Matthew had invented the gospel as a literary form in order to serve the specific message that he wanted to convey. Then St. Mark used that literary form to tell the same story but with his own emphases. St. Luke did the same thing, with different emphases. Who was this St. Luke, and why did he do it?
We don’t know much. We think he was a Gentile convert, not a Jew, the only Gentile author in the Bible. He probably never met Jesus. He was an associate of St. Paul, a doctor, and well-educated in Greek and Roman terms. Before he came to believe that Jesus was Lord he will have believed other things, such as the ideals of Hellenistic culture—the dominant ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful, what makes a person good, what is a human being. He will have learned those ideals from the philosophers and also from the epics of Homer and maybe of Virgil. He probably interpreted the mythological gods and goddesses to be the personifications of the principalities and powers of the world and the ideals of humanity. And then—we don’t know how—he converted!
So he spends a few years assisting St. Paul, organizing and teaching, making use of the gospels as they become available, interpreting them for his own context, and we can imagine him develop his own emphasis—a new way of being human in the world, with new ideals, a kind of humanity that the philosophers had not imagined, a new model human being that Homer and Virgil would not have praised, a new model citizen that the Roman Empire did not desire—the new kind of human being that we see in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
And of course, a new kind of God. A kind of God who would dare to become this kind of human being. Yes, many of the Greek gods took temporary form as human beings, but none of them so thoroughly as to suffer and to die as such. You can imagine Jesus being tempted not to do that either. Who wants to be a god to be a loser, who wants to be a god if it means suffering and death? Well, who wants to be a human being to be loser? The choices that the Lord Jesus made would not have been made by any right-thinking human or any right-thinking god in the Greek and Roman world that St. Luke was addressing.
This helps to understand the devil in this story. He’s not the devil of our cartoons, he’s more like the Satan of the Book of Job, and he hangs out with gods and goddesses like Jupiter and Aphrodite and Apollo. He doesn’t think of himself as evil. He’s a realist, he knows how the world works. He believes what he says. He doesn’t tell any lies here. He even quotes scripture. Everything he tempts Jesus with is a good, on its face. But Jesus says No to these three goods, both as human and as God.
When I preached on this passage six years ago I emphasized how Jesus was being tempted as God. Satan tempts Jesus with three things that we typically ask of God, in all religions. First, feed us, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Second, give us success, give us power. Third, save us, rescue us. If God would just do these things more often more visibly in the world, more people might believe. “Just prove yourself, God, just do your job—why do you keep depending on us stumbling Christians to convince the world?”
But this time around I want to focus on how Jesus is being tested as a human being, as the prototype and test model of the new kind of human being. The proving-ground is the desert, and Jesus is like a new product being tested to the breaking point.
The United States Marines claim to take their recruits apart and rebuild them to be a different kind of human being. To become a ballet dancer you have to change the way you run and the way you jump and even the way you stand, painfully, until it’s second nature. So understand temptation as the training for your second nature.
You are tested and proven and you endure the temptation for the new humanity you are called to become. And you can’t endure if you avoid the suffering. So you can use the season of Lent a little bit of a desert, a self-imposed boot-camp or ballet lessons. So my sermon series for Lent is called Temptation, and this week, the Temptation of the Good.
For the first temptation I think about Park Slope life. Good bread, good food, good taste, good books, good music, good conversation, the good life. Such things we can accept as good gifts in our lives, as we thank God for our daily bread, so when we say “No thanks” to them we really do mean the “thanks,” our No is to confess they cannot fully satisfy, and if we are fully satisfied by them, then we cannot be the human beings that the Gospel calls us to become. We say No to them only when we say Yes to the Word of God. We believe that more, the promises of God, the judgments of God, we hold off from the goodies set before us for the hope and the vision ahead of us.
For the second temptation I think about American life. For example, I have always been challenged by the argument that if not for the military might of America the bad guys would have their way. I am sure it’s true. It’s realistic. And does it not yield the good life that I enjoy? It’s just because it’s so true and realistic, and because it yields me so much good that it’s a temptation, to which there is no argument other than “Worship the Lord your God and serve only God.” Does that mean God first and country second? I think it means God first and nothing second. This is a tough one, and a cause of constant testing, especially from good people who are the good kind of patriots.
Both of these temptations can train us to be less defensive of the goods that we enjoy and the goods to which we have allegiance, and they train us in freedom. But we will be resisted by those whose interests are those goods, from simple lack of sympathy to mockery to discrimination to persecution. The temptation is a testing. You have to keep believing with your heart and confessing with your mouth in order to endure it, to be kept safe in it, and confessing mostly to yourself, “Yes, I want to believe this, I want to believe this.” Even the Lord Jesus had to say it out loud.
For the third temptation I think about the Christian life. That we live the good life in Christ and we expect it to yield more good. I mean if we believe in a good God who rules the world and who loves us, if we walk with God, then we should expect some benefits along the way. You know, God bless us when things are good, and God save us when things are bad. “Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.”
But you can do this without putting God to the test. You can do this when your prayers are not answered as you asked them. You pray to God wholeheartedly without putting God to the test, though you are tempted to give up. You will be tried beyond the breaking point. There is no proof. You save it for yourself when you keep believing with your heart and confessing with your mouth, if only to that one friend who tells you it’s not worth it, give it up. You are that new model of human being who stands up in front of God and who gives God back all the mysterious and sometimes frustrating freedom that God claims, and still believe in God.
This kind of courage is called faith, this decision is belief. St. Paul says to believe with your heart. He doesn’t say your head, because belief is not mostly thinking, although it must engage your thinking. “Believe with your heart.” Belief is in your heart because belief is mostly love. Think about it—belief is faithfulness, belief is fidelity, belief is wanting the other to be other for the sake of the other, which is love, belief is wanting God to be God for God’s sake, wanting the world to be God’s world for God’s sake, and loving your self for God’s sake, because God loved you first.
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
