It’s hard to imagine the “Parable of the Prodigal Son” happening today.

For one thing, it’s one of the most powerful stories of repentance and forgiveness in the history of world literature; and we live in a society in which the only thing less popular than taking responsibility for something you’ve done wrong and apologizing is forgiving someone who’s done exactly that.

It’s the details of the story that make it so powerful. This young man asks for his share of the inheritance early, and his father is extraordinarily generous, splitting the family’s wealth between his two sons evenly rather than favoring the firstborn son. And this is no small thing. It’s not a matter of writing a check: the father has to sell half their land, half their livestock, half of everything they have to provide the younger son with his half of the family’s wealth in liquid form. The younger son has written himself out of the family’s economic future, and soon enough its social future. The older brother and the father will continue working the diminished family farm, but Junior’s going to make his fortune alone in a strange land.

Except instead of making his fortune, he squanders it, living so luxuriously that when famine strikes, it turns out his rainy-day fund has gone dry. He’s friendless and alone, a stranger in a strange land, and no one there will help him. Hitting rock bottom, he comes to himself and works up his courage to make his apology: “I will arise, and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me like one of your hired hands.’” (Luke 15:18-19)

He comes home, ready to make his apology, but “while he was still far off,” his father sees him, and loves him, and forgives; and he comes running out toward him and throws himself around him, and kisses his dear son. And the son begins his apology, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” (15:21) But he never gets to finish. The father doesn’t need to hear it. Halfway through the apology, he’s already stopped listening and turned away to give instructions to the servants for the party, overwhelmed with what’s happened: “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” (15:24)

And then along comes the older brother, whose unforgiveness is as bitter as the father’s forgiveness is sweet. Coming in from the fields, he hears the sounds of the celebration, and when he’s told what’s going on, he’s outraged. And why not? It’s not just, Dad, that you’re throwing the kind of party for this good-for-nothing “son of yours” that you’ve never thrown for me. (15;:30) He already took his half of our property, and spent it. So that’s my fatted calf they’re eating—without even inviting me! That’s my best robe he’s wearing, my wine he’s drinking. And the father begs him to understand: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours… But this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found!” (15:31-32) And the story ends, and we’re left hanging: What would the older brother decide to do?

Many of us hear echoes of our own lives in this story. Perhaps you see yourself in the younger brother, desperately needing forgiveness for some offense, wishing that when you had gone astray, your own father (mother, sibling, friend, spouse) had run out into the fields to greet you when you returned, “when you were still far off.” Perhaps you see yourself in the father, wishing you’d had the grace to extend that unconditional, forgiving love to someone before it was too late. Or perhaps, as many of us do, you see yourself in the diligent older brother: hardworking, straitlaced, resentful after years of working hard and smiling nicely while other people reap the rewards.

We may be like the brother who needs forgiveness, or the father who needs to forgive, or the other brother who’s struggling with forgiveness. But God is like that overjoyed parent, forgiving us before he even heard us apologize, running towards us while we are still far off, loving and delighting in us however far we’ve fallen and however far away we’ve gone, striving to reconcile us with one another and celebrating our return whenever it comes, for ever and ever, Amen.

But there’s one problem with this picture. The story never says that the father forgives his younger son. There’s no reason to believe, in fact, that the father has any idea what’s been going on. There is no “Find my Friends” on his son’s iPhone that shows him spending all his time in the bars and clubs of a far-off land. There are no text-message updates to say he’s running low on funds. There are no collect calls home to ask for cash to buy a bus ticket. He can’t send a telegram. He can’t even send a letter, even if he had fifty-eight cents for a stamp, which he doesn’t, because in the ancient world, there was no postal service. To send a letter he’d have to hire a scribe to take dictation, then find a friend who was headed back in the direction of his hometown to carry it for him. This was how writing letters worked. And if you’re living in a foreign land, so poor and alone that you’re craving the slop out of the pigs’ own trough, there’s not much chance you’re going to find someone to carry a letter back home for you. (And by the way, nobody sends a letter home saying that they’ve squandered their inheritance in dissolute living. That’s what Instagram is for.)

The younger son has cashed out and moved away, cutting himself off from the family. The father is so bereft, regrets letting him go so much that he’s apparently watching the road rather than going about his business as usual, watching so intently that while his son was still far off, he spots him. He could just as easily be coming home in great triumph, having quadrupled his wealth. The father has no idea and still he runs to him. His son tries to tell him, “I have sinned against heaven and before you,” but it’s clear the father isn’t really listening. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. We know the story, but the father’s never heard it, and it’s not until the party’s begun and the servants have heard the tale that the older son understands. The father sees a son who had left his family behind returning, and he is overjoyed, and when asked to explain, he doesn’t say, “This son of mine had gone astray and has apologized,” or “he has sinned and been forgiven.” He says he “was dead and is alive; he was lost and is found.” If there’s a theme in this story, it’s this: not sin and forgiveness, but “lost and found.”

And it’s this sense of loss that shapes the father’s response, and the older brother’s, too.

It was the father’s decision, after all, whether he would give his son his portion of the inheritance or not. It was the father’s decision whether to split the family’s wealth fifty-fifty between his two sons, or to give the firstborn a double portion, as Biblical law suggests. (Deut. 21:17) You might think he should’ve known his children a bit better; he probably could’ve predicted what would happen, after all. If the younger son was lost, it’s because he lost him! And unfortunately, now he’s lost the older son as well; literally lost track of him, forgotten to invite him to the party he’s hosting in his brother’s honor, and lost him metaphorically as well.

It’s the father’s sense of losing his son and finding him again that drives the recklessness with which he ignores his failings and mistakes and celebrates his return, because there’s nothing more important than being reunited with him again. And it’s the older brother’s sense of losing his special relationship with his father, losing his sense of himself as the good one, the special one, the loved one, that drives his unforgiveness, too.

And this is very good news. If we stuck with the first idea—if we stopped with the story of forgiveness and love, without this added element of loss—it would be good news, to a certain extent. It would be comforting to hear that God forgives us even before we the apologies leave our mouths; that God runs towards us while we are still far off to embrace us. But when we find ourselves in the position of the resentful older brother, it isn’t much help. Just be like the father, the story seems to say. Just love, unconditionally, and forgive recklessly, and let someone else feast on your food unfairly in the name of love. But that’s very hard to do, and the story gives us almost no tools to do it.

But the second story reminds me of what I lose when I don’t forgive. The father loses a son, and finds him again. The brother loses a brother—but he, too, can find him again. He can choose to walk into that party. Or he can choose to keep himself out in the cold. But he’s the only one who’ll go hungry if he does. He’s the only one who’ll still be lost, when his brother has been found. And it’s up to him which future he will choose. It’s up to him whether to forgive a brother and a father who don’t deserve it, who’ve wronged him and are at this very moment, as they feast on his fatted calf, still wronging him; or whether to do exactly what his younger brother has done, and cut himself off from the family, as if he were lost and they were dead to him.

And it’s up to us, each one of us, when we find ourselves living in this story, to look for what we’ve lost along the way, what we’ll lose if we can’t bring ourselves to forgive; and what we just might find if we go running toward it, however far off it may be.

Sermon — March 20, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Jesus’ words in our Gospel this morning crack open a debate about what’s sometimes called “karmic retribution.” You’re probably familiar with the idea: if you do a good deed now, you’ll “have some good karma” and the universe will owe you good things in the future. If you do evil now, you may escape punishment for a while, but eventually, you will reap what you have sown; bad things will happen to you.

Now, this is an over-simplified version of the real Buddhist or Hindu idea of “karma,” but in fact, most people believe in some form of it. It’s just the timeline that changes. So, some people really do believe that “what goes around comes around” in this life: if I do good things, good things will happen to me. It may be in a week, or a month, or ten years, but it’s coming. Of course, the various Hindu and Buddhist traditions from which the word “karma” actually comes, have a much more nuanced idea of things, especially when you introduce concepts like reincarnation: I may be repaid for the good or evil I’ve done in this life in some future life, after my death and rebirth. And of course, even most people’s ideas of how “heaven” and “hell” work are variations on the same theme, but again with the timeline changed: God is just, and justice will be served, not in this life, but after death. So no good deed goes unrewarded, and no evil deed goes unpunished; it’s just that it happens in the afterlife.

Jesus dives right in to this debate. It’s clear that he rejects the most simplistic version of “karmic retribution,” the idea that “good things happen to good people” and “bad things happen to bad people,” because this amounts to a kind of victim-blaming. Jesus names a couple of recent news stories to make the point; we don’t know anything about them, but you can probably understand without much context. Think about those Galilean pilgrims, he says, whom Pilate killed in cold blood at the very Temple itself, mixing their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Think of those eighteen poor souls killed when that tower collapsed. We might say: Think of those families huddled in subway stations in Kyiv, of that friend who’s sick and fighting so bravely, of that family member who was bullied at school for years. Is their evidence of some hidden wrongdoing? Is it simply that “what goes around comes around”?

Jesus dismisses that idea out of hand. Do you think they suffered in this way because they were worse sinners than all the rest of us? “No, I tell you,” he says—“but…” (Luke 13:3)

There’s an old saying that preachers ought to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and Jesus knew it well. To those who are worried that their suffering is a sign of God’s wrath or vengeance, Jesus simply says: Be not afraid. It’s not your fault. You’re not being punished for anything.

But to those who are comfortable, who have the leisure to come to him with speculative questions about the cause of human suffering and the problem of evil, Jesus says, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish, just as they did.” (Luke 13:3, 5)

“Repentance” is such a church-specific word that it’s sometimes not obvious what it means. Our English word “repent” comes from the Latin verb repenitire, a verb which means “to feel regret.” It’s tightly tied to ideas of punishment: the pen in repent or penitence is the same Latin word as in penalty or penal; in fact, it’s an alternate spelling of the pun in punish. To “repent” is to “feel really bad,” because to “punish” is to “make someone feel really bad.” But Jesus didn’t speak Latin. The Greek and Hebrew words for repentance have slightly different connotations. You may have heard a preacher quote the Greek word metanoia, the word used in the original language of the New Testament for repentance. Metanoia doesn’t mean “punishment” or “regret” but “transformation of the mind,” a reorientation of a person’s values and beliefs. And the Hebrew and Aramaic word for repentance is even clearer about that reorientation: it’s teshuvah in Hebrew, “turning” or “returning.” Not feeling guilty, not being punished, not even changing one’s mind, but turning away from a path that’s leading to destruction, and returning to God.

It’s this “turning” that Jesus is talking about, I think. Jesus is speaking to people living under foreign occupation in the decades before an explosive, failed revolution that will end with their defeat and the destruction of their city. Pontius Pilate isn’t a generic bad guy. He’s the Roman official charged with maintaining control of this part of the empire. Those Galileans were probably killed for resisting Roman rule, one way or another. And when Jesus turns and addresses the crowd, he’s begging them to resist the Romans in a different, non-violent way, because the rebellion they are planning will lead them to their destruction. To be clear: Jesus is not claiming that unless they repent from their personal sins, whatever, God will destroy them as individuals. He’s claiming that unless they practice teshuvah, unless they turn aside from the path they’re on, they will be destroyed; by Rome or one another or.

We are living in a different place and time. But we nevertheless sometimes find ourselves walking paths that lead us toward destruction. Perhaps it’s a personal path of destruction, an addiction or an obsession or simply an unhealthy way of relating to another person that’s destroying you, day by day. Perhaps it’s something bigger, like the path that’s leading us inexorably toward environmental catastrophe. But it is as true for us as it was for those Judeans and Galileans long ago: Unless we repent, unless we turn aside, we will all perish. This is the sense in which “what goes around comes around.” Not as the result of karmic retribution or divine justice, but simply as the consequence of our own actions. Jesus doesn’t tell these people that they’re going be suffer forever in hell. He tells them that if they don’t turn, they will perish. But what if they do turn and look to see what’s on the other road?

Like many of the heroes of the Bible, Moses isn’t much of a hero; at least not to begin with. This first reading comes from Exodus chapter 3. So far, Moses has been born into an enslaved people under the threat of violence. His fantastic escape down the river in a basket is a testament to his mother’s ingenuity and to the compassion of Pharaoh’s daughter, but we can’t give any credit to baby Moses himself. That’s chapter 1. Chapter 2 mostly tells the story of Moses as a hot-headed and violent man. Raised a prince of Egypt, he’s nevertheless killed an Egyptian man and fled, leaving behind his family and his homeland and all his privilege to tend the flocks of Jethro, the priest of Midian. It’s not a great start.

But no spiritual journey ever starts with our good behavior. It starts with God’s unprompted, undeserved calling. And so the “angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush,” and Moses noticed. (Exod. 3:2) And Moses said to himself, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight,” and “when the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see,” God called to him by name: “Moshe! Moshe!” (3:3) And Moses replied, Hineni, “Here I am.” (3:4)

It is not because Moses’ mother sets him afloat down the river in a basket that God calls him to stand up to Pharaoh and lead his people. It’s not because he’s particular good at nonviolent resistance, which he’s not. It’s not because he’s a good public speaker—in fact, he’s such a bad public speaker that God gets his brother Aaron involved to help him out. It’s because when he sees God’s glory flaring out from the bush, he turns aside to see. And when God saw that he had turned aside, God called to him.

Moses turns away from the path of destruction, the path that had led him from the royal court to a lonely wilderness, from his life being saved from Pharaoh’s violence to ending another man’s life by violence, and he turns onto another path, a path of freedom and of life. And while that path is not always easy—while Moses suffers much along the way—there is never a sense that he’s getting what he deserves, there is never a sense that what goes around comes around, there is never a sense that God is punishing or will punish Moses for this inauspicious and violent beginning, in this life or the next. Because as soon as he turns aside, he has left the path that leads to destruction, and he is safe.

God calls us each by name, as good or bad or ordinary as we are. And the God whose name is “I Am Who I Am,” calls each of us as we are, and we respond, “Here I am.” Here I am, as I am. There’s no one else I can be. And if we turn aside—no, since the moment that we turned aside to look—God will and God is and God has been leading us down the paths of life and love and peace, whatever may happen along the way.

As we walk along that path, may God indeed “keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, 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,” this day and for ever more. Amen.