Sunday,
June 20, 1999
Rev. James
A.Todhunter
"THE STRUGGLING FATHER"
PSALM 86:1-10 LUKE 15:11-32
The Gospel lesson this morning is Jesus’ familiar
story, usually called "The Prodigal Son," but
perhaps more accurately "The Story of a Hapless
Father and His Two Difficult Sons." Our familiarity
with this story can be, I think, a barrier to the
story’s strangeness, and to our ability to determine
what the message to us really is. Traditionally there has
been a tendency to interpret this story as saying that
the "Father equals God, Prodigal Son equals sinner,
and as the Father forgave and welcomed the son back home,
so God forgives and welcomes us each back." Or to
point out that the other son who, even though he was
obedient and stayed at home, was just as sinful in his
resentment as his brother. He needs to seek forgiveness
too, but, unlike his brother, doesn’t realize it. I
can’t say that these interpretations are not
correct. I’ve certainly preached them, in one form
or another, over the years. But I think to reduce the
parable to such simple teachings does not do full justice
to the complexity and mystery of Jesus’
storytelling, or, for that matter, to the difficulty in
retrieving a message from a very different time and place
from our own.
For example, coming back to live at home with his father and the rest of the extended family, is seen, for the prodigal brother, as a return to wholeness - to salvation and reconciliation. The cultural context of Jesus’ time was the large extended family where all the generations stayed together. It is different for us today. Comedian Bill Cosby, honored recently at a college commencement, addresses the graduating class with words that must have sounded sweet to their parents. He said to the young people, "I ask you, I implore you. Please...move on!" Some parents today would gladly offer an inheritance in advance to see their young sons and daughters independent.
So how to we find the meaning at the heart of Jesus story? Let’s start with the observation that clearly here we are dealing with a dysfunctional family. Let us remind ourselves that most biblical families would be considered dysfunctional by any modern definition. These are families characterized by betrayal, murder, incest, extreme sibling rivalry, rampant patriarchy, bigamy, the list of evils of long. "Days of Our Lives" and "The Guiding Light" look tame by comparison. In pondering our story, I have sometimes wondered how it came to be that this father had two such obnoxious sons. The quick answer might be bad parenting. Or poor genes. Forget about the father in the story representing God. Maybe instead it is better to think of the father as this average sort of more or less successful man, living totally and unconsciously enmeshed in the cultural context of his times, doing the best he can under the circumstances. A decent sort of fellow trying to do the right thing, maybe as his father taught him, living by the rules and traditions passed down to him. He cares. It’s hard to paint him as totally good or totally bad. Yes, he has made his way in a patriarchal, slave holding society, maximizing whatever advantages he was given. Perhaps his unconsciousness about the evils of the system he swam in was the cause of his problems. And, interestingly, where is the mother of these two boys? She is not present in the story. Does that mean that he is a widower, or that she is simply a non-person (culturally speaking), or that maybe he even has more than one wife? Can we be sure that these sons even have the same mother? It is curious that the story is drenched in patriarchy, but Jesus doesn’t make anything of it. And remember Jesus can be said to have led the way in the recognition of the humanity of women. Incidentally, the absence of the mother at key points in times of biblical crisis has been long noted. In the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham, the mother Sarah apparently plays no role at all. How did she feel about all this? We don’t know, but surely we can assume she wasn’t happy about it. Indeed, in the Jewish tradition, commentaries (midrash) have developed over the centuries to fill in these gaps. In this story we are left to guess.
But the point I am trying to make here is that the story that Jesus tells starts at a point in which the crisis is upon the father. The crucial mistakes, whatever they were, have already been made. The deadly impact of cultural injustice is already being felt. The absence of maternal love, for whatever reason, is having its effects. Both sons, each in his own way, have been spoiled. This struggling, confused, oblivious, essentially decent, overwhelmed dad, is trying to do the right thing and is in a great deal of pain. And while it might be interesting to analyze how he got into this mess and how much blame he deserves, at some level, it really doesn’t matter. The father in the story is not God, but a struggling slob like you and me or anyone else who has tried to be a parent, and fears he has failed.
God’s love enters our lives when we are in the thick of difficulty. God’s love doesn’t waste a lot of time worrying about how we get into our messes. God’s love comes and cuts the Gordian knots we tie ourselves into. However they got to be that way, our lives are frequently painful messes. I think we should start with the assumption, on this Father’s Day, that being a dad is hard today, and has always been hard. Most dads that I know feel tremendous responsibility for their families, frequently feel misunderstood and under-appreciated by those closest to them, feel inadequate in their parenting, guilty about their failures, and bottle up all those feelings. Most dads maybe don’t want to share such feelings, because they wonder who really wants to hear all that? You fear you don’t really know what you are doing, and that you are always muddling through.
So your son comes to you and wants his inheritance in advance. He is not talking about his share of your life insurance, he is talking about half of what you currently own. So what do you do? You know that the correct "tough love" answer is probably to say no. But yet you liquidate some of your stocks and give him the money, knowing that he will probably blow it in short order. Which is exactly what happens. And you feel ashamed of yourself for not instilling more responsibility in the lad. But now it is too late. So you wait. And you wait. Somebody once said, "There are times when all a father can do is wait." You hear the troubling rumors but nothing from him. And then one day he returns, and you suspect that you should not forgive him too quickly, to make sure he is not conning you and that he has learned his lesson. You should make sure he is penitent. After all, forgiveness can’t come too easily. But, of course, you can’t help yourself. You run down the road to embrace him before he even opens his mouth. All you want to do is celebrate. You feel good. But then your other son confronts you, you feel bad all over again. His words are a sad reminder that what this older boy is saying is true. You have ignored him and taken him for granted. He is entitled to his rage. You blew it again. You are reduced to begging him to join the party.
And that is how this rather odd story ends. It began in the middle of a problem, and ends in the middle of another problem. One son is reconciled to his father, while the other isn’t and we don’t know what will happen.
So what are we to make of this? I don’t know. What do you think? Is one lesson in this that whatever reconciliation we experience in life is always in the context of a kind of muddling reality? Things are rarely neat and clear and pristine in their moral and personal implications. Maybe the prodigal son will relapse. Maybe the older brother will never get it, never truly reconcile with his father and brother. Maybe he will. Maybe this story is saying that built into the fabric of their interactions, a process of healing has begun and, through God’s grace, may continue. Maybe people are learning something along the way. God’s love is like a leaven at work.
The other suggestion involves my changing my mind about something. I began by rejecting the simple formula applied to the story "Father equals God, sons equal you and me sinners." Well, I now think, having mostly preached this sermon, that that is a good formula, and actually may be what Jesus has in mind. But, let me express it this way. If the father-son relationship in the story is a metaphor for God’s relationship with us, then what does that metaphor show us? I think it shows us that God doesn’t have all the answers, that God also muddles through, that God makes mistakes and miscalculations. But the one thing we can depend on is that God cares. God is slow to anger, and full of patience beyond the point of all reason. God is abounding in steadfast love. God’s love is expressed both in patience and self-control, and in the over-flowing, uncalculated generosity of a forgiveness that not only doesn’t examine our words of contrition for their sincerity, but doesn’t even wait to hear them. In some ways, God’s love makes God very vulnerable to all our stupidity and cunning and duplicity. And there is this: at two key turning points in the story, the father (God) is helpless; helpless to prevent the younger son from leaving home, and helpless to make the elder son join the festivities. When we admit our helplessness, any of us, including God, we must then rely on the only force that really has any power at all. And that is love.
I think the story tells us that our relationship with God is a muddling through - a muddling through the miserable, difficult, too complicated realities of home and family and relationships - of affection and hatred, of impatience and resentment, of bottled up and sometimes explosive rage. That’s the arena for the struggle, the world that you and I live in. And yet, it is a story about the power of love to bring about healing and reconciliation. The story shows that the patient love of the father, who is in some sense at least a victim of ingratitude and insensitivity, can eventually rekindle the love that lay dormant in, at least, one of his sons. For me, among the sweetest words in the tale, are when it says that, after the younger son had "squandered his substance in riotous living," (KJV) he "came to himself." Healing and reconciliation happen, in other words, when we "come to ourselves." That is, when we recognize our own capacity for love and self-acceptance, and when we realize there are people who have, no matter what, loved us right along, through it all. That realization is "homecoming" in the deepest sense. It is a homecoming that has little to do with geography or family style. It is the homecoming that St. Augustine refers to when he said that our hearts are restless until they find their peace at home in God. AMEN.
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