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Because the Parable of the Prodigal Son is so familiar, we can miss how strange it is. Perhaps a better title might be the Parable of the Dysfunctional Family, or a Tale of Cain and Abel Revisited. It is strange to us because it comes from such a patriarchal time and culture. We meet no women in the story at all; just a father, two sons, and slaves. If we set aside our familiar feelings and associations, it gets stranger. For example, it is about how important it was for the younger son to come home. Today isn’t it just the opposite? Parents worry that their children will never leave home, and if they come back, there may not be such rejoicing.

The closer I look, the stranger it gets. Take the younger son. What was so wrong about him asking for his inheritance in advance so that he could take off on his own? Not nice, perhaps. A bit callow to not give the old man a chance to die peacefully first. To "squander his substance in riotous living" (as the King James Version puts it) was surely stupid, but it was his to squander now and his responsibility alone. We tend to see this younger son as a kind of model of repentance, humbly seeking his father’s forgiveness. But look at the text a little more closely. After the son has gone through all his money and is forced to feed some gentile’s pigs, he finally comes to his senses. But his recognition is not that he is a sinner, but that things were better back home than he ever realized at the time. He is not driven by guilt and remorse, but by hunger. Right? But this isn’t what he decides to say to his father. Instead, he concocts this little speech. He says to himself, "Okay. Okay. I will get up 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.’" This, he figures, is probably what the old man will want to hear. So I can see him trudging up the road, repeating this over and over to himself (Don’t we do that all the time? We rehearse the speeches that we are going to make to someone in order to get the outcome we want).

So what about this young man? Personally, I don’t find him very appealing. He learned some things the hard way, I guess. His little set speech seems transparently self-serving. But, on the other hand, it is certainly what one is supposed to say when seeking forgiveness. He gets that much right. It is a bit excessive. Isn’t this, when all the dust settles, just another story about a kid learning in the School of Hard Knocks?

But now the story gets stranger. "So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him." All this happens before the son can get a word out of his mouth. But, having carefully rehearsed this speech for maximum effect, the son insists on saying "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son." But it is unnecessary because it’s obvious that he has already been forgiven. Here is one of the strange features of the story. It would seem that we have been taught that the "redemption process" looks like this: we sin; we recognize that we are sinners; we confess to God, begging God’s forgiveness. Then, if our confession has been sincere and heartfelt, God forgives us. Worship services frequently use words that sustain that sequence: "If you do honestly and humbly confess your sin, you are given the assurance of God’s pardon." If…then. But Jesus seems to be showing us a different sequence. His sequence is that we sin; God is filled with compassion for us; then we confess; and together we celebrate. Or to be more specific: we stupidly pursue our own ends with a willful sense of entitlement; we make a mess of things and it begins to dawn on us that we are in trouble; we hope that somehow God can bail us out; so we try and figure out what the "old man" wants to hear; and we come to God (our motives very mixed). But before we present our speech, we are engulfed in this rush of compassion. Our confession is then offered in the context of celebration. Very strange.

Look at the father now. He doesn’t study the situation. He doesn’t want to be briefed in detail about anything. He demands no accounting. No payback. No proof of sincerity. His response is global. His happiness is in the fact that his son who was gone is now back. When his son was out of his presence, it was as if his son were dead. When his son returned, he was alive again. If the father’s love here is somehow seen as modeling God’s love, what does this say about sin and forgiveness? Sin is not the sum total of the bad things we do, great or small, for which we want God to forgive us. Sin is being out of the presence of God. And to be out of the presence of God is to be dead. Remember what, later on in the story, the father says to the older brother, the annoying complainer. He says "Son, you are always with me."

This is a wonderful example of the difference between doing and being; what you do, and where you choose to be, where you put your body. The younger brother came to understand that he was doing stupid and self-destructive things; he came to believe his father could help him; and he determined what he would say to his father. But all of this was secondary to the fact that he decided to return to the presence of his father, to "be" with his father. He didn’t need to do or say or prove anything, other than to come home. Here’s a practical application of this. I believe that it is important that people come to church. Come, whatever your motives, which are, frankly, always mixture of the noble and the self-serving (like the younger son). It is important that you be here, no matter how you feel about what happens in church, because what you are showing is that you seek to be in the presence of God. And that is always enough.

We talk about unconditional love, but we rarely mean it. But the father’s love here really is unconditional in a way that ought to jar and amaze us. And it can also annoy us. This older brother really has a point. Look at things from his point of view. He is stung by how unfair the father’s actions are. The fatted calf is the prize gift, the big treat, saved for those special occasions. Think about those times you have felt unappreciated and unacknowledged, even though you’ve been doing everything right. And the spotlight shines on somebody else. We’re bitter. We tell ourselves "Credit where credit is due." But that’s our point of view. God’s point of view is different. The Apostle Paul says in II Corinthians that when we are in Christ we longer see things "from a human point of view."

And that is how Jesus’ parables work. What makes them so strange, so uncanny, is that they are told in such a way as to invite us into God’s point of view. Most of the stories are about God’s unconditional love, God’s compassion. And if we are to understand these, we must get jolted out of our human way of thinking. It’s like what I was saying before. As humans we think – we do wrong; we seek forgiveness; we are forgiven. Why do we think God operates that way? Because we operate that way. But Paul says in I Corinthians 13 that God "keeps no score of wrongs." Why does he say this? Because we do. We are always counting, always keeping a tally, always weighing things in the balance. That is exactly what the older brother was doing. He was, and had apparently always been, keeping track of what ought to be his. He was enraged because his brother was getting what he himself was entitled to. This was because his father was being unfair and unappreciative of all he had been doing. When the father responds to his older son’s complaint, there is a kind of naïve and childlike innocence and even amazement in what he says. "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and has been found."

The father here is in a different zone entirely. He is just filled with compassion and bliss because his lost son has come back. Period. This goes beyond character or behavior or just and proper rewards or entitlement or anything. How can I explain this? It is like some kind of relativity theory of love. Einstein said that the speed of light is always constant, no matter what the situation. So you have all these experiments he describes with light being studied on trains that are moving side by side, and how light travels inside the coach of the train, and between trains, and we are utterly confounded when we are shown that, no matter what common sense tells us, light always travels at the same speed. It is a constant. It is the same with God’s love. It is always gracious, always compassionate, always reaching out, and always welcoming. No matter what we or others think about the acceptability of those whom God loves. And, from our point of view, there are all kinds of reasons why this should not make sense. But that is from our point of view. When you adopt God’s point of view, when you no longer see things from the human point of view, then it begins to make sense.

I’ve sometimes toyed with the idea of trying to retell this story in a modern context, consistent with our current understanding of family and community. It’s tricky because we just don’t know for sure what family is anymore. It is important to communicate what Jesus is saying in ways other than the father-son relationship in a patriarchal setting. In Paul’s writing in II Corinthians the theme is reconciliation (he uses some form of the word five times in four verses): reconciliation within ourselves, reconciliation with one another, and reconciliation with God. And he says that Christ came as the reconciler, reconciling the whole world to God, and that he gave us this ministry of reconciliation. And really reconciliation is at the heart of Jesus’ parable. We see a struggling family (albeit in a different time and context) entered on a path of reconciliation.

What is Jesus saying that reconciliation means and what signs of reconciliation is he showing us? I think he is saying that somehow reconciliation is coming together again into one another’s presence and being overwhelmed by a kind of uncalculating compassion. The joy of this coming together erases whatever grievances or hurts may have been there before. And it is experienced as an amazing gift. What is the sign of reconciliation? Celebration. To come fully and compassionately into one another’s presence is a celebration. It is like joining a party where all the best is being served and shared. To embrace reconciliation or not is to stand at the door, like the older brother, and decide whether or not to join the feast. The door is open. The invitation is extended. Join the party. No questions asked. The celebration, like human and divine love, is an end in itself.

I have always been charmed by how Jesus concludes this strange story. He leaves us hanging and there is no next episode coming. It is like one of those post-modern exercises where you choose your own ending to the story. You can enter the celebration and bask in love, compassion, community and abundance - all free. Or you can walk away, having determined to take no part in something so irrational, unproductive and unfair. Or you can stand there, weighing the alternatives. How the story ends is up to you. AMEN.

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