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“A man had two sons.” It is the most familiar story with a most ambiguous beginning. “A man had two sons.” Who is this man? Where did he live? What were his son’s names? How old were they? It doesn’t matter. Scripture doesn’t tell us everything we want know, just everything we need to know. So what do we need to know in this story?
There are so many characters and so much detail in this story that we can quickly make the mistake of writing ourselves into the story. Parables are not written so that we might better understand ourselves, though this does happen. Parables are always about revealing who God is what God’s kingdom looks like. The point is not to get to the end of the story and say, “I am totally the younger brother because I have spent a whole lot of time with pigs.” “I am totally the older brother because I hate it when people don’t pull his or her own weight.” Self discovery is certainly part of why Jesus offered this story. The younger brother is out sleeping with the pigs and comes to himself saying, “This is not the way to go,” but the parable doesn’t end there. The younger brother wipes the pig slop from his hands and says, “I need to go home.” Home, rather the Kingdom of God, is always where the parables point. So, what is this parable revealing that we need to know about God?
A man had two sons. Already the story is complicated. Throughout Israel’s history, one son receives birthright. Only one son, typically the first born, is the heir. This man has two sons. How is the man to react when the younger of the two asks for his inheritance? It is perfectly reasonable for the man to say, “What inheritance? You’re the younger brother.” The younger brother marches up to his father and demands his inheritance, basically saying to dear old dad, “I wish you were dead.” The man looks back at his son and says, “Ok.” Sometimes we miss the grace already exploding onto the scene. The man could have said that he gets nothing because he is the younger brother. The man could have said, “Sorry to disappoint you, but I am very much alive and you will just have to wait, and don’t even think about putting something in my food.” No. The man divided his inheritance between his two sons. This is, for lack of a better term, bonkers. The father is being extremely wasteful of his hard earned wealth. You see, “prodigal” means wasteful. The story should be called, “The Prodigal Father.” What on earth is the father doing? That, my friends, is Christianity’s central question.
What on earth is God doing? I’ve asked this question before, though not in those words. When I was going into ninth grade I went on a mission trip with my youth group. It was like Weekend of the Cross, only it was in Tennessee. We were working on a house that used the side of a mountain as the back wall essentially. An old man and a dog were the only residents. They would come out and sit on the porch and watch us work. Day after day he would simply watch us and smile. On Thursday of that week, the man came out with a plate full of chicken patties for us to eat. After serving us a snack he said that he was going to take a walk to the corner store, which was a couple of miles up the holler. When he left we started eating, but the chicken patties were not delicious. In fact, many of us threw them into the words because the taste was offending our refined South Louisiana palates. So, that left us hungry. One of the guys on the team decided that it would be a good idea to break into the man’s house to look for something to eat. I wasn’t always a preacher . . . We got into the house and started looking around. After walking through the filthy living room we made our way to the kitchen, which also hadn’t been cleaned in quite a while. I opened the fridge to get a snack . . . and I saw an empty box of chicken patties and nothing else. He had served us the only food he had and we were so careless and thankless that we threw them into the woods. I felt sick. In an instant I realized that I was a pig, and I was with a bunch of other pigs. I wanted to go home.
The younger son left to go home and while he is walking he is rehearsing what he’s going to say to this father. “Dad, I have sinned against you, and I am so sorry. Take me back. Dad, I have sinned against you, and I am so sorry. Take me back. Dad . . .” While he was still far off, the father runs out to greet him. The son starts his lament and the father cuts him off. The father doesn’t let him finish. The father doesn’t seem interested in the apology. The father is overjoyed that his son has come home. What a scandalous picture of God. No wonder the Pharisees and the self-righteous wanted to get rid of Jesus. The father puts a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet and they throw a party. What a prodigal father, indeed. [Finding Nemo clip].
Of course, the story doesn’t end there. The older brother is working out in the field and he hears a commotion happening. He learns that his younger brother is back and dad threw a party. This burns him to the core. You see, the brother’s anger leads me to believe that the older brother is not really working for the father. The older brother seems to be working only for himself. It seems as if following the rules and doing good work was simply a means of supporting his own self-righteousness and his own ego. Both brothers were looking only to themselves. The younger brother had a Vegas-themed ego, while the older brother had a church-themed self-centeredness. The later, I fear, can be more dangerous than the former. When the father goes out to meet him, the older brother says, “Look, I’ve served you all these years, and I never disobeyed your instruction. Yet you’ve never given me as much as a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.” Did you count how many times the older brother said “I?” The father says, “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” Do you hear the difference in the language? The older brother says, “me, me, me, I, I, I.” Conversely, the father said, “You are with me, and what I have is yours, and we have to celebrate.” I am he and you are me and we are all together. Coo-coo-cachoo.
Again, the point of this story is not to identify with the younger brother, though it is helpful to know that hanging out with swine is not the place to be. It is not the point to identify with the older brother, though recognizing the deadliness of pride is a gift. The point is what the father is asking the community to do. The father said, “We had to celebrate.” You see, throughout Luke 15 there is a common theme. A shepherd finds out that one of his sheep is lost. He goes and recovers the sheep and asks the community to “Rejoice with me.” Later in the chapter Jesus says that a woman had ten coins and she lost one of them. She swept the house clean, and after finding the coin, she called her friends together to “Rejoice with me.” A man had two sons and when the younger one came home, the father said to his household, “Rejoice with me.”
Rejoice with me over what God is doing in our community. Rejoice with me that we had servants for weekend of the cross. Rejoice with me that Cammie is now back from Cambodia. Rejoice with me that this sanctuary has been full of children this weekend. Rejoice with me over transformed lives and new beginnings. Rejoice with me because it is the one thing the father asked of his sons and daughters. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!