REIMAGINING THE PRODIGAL SON

Sermon for November 8, 2009

Scripture: Luke 15:11-32

I'm not sure whether what I want to do in the sermon this morning is quite legitimate, but I'm not sure it's not legitimate either. I intend to talk about the story of the Prodigal Son, but I'm pretty sure that the way I will be talking about it is not the way it was originally intended. I will be taking some major liberties with the story, and that may make some of what I have to say a little questionable, but as I say, I'm not so sure it's entirely illegitimate either.

After the service two weeks ago, Beverly Seng reminded me that the choir had this piece they were going to sing sometime based on the parable of the prodigal son, the piece you just heard. She was letting me know in case I wanted to preach on the story when they sang about it, and if I did, she was wondering when would be a good time. I said I'd think about it, whether I wanted to preach on the parable. I encouraged her to go ahead and do the piece this Sunday, and I might preach on the prodigal son…or not. Right off hand to be honest, it didn't have a lot of appeal. I've preached on it a number of times over the years, and it happens that I just preached on it here at Sojourners last spring (I looked it up). So it doesn't fall into that category of topics or scriptures that I hadn't done before that I might want to talk about before I'm done. And I wasn't sure I had anything new to say that would make it interesting for me to go back and take another look at it. But I said I'd think about it.

Then came vacation. For my vacation reading this time, I decided I was going to read the three novels of an author named Marilyn Robinson. As it turns out, her latest novel, called Home, I took to be a kind of re-telling of the story of the prodigal son, and that this book turned up in my vacation reading at the time it did I took to be one of those mysterious messages that seem somehow to be something more than mere coincidence. In this case, the message I heard was that I ought to think a little more positively about preaching on the story of the prodigal son. I'm not going to dwell on Marilyn Robinson's novel this morning. Most of you haven't read it, and her book is not the point here. But in fact, all three of Robinson's novels, in their own way, got me to thinking in a different way than I have before about the parable of the prodigal son, and so I decided to come back to it after all.

There are, as you know, three characters in the parable, a father and two sons. One of the sons, as Jesus tells the story, is a kind of a worthless character, who decides it's time to strike out on his own, asks his father for his inheritance in advance, in effect cuts his ties with his family, treats his father as if he were already dead (my inheritance now, please), and sets off for some far country. There, the Biblical words say, “he squandered his property in dissolute living”. We presume, I have always presumed, that he enjoyed himself for as long as he could, living the high life, whatever that meant for him, until finally he ran out of money, had no resources, no purpose in life, nowhere left to turn, so he turned home, not because he had had some dramatic conversion experience and had seen some light or another and had this profound change of heart but just because he was desperate and at least had the sense to see that his only remaining choice was to throw himself on the mercy of his father.

And, of course, it is the mercy of the father that in most readings of the story is the whole point of the story. The mercy of the father, who we presume stands for God in the story, proves to be more than the son could have hoped for, more than he could have imagined. People may lead lives that are judged worthless by worldly standards, and sometimes, maybe a lot more often than is immediately apparent, people come to think of themselves as worthless, by their own standards. But God does not think of anyone as worthless. God loves people even when they do not love themselves. God doesn't love us according to some measure of what we might deserve but only according the love that it is God's nature to have for God's children. That loving, merciful nature of God is portrayed in the image Jesus creates of the father running out to embrace his long lost son. There is nothing we can do to change that loving nature of God or to deserve it. It is just who God is and who we are, always have been, always will be, God's beloved children.

This general way of reading the story doesn't change when you bring the elder son into the picture. He is, of course, the responsible one, the respectable and respectful one, the dutiful son who has never left his father's side, the one who has done what was expected and most importantly, what was needed. He doesn't come off so well in the story because he is a bit resentful of all the rejoicing surrounding his brother, who after all has left him to attend to things by himself. This results in a gentle rebuke from his father who maybe thinks the elder son ought to be a little more joyful himself and who expressly says that he shouldn't begrudge a father his joy over seeing a son who “once was lost, but now is found.” There are lots of people who sympathize with the elder son. There probably were in Jesus' time too, which is no doubt why Jesus adds the character to the story. It has never been an unusual thing, I'm sure, for people who do what needs to be done day in and day out to be taken for granted. But whether we do or don't sympathize with the elder son is not the point. He is not in the story to point out how some people may feel, or may actually be, underappreciated. He is there to emphasize the point that God does not love human beings in a tit-for-tat sort of way, that God's love is not conditional, that God's love is not offered according to what we deserve but only according to who God is.

Now of course there are all sorts of ways to express the kinds of things I have just been trying to say. Some ways of telling and interpreting the story may focus on one character or another, and the message can have lots of different versions and variations, but at root it is a story with these three characters: the “bad” son, the “good” son, and the merciful father/loving God. I've never really thought of the story in any way other than the structure provided by those three characters. That's the way Jesus told it. I don't doubt that it was meant to be read generally in the ways I've been trying to put into my own words. It's a parable about the nature of God and about (this was what I tried to say last spring) about the reunion of God's people. I don't have a problem with that. But after reading Marilyn Robinson, I have a different (additional) way of reading the parable. I should be clear that I am not blaming this on her. If this is way off base, it's not her fault. It's just that reading her caused my mind to wander off in this direction.

After reading Marilyn Robinson, it occurred to me to wonder where the mother is in this story. There's a father and two sons; what happened to the mother? I was led to wonder about that not because Marilyn Robinson's writing is all about gender issues—it isn't— but because it is significantly about grief. I know Jesus didn't tell the story this way, and he doesn't have to include a mother as a character if he doesn't want to, and he may not need a mother in the story to make the point he wanted to make, and he never says that there was no mother in the family, and all of that is why I said at the beginning that what I'm about to say may not be quite legitimate. But I couldn't help but imagine these three men all with an unspoken grief in their lives, the loss of a mother or of a life partner.

I am imagining that each of these characters dealt with that loss in a slightly different way. The one son couldn't stand to be reminded of the loss every day by just being around the places his mother had once been, sitting at the dinner table every day where she was no longer, and so he felt a need to just get away, get away from the physical surroundings and all the old feelings connected with them, go to some far country where he could start a new life. So he asks his father for his share of the inheritance runs away from home and from his grief, or tries to, and ends up with a new life that didn't work out all that well for him.

The other son, I am imagining, took a different approach. He too wanted to run away from his grief, but he didn't literally leave; he just retreated into his work. And there was plenty of that, especially since his brother wasn't around. He lost himself, or tried to, in his work. To be sure, he was right there, doing what needed to be done every day, but in a way he was just as far away as his wayward brother was. He could talk to his father about fixing the tractor, but not about the grief they both harbored side-by-side, but silently, and separately.

And, as I am imagining the story, the father was no better at dealing with his grief than either of his sons were. At first he wanted to be strong for them after their mother had died. He needed to let them know that everything was going to be ok and that he was going to be ok. He didn't want to let the grief show too much. But then as time went on the need was less to maintain the appearance of strength and more for a father and son to speak what was in their hearts, less to maintain the silence and more to find a way to break the silence. But the father didn't know how, any more than his sons did how to break the silence and share their grief.

So maybe one could read the return of lost son as a decision on his part not to deny or run away from his grief any more, and maybe the tears they shared when the father ran out to meet his son were at some level the tears they never shared over the loss of the wife and mother, and maybe the resentment of the elder son didn't have so much to do with a party and had much more to do with the fact that for years he would have loved to be able to cry on his father's shoulder or have his father cry on his, or just to have some acknowledgment of the grief they were both dealing with. There needed to be some kind of homecoming too between the father and the son who had never left, but that homecoming had never happened and still wasn't happening and the “what about me?” feeling had a lot more to do with that than it did with a party.

Well, as I've made clear, I think, I realize all this is completely fanciful. There's nothing in the parable the way it appears in the Bible that talks about anything like grief, or how we deal with grief, or how it affects the way we relate to other people, or the difficulty of fathers and sons talking to one another about certain things. But here's why I think my imaginary rendition of the story may not be entirely illegitimate.

One way of saying what the parable is about, in its original form, is that it's about estrangement. At one level it's about estrangement from God, the son who wanders off, acts like he wants to have nothing to do with his father (representing God), comes to his senses, decides to come home as it were, thereby finding that his father/God has never given up on him, never stopped loving him. At another level, less often dealt with, it's about our estrangement from each other as human beings too, the estrangement between the two brothers, and the vision of the father/God to have his children reunited, to know that they are both fully his children, both fully brothers to one another.

But neither our estrangement from God nor our estrangement from one another is the result simply of the fact that some of us are bad and some of us are good in the terms of the story. We are estranged from God not because we are the irresponsible or unfaithful types represented by the prodigal, or because we are responsible but somewhat ungenerous types who would like to be rewarded by God a little more obviously than we are. We are estranged from God and from one another, not because we are any “type” of person at all but because we are human beings and sometimes have things to deal with that are not so easy to deal with and we end up not doing so well at it. Things like grief. And when Marilyn Robinson suggested to me the thought that we are estranged from each other and even from God not because we know grief but because we have not found a way to share our grief, it seemed to me an appropriate thought to include in a reflection on the parable of the prodigal son.

All of us who are not prodigals nevertheless are in need of finding ways to overcome the estrangement that exists between human beings and between human beings and their God. One source of that estrangement, one powerful source of that estrangement, is unshared grief. I do believe God that God means for us to find ways to overcome that estrangement. More than that, when we do, I believe God as the parable says, always stands ready to embrace us and to rejoice. Amen.

Jim Bundy

November 8, 2009

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