Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Alongside the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Parable of the Lost Sons this week may be the most well-known of any of the parables of Jesus. It is important to note, however, that to say something is well-known does not necessarily imply that it is known well. Perceived familiarity is a formidable obstacle to learning, particularly the kind of learning parables intend to foster and provoke. As you prepare your sermon for this Sunday, it is important to keep that in mind. While the false sense of assurance that perceived familiarity provides can make attempts to explore new interpretations or meaning with a congregation difficult, it can also be used to a preacher’s advantage, especially with parables.

Jesus employs parables frequently. Western ideas of learning and knowing have so formed us that our default approach to the parables of Jesus is that they function like Aesop’s fables—that there is a moral to the story that we should extract and then apply to our lives. Such open, frontal pedagogical assaults are exposed to the full defenses of the hearers/readers. This way of reading parables may have provided self-help inspiration for some, but this way of reading or teaching the parables domesticates them and allows the readers or hearers to maintain their complex defenses; the parable can be dealt with and then set aside.

Parables are by their nature a dialectic and dialogical form of speech. They invite active and prolonged participation. They dance inside a person’s mind, tip-tapping away on deeply lodged assumptions and patterns of thought. They do not dole out information or meaning in easily swallowable bullet points, principles, or propositions. Parables are not fables. The Greek word for parable means “to lay or cast alongside.” Parables are stories, narratives laid alongside our lives, and they invite us in not to teach us a moral, but to activate our imaginations.

On their face, parables are extraordinarily ordinary. They feature the stuff and the people of day-to-day existence. Rarely do they mention God or anything we might typically consider religious or spiritual. There is nothing in them that we might find threatening. Like receiving a Trojan Horse, we let down our defenses and allow parables access, turning them over like a riddle until, finally, the truth confronts us. This confrontation is not violent. God does not force repentance on us. Instead, God invites us into the reality revealed to us by these parables— the Kingdom of God.

I am disappointed that the lectionary isolates this particular story from the other two parts of the parable. Luke’s introduction of these stories is singular; these three stories are three legs of a single parable stool. Like waves lapping ashore, one after another, the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin establish patterns that should impact our interpretation of the final story of the lost sons.

The gospel lection does, however, include the first two verses of the chapter, establishing the situation alongside which Jesus throws these three stories. As is so often the case in Luke’s gospel, Jesus is among those whom the Pharisees refer to as “tax collectors and sinners.” Even though the text does not situate Jesus at a table sharing a meal in this particular moment, Luke has established a pattern up to this point; Jesus is often found sharing meals with those who exist on the outside of the clean/pure boundary so vigorously maintained by the Pharisees and teachers of the law. Table fellowship and hospitality was a big deal socially in Jesus’ culture, as remains the case in many cultures in southwest Asia and northern Africa today. To recline at a table and dine with someone was a sign of intimacy and acceptance. Jesus was vouching for these outsiders just by the nature of his presence among them. It is in direct response to the religious insiders’ flustered and self-righteous utterances about Jesus’ choice of table companions that Jesus lays out the stories in Luke 15.

It is important that we not demonize the Pharisees; according to common convention, they would have been considered to be the ones in the right, even by those outsiders enjoying Jesus’ company. The Pharisees and teachers of the law believed their attitudes and actions were in service to God, to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The arrival of the Messiah was believed to be dependent upon the faithfulness of God’s people. This is particularly true regarding observation of the Sabbath, which is often a source of conflict between the Pharisees and Jesus. Many believed that the Messiah would come if all of Israel observed just two consecutive Sabbaths. For the Pharisees, “sinners” were a barrier to the arrival of God’s reign. The Pharisees’ practice of ostracizing any who did not strictly observe the purity code was, in their minds, in the service of God’s redemption of Israel.

After experiencing a near-fatal staph infection he acquired from a routine knee-surgery, Eugene Peterson draws a comparison between hospital-acquired infections (iatrogenic, caused by healing) and a type of spiritual infection that Peterson names eusebiagenic (caused by devout behavior or holiness). Eusebiagenics names sins of self-righteousness and a legalism reflective of do-it-yourself sanctification— sins that are only possible within the life of faith.[1] Such infection sets in when our chronic condition of lostness is forgotten. Symptoms might include feelings of superiority to others whose “lostness” is more readily apparent than our own, and an assessment of one’s relation to God by comparison to how together it seems others’ have their lives.

I trust that many of you preparing sermons for the gospel lection this week will see this reflected in your congregations. The first two verses of this chapter are crucial because they establish the intended audience of the parable and, therefore, alter the way we should approach it. Those sitting at the table with Jesus, “sinners and tax collectors,” are surely welcome to overhear Jesus’ telling of this parable, but its intended audience, the ones to whom Jesus directs the parable’s most unsettling meaning, are the religious insiders. By nature of the position they take concerning Jesus’ welcoming of those considered outside of God’s kingdom, the Pharisees are ironically ostracizing themselves from the inbreaking of God’s kingdom into the world— something they think they are working to hasten. The position taken up by the older brother in what is the fourth vignette of this parable mirrors the stance of the Pharisees. During the celebration hosted by the father (in which the older brother should have been playing a significant cultural role), the older brother refuses to go inside. As he has done several times in this tale already, the father breaks cultural norms and shames himself by leaving the feast to go out to his oldest son. He pleads with him to come inside and join the celebration of his brother who was dead but is now alive (notice the resurrection language!).

“Lostness,” as established by the first two vignettes of our parable in Luke 15, means that something that is lost must be found; making itself found is beyond its means and ability. Isolating the story of the prodigal son from the other two vignettes leads us to neglect this established meaning of “lostness.” Even though it is often assumed, the younger son is not repentant when “he comes to himself.” He just wants something to eat. If you read his plan carefully, he intends to return and eventually earn his way back into the good graces of his father and community. He intends to manage his restoration on his terms and in his power. He refuses, even in his humiliating circumstances, to confess his need to be found. His planned speech further betrays his intentions. His opening line is not an original composition (cf. Exodus 10:16). When the father runs to meet him, and the younger brother is finally face-to-face with him, his plans fall away. The text does not say the father interrupts him, as is often assumed. Because the story emphasizes that the younger son no longer remains lost, it must mean that he has come to rely on the father’s mercy and grace for life and salvation rather than on his own machinations.

Of the four lost things depicted in the vignettes of this parable, only one of them remains lost, on the outside, at the conclusion. The real punch of this parable is that which continues in its lostness, which continues to be on the outside of the heavenly feast looking in, is what those listening would have assumed to have never been lost in the first place. The parable is left open-ended. It is an invitation without expiration. The parable does not tell us whether or not the older brother decides to go in and join the feast because the call to conversion endures.

I am beyond my word limit, but I want to make one more note in conclusion. The context for these parables scrubbing clean a window so that we might get a glimpse of the reign of God is Jesus’ feasting with “tax collectors and sinners,” with those who had been lost but were now found. Jesus is not talking about a reality that will one day come from above and replace our current reality. Jesus is not merely talking about a reality to which the faithful will one day be removed. In this parable, Jesus is pointing to a reality that is already present, where he is already present, tearing down walls and trespassing boundaries, embodying the radical love and hospitality of God and God’s kingdom. Void of the present embodiment of the reality of the kingdom of God, readings of this parable will always tend towards abstraction and individualized, disembodied spirituality. It is imperative for the church to be-live that God’s Kingdom is not someplace waiting for arrival in the future. God’s kingdom is the future brought to us through Christ by the power of the Spirit. It is no accident that the celebration of the lost being found in each of these vignettes is a feast (this is certainly implied in the first two, even if it is not explicitly spelled out). A significant image for Israel when imagining God’s reign is a feast. Table fellowship may very well be the essential part of Jesus’ ministry for Luke, and it is no accident that Jesus chose a meal as the most important practice of his continued presence and reign in the church— the Eucharist. It is in thanksgiving that our works cease to be efforts to secure our salvation, but become exhalations of the Spirit-breathed resurrected life in us.

[1] Corey Helverson, “Eusebiagenics, or, The Perils of Piety: Another Look at Luke 15,” Direction 38, No. 1 (Spring 2009): pp 93-104, http://www.directionjournal.org/38/1/eusebiagenics-or-perils-of-piety-another.html