Luke 15:1-32
There is a lot of humor in the bible
if you know where to look. In our first story, you hear God telling
Moses “Go down because your people, whom you brought out of egypt,
have become corrupt.” After God gets through with his threat,
Moses replies, “Why should your anger burn against your people,
whom you brought out of Egypt?” Sounds like a mom and dad arguing
over who is most responsible for the kid's bad behavior.
Saint Thomas Aquinas said that the
virtue closest to God was love, but mercy was the second. And
perhaps there isn't really a difference; mercy is a form of love.
The Gospel of Luke, which we read from today, has story after story
about God's mercy. And today, we hear three stories in a row, and
Jesus is making some very serious points with humor.
Put yourself in the mind of a
first-century Jewish person. I know that's kind of difficult, but
you almost have to do that to get what Jesus is really saying in
these stories.
So if you are a religious Jew living
in a community that depends on raising livestock and farming for its
survival. You are under the political control of the Romans and
Jewish people who have “sold out” and like powerless people
everywhere, you turn to your religion and become more deeply
involved. You listen to the teachers and try to live according to
the law they proclaim. There are a lot of things in life that go
without saying. And one of them is that you avoid people who are
impure, who are at the edge of society, people like tax collectors,
prostitutes, pagans, even Samaritans. When you pass one on the
street, you ignore that person. A really good rabbi might even cross
the street to avoid even the possibility of brushing against a
sinner. So it is shocking to you to see that Jesus is very different
from the other Jewish teachers in this regard. And if the pharisees
are disturbed, you are as well; after all, they are people who live
the law as well as humanly possible.
And that's when Jesus tells his
stories. And if you were a first century Jew listening to him, it's
almost as though Jesus piles one thing on top of another.
First, he says, “who among you would
leave 99 sheep to find a lost one? The answer – none of us. That
would really be foolish. But this shepherd does, and not only that,
he does not lead the sheep back, he hoists it up on his shoulders.
It is not a little lamb like in the pictures. A full-grown sheep may
way 150 pounds. The shepherd does all the work, all that is
necessary, to save the sheep, to re-unite it to the flock.
And the woman who lost a coin. We can
sort of follow the logic as she frantically sweeps the house and
checks under the bed and moves furniture around until she finds the
coin. Like the shepherd, she does all the work. But then she throws
a huge party, probably spending more than the coin was worth. That
doesn't make sense either.
And to top it all off, Jesus throws in
the last story, the story of a child who couldn't wait for his father
to die, but wanted his inheritance right now; a son who upon
receiving it, goes off and blows it all – we don't know on what,
but we can be pretty sure it wasn't well invested. And he is reduced
to taking care of pigs, and eating pig food. If you go back and read
Jewish law, this young man deserves to be disowned; his father has
every right to say, “he is not my son”. In fact, that's what
Jewish law would tell the father to do. Why should someone like this
disrespectful, rebellious first century juvenile delinquent be part of
the community at all?
And the son comes to his senses and
decides what he is going to say to his father; he would happily take
any job if he can just eat and have a place to sleep. That's all he
hopes for. But the father has been going up on a hill every day and
looking off into the distance, hoping to see the son returning. And
when he barely glimpses this, he runs to the son, again, doing all
the work. And his welcome back is extravagant. And Jesus knows what
people are thinking. And he puts those thoughts in the speech of the
second son. And if we are honest, we sympathize with the second son.
Lots of people have tried to create a back story for the second son
to explain why he reacts this way. But Jesus gives his own back
story – and it isn't satisfying at all; “we must celebrate
because the one who was dead is now alive!”
Jesus tells the first story and the
shepherds are shocked. He tells the second, and the women who are
following him are shocked. And he tells the third, and everybody is
shocked. And he leaves it at that.
When we hear these stories, we should
allow ourselves to be shocked as well. Because Jesus is really
talking about God's mercy. To the Jewish people the relationship
with God is a covenant, and they've violated their end a lot of times
and suffered the consequences. After suitable punishment, maybe over
a few generations, God always brings them back; but their
relationship with God is dependent on keeping God's law. That's what
the Pharisees are concerned about. They want everyone who is Jewish
to obey the law to the fullest, because that's when God will finally
restore the Jewish people to their true position in the world – a
light to the nations, a city on the hill. Unfortunately, I think a
lot of us can identify with the pharisees – our relationship with
God depends on what we do, how well we pray, how completely we avoid
sin.
But what Jesus is saying is that God
is not like that; God does all the work, if you are a dumb sheep or
an inanimate coin, God will do all the work. If you are a prodigal
son, God will do all the work the second you let him, because he has
created you so that you can choose not to let him.
One of the insights of the mystics is
that you draw closer to God by letting go of things, by “unlearning”
what you know, by becoming like a little child. True religion should
teach us how to empty ourselves out so that God can come in. Because
that's all that stand between you and I and God.
