PRODIGAL FORGIVENESS!

14^th March 2010 : Lent 4 : Year C

9:30am Camillo

Joshua 5:2-12 : 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 : Luke 15:11-32

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now. Or maybe two things. The gospel reading we have just heard is NOT about the prodigal son. This may come as a surprise because we have become accustomed blithely to letting the phrase Prodigal Son enter our minds without invitation and equally the same phrase has intruded into our consciousness without asking permission to do so.

When we look at chapter 15 in Luke’s gospel we see that he has organised it on the basis of three parables – first, the lost sheep; second, the lost coin; and third? the lost son, the parable that concludes with the words, “he was lost and has been found”.

Certainly Luke creates tension and suspense by building up to the crucial story, the real story by throwing in two smaller, bite-sized vignettes. He wants us to see the importance of story 3 – but that doesn’t undercut the plain fact that story 3 is the climactic episode in a three-part mini-series about being lost – and then being found again.

Our traditional, historical focus on the prodigality of the son is largely, let me suggest, a function of our own avoidance of culpability. In other words, we point the finger at the wayward son so that no one will notice that we are not exactly squeaky clean.

It’s reminiscent of the scene in the movie Stalag 17, in which the William Holden character, whom most of the prisoners despise, recalls being beaten up because the POW’s think he’s spying for the Germans. Holden comments that the real spy, the real traitor would have been the one punching and kicking the hardest.

Well, folks, the lost son is William Holden and we are the POW’s of Stalag Camillo. It’s called scapegoating. Which is to say no more than that this is human behaviour, not at its ugliest, but not in its most worthy and honourable manifestation. And we legitimise the behaviour when we pour our own hurts and anxieties and woundedness onto another – even a fictitious character – instead of facing up to our need to seek healing.

If we really need to fling the prodigal word into the story – a word that comes from the reviewer’s quill, not the author’s – then we would serve ourselves and posterity better by looking at the father rather than the son.

If the father is meant to represent God then Luke’s Jesus wants to draw our attention to another nuance of the word prodigal: extravagant; generous beyond belief. This is how the father behaves. This story in Luke is one of the sources of our theology of God’s abundantly generous nature.

But it’s a hard generosity to accept – especially if we are playing the guilt-ridden scapegoat-herds who secretly “know” we deserve punishment and even more secretly wish that God were rather more punitive than forgiving and loving.

And of course, if we accept the prodigal father then where does that leave our vicarious self-righteousness with regard to the lost-and-forgiven son? Let me suggest that we don’t want the son to be forgiven.

We want him to remain forever prodigal because we unconsciously recognise something deeply disturbing about the divine economy in this story.

What we notice is this: the father lavishes his forgiveness freely, generously and extravagantly; and most scandalously of all, he lavishes this free, generous and extravagant forgiveness NOT on the basis of the son’s confession of moral turpitude and general depravity but because the son exercises true repentance – the metanoia of changing his mind and returning to the father.

Of course repentance in this scriptural sense implies renunciation of clearly immoral behaviour – but what activates forgiveness is actually coming back to God. …Because what is at issue is not the busy and overworked minutiae of moral impropriety but the separation that of necessity occurs when we indulge behaviour that is, for want of a better word, “ungodly”. What actually makes such behaviour ungodly is not any preciosity about the actual deed or thought but the fact that it treats other human beings and created things with disrespect and dishonour, as objects we use rather than those with whom we share a unique and genuine connection.

Immorality, when we can actually isolate it from within its spectacular arrays of grey, disrupts and sometimes shatters that connection. Is it mere coincidence that we sever our connection with God as well?

But that’s not the only thing we notice about the transaction of return-and-forgiveness in this story. Something is missing. After all this talk of creating a scapegoat of the son – where is the go-between who intervenes on the son’s behalf and pleads his case, thus satisfying the father’s thirst for “just” retribution?

Hark! Did someone say, “But the father doesn’t seem all that interested in retribution and vengeance?” And did I hear someone else say, “The father seems right chuffed just because the snotty-nosed brat came home!” Oh; and was that someone else saying, “Um, I can’t find anyone in the story pleading on behalf of the son.”?

All true. Where’s the sacrifice? None exists. Who’s the scapegoat? No one. What form does the father’s just and righteous vengeance take? Er, what “just and righteous vengeance”? Dad just seems, well, awesomely pleased – for no other reason than the return of his son.

The reality is that we are the ones who want vengeance. We want retribution. We want a neat, dualistic system in which everything adds up and all the negatives balance against the positives and vice-versa. We want it clear, cut and laid out on racks in the baking sun to dry.

Unfortunately, the divine economy does not operate like that. God’s forgiveness is for those who return to God. Almost certainly, we will still be trailing behind us our sacks of garbage, our lifetime’s worth of damage and woundedness that continue to require the grace of God to address.

And God is more likely to do that through the services of a psychiatrist, psychologist or psychotherapist, and/or by chemical means, than through the use of natural-rule-defying pyrotechnics. And God will use communities of faithful, loving people. And sometimes that will include the church.

A

nd what of the son’s brother, the scowling, aggrieved son who demands retributive justice? He’s the guy calling his bro prodigal, who cannot bear the prodigality of his father. Many of us secretly admire this dude because we’re thinking the same.

We’re thinking the same because we, like sour-puss, operate through the heresy of dualism, where everything is black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. Where the books have to balance; where the columns and rows, where up, down, across and every-which-way must arrive at a neatness and exactitude that would shame a Sudoku square.

Ironically, we call that “reconciliation”, but on God’s planet reconciliation actually means something different. It means “my sons and daughters were lost but now they have come home again. Whoo-hoo! Let’s par-tay!”