Year C
Luke 15:1-3,11b-32
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The Love That Waits
On this Rejoicing Sunday there is much for which we can rejoice and all the texts today testify to this theme. Rejoicing is what we are invited to do as we contemplate the lengths to which God will go to restore us to a right relationship with God and each other. In both the New Testament and the Old, we find pictures of a God who is forever pursuing the lost, seeking out those who flee God, and One who is always pleased to give us the kingdom. Is there any better picture of this than in Luke’s wonderful parable today of the prodigal son. The late writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once called the parable the greatest story told in the bible….or anywhere else.
Why? Because amid the variety of confessions about God contained in the pages of scripture, this one seems to get at the very heart of God, who is always more eager to forgive than we are to receive forgiveness, always ready to go to any length necessary to embrace all humanity in love. This embracing love was Jesus and his message which he showed in his life, death, and resurrection. Why he even welcomed and ate with sinners and so appeared to the religious leaders as guilty by association. In response to their judgment and the urgent need to repent in response to his message, Jesus offers this parable today, the third of a set of stories in chapter 15 which give us an incredible insight into how sinner’s are received, forgiven, and loved by God.
In 1986 Henri Nouwen, a Dutch theologian and writer, toured St. Petersburg, Russia, the former Leningrad. While there he visited the famous Hermitage where he saw, among other things, Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son. The painting was in a hallway and received the natural light of a nearby window. Nouwen stood for two hours, mesmerized by this remarkable painting. As he stood there the sun changed, and at ever change of the light’s angle he saw a different aspect of the painting revealed. He would later write in his book titled the Return of the Prodigal Son : “There were as many paintings in the Prodigal Son as there were changes in the day.” I believe as Henri did that even though we have heard this story many times, it’s like the changing light of the day, we can find something new each time we hear it about the God of love and forgiveness.
The parable of the lost son, the lost sheep and the lost coin all found in chapter 15, emphasize God’s love and forgiveness along with God’s joy at finding what had been lost. God seeks, God finds, God rejoices and calls others to rejoice. This emphasis in the parables, shifts just a bit in the story of the prodigal son as it’s focus is mainly on the response of the two sons and of course, along with the father. The prodigal son himself is well known to us. Restless, impatient for his future happiness, disrespects his father by demanding from his father that which he thought was rightfully his. He takes his money, abandons his family, wastes the money, his life, and finally ended up doing the most indignant task that a Jew could do-the feeding of swine.
The father stays at home and waits, until that pivotal moment when he sees his son returning. Filled with compassion and forgiveness, he runs out to hug him and calls for a celebration. The response of the elder son is well known to us also. He is angered and confronts his father. The dutiful son does not provoke wild rejoicing and overflowing compassion, but that does not mean that he is not loved. The problem for him, for the religious leaders and for us,is that he cannot believe that his father loves him, while at the same time showing such love and forgiveness to his brother who is so different from him. Both sons have lessons to learn about the many facets of the father’s love.
Paul, in the reading today from his 2 letter to the Corinthians, shows that he has understood this understanding of God. He knows the we have the active, seeking God, who reaches out in Jesus to bring back the lost world and who looks at us only with compassion, always waiting, not wanting to humiliate or judge us, but only to offer us the chance for a genuinely new relationship. Paul talks a lot about newness in Christ. I would assume that this has to do with the fact that at the beginning of his ministry, he was faced with those who could not forget what he had been a persecutor of Christians. But he experienced and knows that God has forgiven him, forgotten it, and made him a new person in Christ.
The old is passing away. Confessing our sins acknowledges and participates, reconciles us to God, in the new way of relating that Christ offers. Just as the father’s love in the parable reconciled him with his estranged son, so we are reconciled to God through Christ, who never stops loving us. The trouble has always been that we don’t turn to God because of our pride, our sin, why do we need God we can do it on our own. As Paul makes clear, we don’t have to think of this in human terms because Jesus who lived totally without sin has taken care of it for us on the cross. We are now new people. We can accept God’s offer of newness, and be part of it. For the next chapter in the story of the prodigal son. according to Paul, is that the son goes out of his way to mend the relationship with his brother and then, together, they go out and search for others who need the father’s saving love.
God is always saving people leading them into new places and new possibilities as in the story of the prodigal son, as in Paul’s life, and as God did for the Israelites who under the leadership of Joshua, finally enter the Promised Land. The forty years of wandering are over. Now there was no longer a need for the manna that had sustained them through their wilderness journey. They could eat of the produce of their own land and celebrate the Passover. Through all of this, the people learned that God keeps God’s promises and is always looking down the road., waiting. When the son comes home, the father seems not even to hear his confession. Forgiveness is already his.
We are invited today to imagine both the cost and the hope of God’s forgiveness not just on a grand scale but also in the everyday terms of a father who loves his children enough to forgive one son his foolish waywardness and the other his hardness of heart. If we can imagine forgiveness in these terms, we may also be able to practice it and welcome others home. Little wonder there is always rejoicing. Rejoicing is what is needed when God has had God’s way with us. So let us “Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart”. For we were lost and have been found because of God’s active, seeking, reliable, lasting love.