Eyes for Peace

As He came near and saw the city, He wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” (Luke 19.41-42)

There is no after-party following Palm Sunday’s parade. Jesus dismounts the borrowed donkey and goes to the Temple, has a look around at what’s going on, and returns to Bethany. We know what Jesus finds during His brief stop at the Temple upsets Him, since He goes back on Monday to oust moneychangers and merchants who gouge holiday worshippers with inflated prices. He unites two prophetic texts to condemn their criminality, saying, “My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” And we have a pretty good idea that Jesus returns the next day intent on shaking things up, in part because He’s in a foul mood. On His way into the city, He spots a fig tree that hasn’t yet blossomed. He’s hungry, but the tree has nothing to offer. So He curses the tree and it shrivels up. This is a side of Jesus the disciples haven’t seen—their first indicator that there’s been a shift in the atmosphere. Everybody’s tensed up.

Before all of this happens, however, Luke captures a poignant moment that helps us recognize the sorrow Jesus feels for Jerusalem. He pauses before entering the city and weeps for its decline. Jerusalem, the proverbial city on the hill, whose world-famous Temple sits atop its highest peak, has lost its vision. According to Isaiah 56, God has ordained Jerusalem’s Temple as a site of justice and inclusion. The chapter begins with a divine command: “Maintain justice and do what is right, for soon My salvation will come, and My deliverance be revealed.” (v1) The prophet lays out God’s vision for the Temple, describing a place where eunuchs and foreigners who were previously excluded would be welcomed and given places of honor. This is where we find the “house of prayer for all peoples” declaration. (v7) Gender and ethnic boundaries will be erased. Peace and unity will prevail in the Temple, which shapes Israel’s social and religious agendas. Jesus is entering Jerusalem to offer its people salvation and deliverance. But even before He steps inside the city, He isn’t hopeful. “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes,” He laments.

His reference to blindness invokes God and Isaiah’s displeasure with how the Temple is being run. In verses 10 and 11 we hear, “Israel’s sentinels are blind, they are all without knowledge; they are all silent dogs that cannot bark; dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber. The dogs have a mighty appetite; they never have enough. The shepherds also have no understanding; they have all turned to their own way, to their own gain, one and all.”

Jesus weeps because this is an old, old story. The gulf between the Temple and its people continues to widen. The correctives issued in Isaiah 56 haven’t been obeyed. People are still turned away from worship. The rich get preferential treatment. Preachers and teachers continue to serve up God’s promises, yet they have no vision for what those promises will look like in a “new Jerusalem,”—the place Jesus has spent three years describing as “the kingdom of God.” And here He stands, looking at Jerusalem through tear-swept eyes, the very embodiment of God come to save and deliver Israel from its religious and political oppressors. Their promised Prince of Peace is with them, but they can’t see it.

We can see it, but do we really understand what we’re looking at? The cry from Jesus’s heart mourns the loss of community. God has endowed Jerusalem with power to become a singular place where no one is rejected, where God’s all-inclusive love can reign supreme. Jesus has come to offer this amazing gift to a holy place that has lost touch with what makes it holy. Seeing how many of our own churches reflect Jerusalem’s failure, we too should mourn. But mourning is not enough. We should walk into our places of worship with clear eyes for peace. We should recognize where our leaders and communities have failed and we should decry their resistance to change. God is calling for a house of prayer for all peoples. The redundant embrace—all peoples—stresses the expectation of uncompromised inclusion.

Any church or faith community that compromises God’s expressed vision should be regarded with suspicion. These are blind spots shepherded by people with no understanding. We will not be fed in these pastures. We will not find peace in them, even though they sing and preach in the name of Christ. So why are we there? It behooves every disciple of Christ to seek community among people who have eyes for peace and understand Who Jesus is. The glory of the Temple loses its luster when we realize it’s lost its way. The fancy robes and soaring architecture and showmanship that draw so many inside its walls lose their magic. When churches prefer some above others and deny entry to eunuchs and strangers, the ground they stand on is no longer holy. So weep like Jesus for their blindness. But follow Jesus’s example: declare your displeasure with their error and when they resist you—and they will—walk away. Find a home where people with eyes for peace live out God’s vision in tangibly faithful ways.

The Extravagant Son

When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. (Luke 15.20; The Message)

Easy Recognition

The beauty of Jesus’s parables resides in their earthiness and accessibility. His characters are made of clay—flawed, unfinished, and often thickheaded. Whether central figures or supporting cast members, if they’re not exactly like us, we know someone like them. And our easy recognition of the characters, including those whom Jesus introduces as surrogates for God, enables us to enter His parables from many angles. No matter how many times we’ve heard these stories, we can always discover something new and revealing in them.

The parable in Sunday’s Gospel (Luke 15.11-32) is usually called “The Prodigal Son”. Since “prodigal” isn’t a word common to modern English, we’re apt to infer its meaning based on the son’s behavior, rather than seek out its true definition to see what Jesus wants to show us. We assume “a prodigal” is rebellious, ungrateful, devious—in short, a spoiled brat, which invites our condescension toward this character. But that’s not what the word means, nor is it what Jesus describes. Jesus’s word (asótós) doesn’t even address the son’s character. It merely portrays how he lives—loosely, wastefully, in wanton debauchery—after he leaves his father’s house, his pockets spilling easy money, with no compass for his life. A better word would be “extravagant,” and when we substitute it for “prodigal,” the story gets really interesting, because we realize the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Blanks

We don’t know what fires the son’s urgency to leave home. All Jesus tells us is he’s the younger of a prosperous farmer’s two sons. He asks his father to advance his inheritance, which totals cash equal to one-third of the father’s holdings. (According to ancient custom, the eldest son is entitled to twice what his younger brothers receive. Unfortunately, sisters don’t inherit directly from their father’s largesse; they’re given a dowry and married off to other families, who agree to support them in exchange for bearing children.) While it’s not unheard of in Jesus’s day for fathers to advance their legacies before death, it’s not how things usually go. By design, this couches a lot of blanks in the first act of the story, as Jesus withholds telling details about the nature of the father-son relationship.

Is the younger son the favorite? So it might seem, given his dad’s consent to honor his request and the older brother’s outrage when he returns home. On the other hand, their relationship may be troubled, and the father relents out of frustration, hoping some real-world experience will help his son figure things out. (Which is how the story ends.) Then again, the father’s confidence in his son may be so sure that he’s unworried about how he’ll spend his fortune. There’s also the possibility the father—like many others—sees a chance to live out his own dreams of being footloose and fancy-free through his son. Although there are many potential explanations for their rather unusual arrangement, they all lead back to two facts: the father loves his son supremely and, however the story goes, the father has a hand in its outcome. It is the father’s will—in the strictest legal sense—that enables the son to leave home.

So the son is not a rebel. He’s not greedy; he only asks for his share. He’s not deceitful; unlike Jacob in the Old Testament, he doesn’t trick the father into handing over what he doesn’t deserve. All we know is something inside him wants to break away. Maybe he’s just tired of living on the farm and wants to see the world. Maybe he’s lonely and longs for relationships he can’t find at home. (As we discover, his brother is not his friend.) Maybe he has delusions of grandeur and runs away to become a rock star. Maybe he’s a rich kid who’s curious about how the other half lives. In the end, his reasons for taking off don’t matter because the story is really about how he squanders his gifts and how that leads to reconciliation with his father.

A Tale of Horror

Once the son leaves home, we see that he and his father are more alike than they realize. They’re both extravagantly generous. They both enjoy a good party. Neither of them seems overly concerned about onlookers’ opinions, as decisions they make are likely to raise eyebrows and draw criticism. Both are undaunted by risk. In permitting his son to leave, the father risks not having a second child to care for him in his old age. In throwing his inheritance to the wind, the son risks not being able to provide for himself. And that’s what happens. Once he blows his fortune on extravagant living, it’s as though the universe turns on him. Famine descends on his newly adopted land. The friends his money bought are gone. He gets work tending pigs and stares hungrily at the swill he pours into their manger.

It’s here that Jesus’s story turns into a tale of horror that chills His listeners to the bone. The Jewish taboo about eating pork means not one of them owns a pig and very few, if any, have even seen one. Pigs are monsters—filthy, ravenous beasts that endanger their health and their faith. In the eyes of Jesus’s audience, landing in a pigpen is worse than hitting rock bottom. “That brought him to his senses,” Jesus says. The son reckons, “All those farmhands working for my father sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death.” Deciding to return home, he prepares a repentance speech, confessing he’s sinned against God and his father, begging to be taken on as a hired hand. And that brings us to the story’s final twist.

Lavish Love

The father never loses hope that he’ll be reunited with his son. “When he was still a long way off, his father saw him,” Jesus tells us. “His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him.” This means the father kept waiting and watching for his son’s return. The son starts his repentance speech. But the father cuts him off before he can offer to hire on as a common servant. It’s time to celebrate! The father starts issuing orders to the staff, planning an extravagant party, and moving quickly to restore everything the son surrendered: the best robe, i.e., the finest garment from the father’s own closet; the family ring, empowering the son to exercise his full rights as an heir; shoes, instantly differentiating him from the barefoot household slaves; and a grain-fed heifer, which the father set apart from his pastured cows, with the intention of breeding better stock or perhaps offering it in sacrificial worship.

The father’s lavish love won’t be denied. Naturally, this angers the older brother, who’s remained faithful the whole time. We get his resentment and refusal to join the extravagant reunion. While his brother’s been living the high life, he’s shouldered a lot of heavy lifting. He’s had to deal with his parents’ anxiety, neighborhood gossip about where the father went wrong, and servants’ concern about job stability after one-third of the household assets disappeared. “What are you doing?” the older brother asks. “He wasted a fortune on prostitutes and you throw him a party? I’ve never given you a moment’s grief and you’ve never done that for me!” Oh yes, we understand the older son. Yet that’s why we’re wise to doubt the reliability of his accusations. Left alone, he’s crafted a hateful fiction about his brother’s behavior. To some degree, it’s likely to be true. A windfall can make people do crazy things. What’s missing from his fantasy are the hard times and degradation the extravagant son encountered. He never stops to ask, “What went wrong to drive my little brother back home?”

The father doesn’t ask, either. It’s irrelevant to him. All he cares about is that his lost son has returned. Listen to his response to the elder son’s protests: “Son, you don’t understand. You’re with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours—but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!”

Never Far

How can we not love this story? We can enter it from virtually all sides, as the son, father, elder brother, servants, and off-screen characters—neighbors and onlookers, foreigners who sap the son’s fortune, even the audience who heard the parable for the first time. It is the story of repentance writ large in bold print, the greatest comeback tale of all time. But if we leave it at that, I think we miss a central truth Jesus wants us to see.

Regardless how far we stray from home, we are never far from God. We are, in every way, God’s children and we carry God’s traits with us wherever we go. That is God’s ultimate gift to us. The extravagance of our misbehavior is a distortion of God’s extravagant goodness. The generous nature that often leads us to wastefulness comes from our exceedingly generous God. Our compulsion to take risks is inherited from a God Who is willing to risk everything in order to restore us to right relationship. And while we are away from God, abusing our privileges and channeling our godly traits in wrong-headed ways, God never stops waiting and watching for our return. How low we sink—how horrible our lives become—is a matter of choice. From the moment we leave, the door stays open. Whether anyone else appreciates the bond we share with our Maker is irrelevant. We can always come home.

Jesus gives us a story riddled with blanks about the characters’ motives and attitudes. But He does this on purpose to lead us back to His parable’s defining truth. Just as the father tells the older son, God says to us, “Everything that is Mine is yours.” Wherever we may be in our lives—if our feet are firmly planted at God’s table or if we’ve skipped town and landed in a pigsty—that truth will never change. Everything that is Mine is yours. That’s reason enough to party.

No matter how far we stray from home, regardless how low we go, God waits and watches for our return.

Always Content, Never Complacent

I have learned to be content with whatever I have. (Philippians 4.11)

“I don’t like Paul.” I’ve heard several people say this lately. My response is always the same—a sympathetic nod—because Paul isn’t easy to like. On one page, he takes our breath away with eloquent dissertations on God’s grace. On the next, he trips all over himself, snarling at his detractors, belittling women, and mistaking swagger for certainty. But while I too quarrel with Paul’s personality and more than a few of his ideas, I like him very much. I like him because he’s difficult to like. I like him because he’s never reluctant to admit to his messiness. Most of all, I like him because he’s our finest example of a sincere Christian trying to figure out how all of this is supposed to work and what it all means.

I see Paul as a sort of lead investigator in the faith lab. He’s constantly at work, observing new phenomena, combining ancestral beliefs with novel approaches, debunking outdated myths, replacing them with fresh paradigms, and always—always—struggling unlock the Gospel’s revolutionary truths. Paul insists on publishing his findings as he goes, a daring proposition for anyone carving out new territory, let alone someone tasked with establishing the principles and practices of a radical faith movement. As a result, we’re privy to his blunders as well as his breakthroughs. It’s why we see him barrel down a dead-end alley one place—for instance, in his condescension toward women’s roles in the home and church—and then reverse his direction elsewhere, as he does by declaring, “there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus,” in Galatians 3. These flaws attest to Paul’s obsession with figuring things out. Despite his irksome vanity, he’s not interested in proving how smart he is. He’s doing his best to put everything together for the sake of the Gospel. He may not be likeable. But he’s always sincere.

We can get closer to Paul by recalling that, like many of us, he’s the product of a highly prescriptive faith environment. Before Christ charges him to be an Apostle, he already knows the Hebrew Bible by heart and has gained respect as a model seminarian. On top of that, he’s a Roman citizen, a foreign-born Jew of the merchant class, a person of privilege. So he comes from an entirely different place than the other disciples. By the time he’s stopped by a vision of Jesus on the Damascus Road, he’s sure he’s got a handle on how things work. Now he has to start all over again. And one of the key shifts in Paul’s life occurs when he learns to differentiate between complacency and contentment.

In Philippians 4.11-13, we find Paul’s magnificent contentment confession: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have… In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need.” And what is his secret? “I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me.” We can assume Paul’s talking only about his physical and material needs. Yet I’m of the mind it runs deeper than that. I believe he would also add, “I know what it’s like to be religiously complacent and how to be content with unanswered questions. I can remain committed to trying to figure it all out, while conceding it’s more than I can ever comprehend.” Now his famous “I can do all things” statement becomes an epic declaration of faith in the making.

I’m thoroughly convinced that every Lenten desert contains a Damascus Road of some kind—a bracing encounter with Christ that calls us away from shallow lives of religious complacency and leads to the deeper mysteries of faith. We won’t figure it all out. We’ll make blunders and find ourselves backtracking from ideas we’ve embraced in the past. Not everyone will be happy with us. But in our pursuit of right relationship with God we can find contentment. Paul told Timothy, “There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.” (1 Timothy 6.6) Pursuing God’s will and way inevitably requires us to start over, clearing away ready-made answers to make room for questions we can’t possibly resolve. But when we combine that with contentment, we will gain strength for our journey and discover lives of faith that are anything but complacent.

Resonance and Power

He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3.30)

Our pastor opened her Ash Wednesday reflection this year with the story of a priest who asked his congregation, “What’s the difference between a stick in the mud and a flute?” After they pondered the riddle for a moment, he told them. “A stick in the mud is full of itself. But a flute has been emptied out to make music.” The metaphor was obvious. Lent is the time when we consciously empty ourselves out so that God’s Spirit can blow through us and transform our lives into song. Yet it occurred to me that I knew very little about how a flute works. So I looked it up and learned something very interesting.

The flute’s hollowed-out chamber is called a “resonator.” As air travels through the passageway, it’s directed across a series of holes that causes the air inside it to vibrate. The player changes the pitch by blocking the holes to alter the resonator's length and its corresponding frequency. This is why piccolos—basically, half-sized flutes—emit higher, somewhat shriller tones, while longer flutes have a lower, mellower register. So it turns out the keys have little to do with the depth and volume of a flute’s melody. It's not about what comes out of the flute, but what happens inside it. The more room a flute provides for its player’s breath, the more power it possesses and the more resonant its music becomes.

Of course, we know sticks in the mud make no music. Being full of themselves, they have no resonance. Worse still, they’re already dead and don’t know it. They’ve fallen from the tree that gave them life. They stand, not in their own strength, but in the muck and mire collected around them. If they make any sound at all, it’s the crack of being snapped in two to or the crackle of being tossed onto a fire.

Some time after he baptizes Jesus, John the Baptist’s disciples inform him that Jesus has started baptizing people on His own. He’s having great success, which alarms the Baptist’s followers. But John immediately discerns the situation. To challenge Jesus would indicate he’s full of himself. He will become useless to Jesus—a stick in the mud who’s lost touch with God’s purpose. “He must increase,” John says. “But I must decrease.” John empties himself out so the resonance of the Gospel can flow through him.

The less of us—our will, pride, and self—there is, the more melodious our lives become. In this season of emptying out, we examine ourselves thoroughly, searching for blockages that impede the flow of God’s Spirit in our lives. We get out of our own way to allow God to have God’s way. The less of us there is, the more resonant and powerful our music will be.