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.

Led Away

Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed His star at its rising, and have come to pay Him homage.” (Matthew 2.1-2)

Like all great stories, the Nativity saga gives us just enough information to set our imaginations aflame. Wherever we enter it, we find questions the gospel writers leave unanswered, opening windows for us to see ourselves in the characters they portray. Matthew’s tale of the Magi almost seems purposefully short on specifics about these men. We know they’re “wise,” they come from easterly pagan lands, and apparently they’re well heeled, possibly even renowned, because they have no problem getting an audience with King Herod. Beyond that, their background is vague at best. We’re told they journey from the East, led by a rising star, in search of the newborn King. But what compels them to seek Him out is open to speculation. They want to pay homage to Him, yet the nature of their adoration isn’t clear. Are they believers? Or are they diplomats? Could it be they’re the kinds of people who are always ahead of the curve—who sense a major shift is underway and go out of their way to be the first to show up?

In her sermon “Home By Another Way”, Barbara Brown Taylor imagines the Magi in this fashion:

They were all glad for a reason to get out of town—because that was clearly where the star was calling them, out—away from everything they knew how to manage and survive, out from under the reputations they had built for themselves, the high expectations, the disappointing returns. And so they set out, one by one, each believing that he was the only one with a star in his eye until they all ran into one another on the road to Jerusalem.

No one can say if her intuitions are more correct than anyone else’s. Yet the sensibilities she assigns to these mystery men seem right, as they reflect those we have during Advent. As the Bethlehem star comes into sharper focus, we can feel ourselves being led away. Gladly, we sense everything we predictably rely on—our knowledge and reputations, our ambitions as well as our shortcomings—falling behind us. All we bring to the manger are a compelling need to find Christ and gifts we offer. We start from different places. We’re moved by different ideas, desires, and beliefs. We’re clad in diversity. Yet somehow we run into one another along the way. At first, we are little more than traveling companions, beneficiaries of serendipitous timing. But when we arrive at Bethlehem, we become family, bound together for all time as we behold the splendor of the Word Made Flesh, Who has come to live in us.

No Strings

If the person is poor, you shall not sleep in the garment given you as the pledge. You shall give the pledge back by sunset, so that your neighbor may sleep in the cloak and bless you. (Deuteronomy 24.12-13)

While we exult in Advent’s time of expectation, for many it is a season of dark dread. Even as we read this, countless people are suffocating with anxiety because they have no means of celebrating the Feast of the Nativity or placing gifts under the tree—if they have a tree at all. We rally around these folks and do everything we can to lift their burden. Yet in our giving we should be wary that it comes with no strings attached—without pity, without prejudice, without any expectation of reward or praise, and most of all, without any sense we are somehow superior (or “more blessed”) than those in need.

We are culturally predisposed to divide and separate the well off from the less fortunate, the haves from the have-nots. Of this supposition, Dorothy Day wrote:

The poor, it seems, have no right to beauty, to order. Poverty must be squalor, filth, ugliness, to be deemed poverty. But this is destitution, and it was usually from such destitution that our family had “come up in the world.”

It should humble us to realize our families have been where those we help presently are. A journey back through our histories land us at a point where we too faced poverty and its stigmas. Yet someone saw to our needs because making our families strong strengthened the community at large.

In the Hebrew Bible, provision for the poor is consistently framed in the context of community. It is for the common good that those having much are expected to give to those having little. In Deuteronomy, we see one method of how this works. When poor people need help, it is offered in the guise of a loan to protect the recipient from being disparaged as a freeloader. The “lender” takes the “borrower’s” cloak as collateral, presumably to be held until the “debt” is paid. Before the day ends, however, the cloak is returned to ensure the needy person can sleep comfortably through the cold night. The leverage to demand payment is removed so the poor person’s anxieties are quelled and he/she doesn’t lose respect. This is the same principle that Jesus cites when saying, “If someone asks for your coat, offer your shirt as well.”

As we go about our seasonal giving to those in need, let us take care to honor their dignity as valuable members of our communities. It’s not about feeling good about what we do to help out. It’s not about feeling sorry for those who need our help. It’s about easing their anxieties and keeping them warm and safe during a time when circumstance threatens their capacity to care for their own.

Saying Grace

Clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony… And be thankful. (Colossians 3.14-15)

Hassles and Anxieties

Last Sunday, our pastor showed us a scene from Meet the Parents, in which Ben Stiller, hoping to impress his future in-laws, offers to say grace at the dinner table. The results are less than sterling.

She followed the clip with a few questions about why we often feel so awkward when praying aloud in the presence of others—why the desire to sound sincere tends to backfire, and our words quickly become stilted and grandiose. Her observations about prayer “performance anxiety” got me thinking about how the Stiller clip will replay itself at Thanksgiving tables around the country. For many, this will be one of very few times that families will fellowship around their tables. For many more, it may be the only day of 365 that they pause to express gratitude for goodness they’ve received. And while I know of no hard data to support this suspicion, I’m thoroughly convinced the erosion of both traditions—family dinner and saying grace—significantly contributes to social decay we currently wrestle with. Conceding the “inconvenience” of spending time around the table subjects us to more inconveniences than we realize. How much harder our lives have become now that orchestrating family dinner is too hard and taking 30 seconds each day to give thanks demands too much! The hassle of family dinner and performance anxiety associated with saying grace are nothing compared to hassles and anxieties that have grown up in their absence.

Universal Compulsions

So I wondered, where do the customs of eating together and saying grace come from? While other species gather for meals, by and large, proximity to one another and ready availability of food shape their communal dining habits. Humans are rare—if not unique—in their concept of “breaking bread” as a social necessity. Until very recently, the family table was indispensible. It was where family conflicts were resolved, milestones were celebrated, cohesion as a household and membership within the larger community were secured, the lore of identity and kinship passed from one generation to the next, moral character was established, and futures were assessed. In other words, humans have always approached the family meal expecting more than nourishment. We bring big questions to the table, which get answered indirectly through the behaviors and conversations that transpire during our eating rituals. (The first Christians certainly recognized the power of sharing a common meal, which is why they placed a table—rather than an altar or idol—at the center of their worship.)

Thus it seems our compulsion to break bread together is hard-wired and can only be overridden by conscious neglect. But pairing times of nourishment with expressions of gratitude also appears to be a universal human compulsion. Virtually every world religion endorses the practice of giving thanks at mealtime. In all of its forms, “saying grace” boils down to what it sounds like: taking a moment to rehearse examples of unmerited grace and undeserved favor. No prayer more clearly captures the purity of this impulse than one we learn as children: “God is great. God is good. Let us thank God for our food.” To say grace is to invite God’s goodness to our table—to lay the gifts of life-giving food under the canopy of God’s supreme love and care for us. Saying grace isn’t a religious obligation. It’s an intentional act that makes God’s abundant presence felt in our lives—a sacred opportunity to confess faith in our Maker and Provider.

Four Thanksgivings

As Christians, we inherit grace-saying from our Jewish forebears. In Judaism, Birkat Hamazon (“Blessing on Nourishment”) is comprised of four thanksgivings: for the food; for the land of Israel; for the holy city of Jerusalem; and finally, for God’s goodness. We typically collapse this structure into a single statement that focuses on the first and last parts. (“Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty.”) Yet, whether preparing our hearts for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast or simply reaching for words before a daily meal, the Jewish blessing can be very useful in easing anxieties about giving thanks to God aloud. We do this by expanding on the Jewish prayer’s basic principles.

Let us thank God not only for our food, but also for being alive and healthy and able to digest it; for the gift of labor that supplies our tables; for senses that relish what we eat; for fellowship occasioned by gathering at the table.

Let us thank God not only for where we live, but also for freedom to make that land our home; for the security of having a place in the world; for the wealth that grows out of belonging to families and communities that strive to live and prosper in peace; for the traditions and heritages that enrich our lives together.

Let us thank God not only for our holy places, but also for the promises they house; for hope that will not surrender to pessimism; for spiritual sanctuary in a world governed by greed and injustice; for beacons of righteousness that shine forth from the citadels and steeples of God’s dwelling places.

Let us be thankful, not only for God’s goodness, but also for the unmerited love and mercy it contains; for relentless blessings we enjoy and too often overlook; for daily guidance and protection given to us; for awareness that if it were not for God’s grace, we would be lost.

I pray a meaningful and rich Thanksgiving Day for all who celebrate the holiday in the US and an equally abundant blessing for those outside the States—reminding all of us of the wisdom imparted in Colossians 3:14-15:

Clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.

Amen.