Luke 15:11-32
“Unbelievable!” says the younger son in wonder, as he stands at the door looking into the feast. “I can’t believe this is for me. Last time I had a full meal it was pig slop. That’s all I deserve after what I did. How can I sit down at this feast? I don’t deserve it.”
“Unbelievable!” says the older son in anger, as he stands at the door looking into the feast. “I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. I’ve honored my mother and father. I’ve worked hard. I’ve followed all the rules. I’m the one who deserves a feast.”
I have this picture in my mind of a glorious spread–the fatted calf, figs and dates and pomegranates, hummus and olives. There’s dancing and singing, and two young men standing at opposite doors, unable to partake because they are paralyzed by the ways they have defined “deserving.” The feast overflows with abundance and love; they stand hungry and alone.
Almost every time we read this story, in Bible Study or Sunday morning worship or Seeds of Grace, the conversation turns to the older son. One time I only told the first half of the story, and we still ended up focusing on his anger. We want the world to be fair, we want God to be fair, and so we are deeply disturbed by the injustice the older son perceives. We almost never get around to talking about the feast.
Last time our Bible Study group tackled this passage, I learned that some scholars think the older brother’s story might not be original to Jesus. Jesus’ parables make one point. Sometimes the gospel writers turn his parables into allegories, in which each character represents something or someone. It’s possible that Luke adds the older brother in order to make a point about conflict in his own early church community, as they struggle to figure out how to be one people from Jewish and Gentile backgrounds.
At first, I was eager to latch on to that scholarly hypothesis. Maybe, I thought, we can ignore the second half of the story. Maybe we can extract the distracting part and focus on the feast.
As I thought more about it, I realized that the older son’s story is important. If the first half of the parable conveys a truth about who God is, the second half acknowledges how hard it is for us human beings to trust that truth.
When we decided that our worship theme for the fall would be “Jesus the Foodie,” I was expecting a nice light-hearted season–only to find that Jesus uses food stories to perplex and challenge his followers. Today’s story goes even further. There’s something almost offensive about it, with its seeming disdain for the older son who does what he’s supposed to, with its apparent disregard for basic fairness.
Does Jesus mean to offend us? Probably. Jesus intentionally offends his disciples, the crowd, and the religious leaders looking on in order to push them beyond their limited perceptions of God. If we stay with the story, if we wrestle with our discomfort, we ultimately awaken to a deeper truth, the truth behind the feast.
We start our wrestling with a truth we think we know about God. We worship a God of justice, a God who cares deeply that our human societies are ordered in such a way that everyone has food to eat, that each person is treated with dignity, that things are fair. When we fall short of God’s vision, God finds a way to point it out–prophets, holy writings, our own consciences. God demands that we admit what we have done, turn around, try to undo the damage, and come home to the way God calls us to live.
That truth–of God who teaches us right from wrong and insists that we right our wrongs–is reflected in the younger son’s journey. It takes a long time, but eventually he realizes what he has done. He turns around and embarks on a long journey home, what I imagine to be a time of self-reflection, a time of internal transformation.
We start our hearing of the story with this challenging but comprehensible truth: our God of justice calls us to repentance and to a renewed commitment to do what is right. Then we get to the feast along with the older son’s reaction. The feast pushes us to a deeper truth, a truth so simple we can’t quite let ourselves believe it.
God is love. God’s love is reflected in the rules that help us live in community, and God’s love is deeper, broader, and wider than all those rules, than all our categories of right and wrong. We cannot earn God’s love. Blessedly, we don’t have to. It is a gift. Neither can we do anything to make God stop loving us, for God’s love is not constrained by our actions.
The image that helps me hold on to this deeper, simpler truth is a waterfall. God’s love is like a waterfall, flowing over us. All we need to do is stand here and receive it.
So simple, and so unbelievable. We can’t comprehend that all this love could be for us, flawed as we are. I picture us approaching this waterfall of abundance with measuring cups in our hands, trying to parse out the appropriate amounts we each deserve. The water flows with such force that we cannot capture it. It simply overflows. We cannot measure it. We cannot contain it. All we can do is allow ourselves to be bathed in love, until we are healed and transformed.
That’s my image to help me begin to grasp this truth, which I call grace. Jesus chooses, at least in this story, to use an image about food. God’s love, God’s grace, is like a feast–food to nourish body and soul, sweet and savory and rich, more than enough for everyone, with joyous dancing and singing. A table set for us–all we have to do is walk through the door.
This week has been a hard one for the Framingham community. Over the holiday weekend, there were two instances of children using social media as a platform for hate speech. In one case, students at McAuliffe Middle School created a viciously anti-Semitic Instagram group and invited a young Jewish girl to join it. In the other case, it appeared that a Framingham High School student had posted racist words alongside a picture of herself. We later learned that her account had been hacked; someone else posted her picture with the racist words. I don’t know whether the hacker was another member of the Framingham High community; I do know the event has been painful for everyone who was targeted and everyone who cares about our community.
By Monday, the internet had exploded with pain and anger. There were demands that the names of the children be released to the public, that they be automatically expelled. There were accusations that the school administrations didn’t respond quickly enough.
Beyond the internet, people from all walks of life wrestled with how to respond. Police gathered facts, confirming the high school student’s insistence that she did not write those words, reminding us that the rush to judgment can be dangerous. City officials met with community leaders. School administrators wrote initial emails, follow-up emails, and still more emails. Teachers and students and counselors tried to process what had happened. Hundreds of people gathered on Friday night at Temple Beth Am for a Stand Up Shabbat Solidarity service.
Through it all, the Framingham community wrestled with justice and reconciliation, with grace and love–with the themes highlighted in our gospel reading. We wrestled with the reality that children from our city learned hate from somewhere in our midst–that as a community we have strayed from how God calls us to live. We wrestled with the inclination to turn our abhorrence of what they did into a rejection of them, even as we acknowledge that children should have an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. We struggled to envision what healing and restoration might look like–for the people who were targeted, for the youthful perpetrators of hate, for the entire community. At our service Friday night, we tried to envision the feast, to claim the potential for wholeness, to receive God’s blessing poured out over our struggling, pain-filled, hope-filled community.
Our gospel story doesn’t give us a simple road-map for how that long journey of healing and reconciliation should proceed. The gospel story honors the sacredness of our struggle, as we try to understand what the promise of God’s forgiveness means for our efforts to find forgiveness and reconciliation in our community.
The feast in this story calls us to ground our very real struggle in a deeper truth: God’s love is deeper and wider and greater than our brokenness. God’s love is poured out over all of us, a waterfall of grace. God prepares a feast for us, and God invites us to the table as we are: with our regrets, our brokenness, our imperfect efforts to deal with the legacy of racism and anti-Semitism, our struggle to right our wrongs and find reconciliation.
This is a feast of grace. It is God’s love poured out for all of us. It is God’s love baked into breads and roasts and cakes. What are we doing standing at the door? Let us go in and feast. Amen.