Hilton Head Island, SC – September 25, 20, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 15:11-24; Luke 15:25-32
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him, and kissed him.” – Luke 15:20b
The Parable of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the best known of all Jesus’ parables. I believe it also is the greatest of all his many parables. It describes in exquisite detail an essential part of the nature of God, namely His extravagant forgiveness.
The story is familiar to nearly everyone, even to those who have heard it only once. Without repeating every facet of the parable, which would take at least three or four sermons to do justice to the story, Jesus tells us there was a father who had two sons. The younger son demanded that his father give him the one-third of the total inheritance which would eventually be due him. It was just a third, because the father had only two sons, and in first-century Jewish society, the oldest son always got two shares of the estate while all other sons would get one share. Therefore, because there were only two sons, the older would be entitled to two-thirds and the younger son to one-third. (Daughters ordinarily did not receive much of anything, other than the father’s good wishes that they might marry a rich man who would keep them in the manner of living to which they would like to become accustomed. Ladies, being a female then was even more of a heavy injustice than it is now.)
It is important to understand what the younger son was demanding. He was wanting his share of the inheritance before his father had even died. In effect, he said to his father, “I want you to become as good as dead, Dad.” The absolutely astonishing feature of Jesus’ parable is that the father agreed to his son’s demand, without so much as a question or comment of any kind.
Then it was that the younger boy left for “the far country.” There he “squandered his property in loose living.” (Jesus doesn’t specify what “loose living” entailed; he leaves it up to us to decide what that might be. Whatever it was, he spent all the money he had received in his brazenly-claimed bequest.) When his money was gone, he took a job feeding pigs in the distant Gentile land. Remember this: This is a Jew feeding pigs to try to scratch out a living. When the younger son finally “came to himself,” he decided he had no choice but to go back home and throw himself on his father’s mercy. What a revolting development that was! When he left home, he thought he would have the world by the tail, but all he ended up with was a tattered tail attached to no world at all!
The narcissistic young man prepared a speech he would deliver to his father when he got home. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.” Did he truly mean that, or was he merely attempting to presume on his father’s mercy? Jesus doesn’t tell us. We don’t know whether the younger son was honestly repentant or if he was still trying to con his father.
Weeks or months later, the wastrel arrived back where he started his earthly existence. But now he was dirty, in rags, with no shoes, a mere skeleton, a hollow-eyed ungrateful failure. However, listen to the next of the multitude of rich details in this never-to-be-forgotten parable. “But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” For months the father had frequently been glancing down the road, hoping to see his son. He didn’t even give his miscreant offspring the opportunity to invoke his well-rehearsed speech; he just ran down the road and threw his arms around his son, the son who had in effect wished him dead, who had insisted he receive his inheritance, who had severely disgraced his father in the community by his thoughtless actions.
There is something in Jesus’ words which we in our culture are bound to miss. The father ran to greet and hug his son. In first-century Jewish culture, no proper father would ever run to greet anyone. It was far too undignified. The son might --- and probably should --- run to meet the father in such circumstances, but no head of the household would ever, ever reverse the process! For a genuine gentleman to run at all represented severe self-effacement! It was self-abnegation! The oldest male in every household was, in Latin, the paterfamilias, the Biiiiiig Daddy, the Main Man! And if a man, particularly an older man, were to run, he would have to hike up the hem of his long robe in order to be able to churn his legs. But what if those legs were thin, or fat, or pale, or crooked, or gnarled? He would diminish himself by running, and so no self-respecting father would sprint out to embrace a prodigal son who at a glance obviously had spent every shekel he had been bequeathed. But the father in Jesus’ parable did exactly that! It was an act of extravagance, of extravagant forgiveness. Without even hearing his son recount what had happened, without hearing so much as a word, the father showed by his response to his egregiously-errant child that he was already forgiven of his offenses, whatever they might turn out to be.
Listen carefully, Christian people. Jesus never once says it, but clearly he implies that the father in this parable is God. It is God who is the forgiving Father, it is God who offers all of us extravagant forgiveness.
The younger son gave the speech he had so assiduously committed to memory, but the father paid no attention to it. He ordered the servants to bring the best robe and put it on him, and to put a ring on his finger (illustrating that he was once again a valued member of an important and influential family), and they put new shoes on his feet, and prepared a feast. “For this my son was dead,” the father exclaimed, “and he is alive again. He was lost, and is found.” Some forgiveness may be cheap, but this was costly forgiveness, extravagant forgiveness.
On a sultry June 17 evening in 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina, a young white man walked into the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. A group of people, from children to grandparents, were engaged in a Bible study with their minister. Dylann Roof listened for an hour or so, and then he took out an automatic weapon, killing nine of them, including Pastor Clementa Pinckney, and injuring several others.
Within thirty-six hours, some of the family members of the victims stood in a courtroom in what Charlestonians call “the Holy City.” There they expressed forgiveness for the racist murderer. This was less than forty-eight hours after the murderous rampage! They implored the judge who soon would have the defendant before him not to pronounce the death sentence, which of course at that point he had no authority to do. Some of the other family members or the injured understandably did not feel moved to grant such a swift display of extravagant forgiveness, but for several of these people, forgiveness for the crime and for the criminal was almost instantaneous. Countless people all over the world were mystified or enraged by the rapid genuine expressions of forgiveness, and many others were enormously moved by the enormity of their compassion in the face of such immense grief and sorrow. Thus not only God, but also ordinary human beings, can engage in extravagant forgiveness.
Five months after that incident, Time Magazine had the longest cover story about that episode I can ever remember in any cover story, and I have been reading Time for over sixty years. I kept that issue, knowing that at some point I would be preaching this sermon. The primary writer of the piece, David Von Drehle, is an editor-at-large and a senior writer on the Time staff. (Google it: Time, Nov. 15, 2015. It is a profoundly engrossing essay.)
The story said, “(T)he forgiveness expressed by some surviving family members left as many questions as it answered. Can murder be forgiven, and if so, who has the power? Must it be earned or given freely? Who benefits from forgiveness – the sinner or the survivor? And why do we forgive at all? Is it a way of remembering, or of forgetting?”
Later that day, when Dylann Roof stood in the courtroom, Nadine Collier stepped forward to the microphone. Her mother, Ethel Lance, was one of the nine people killed. Nadine was in the room when the shooting occurred, but she was somehow spared. About the accused she thought this as she sat in the chamber of justice: “I kept thinking he’s a young man, he’s never going to experience college, be a husband, be a daddy. You have ruined your life,” she said to herself, mentally saying it to the accused.
Then, through tears before the judge who asked her to speak and in the hearing of everyone else in the courtroom, Nadine Collier said to Dylann Roof, “I forgive you. You took something away from me. I will never get to talk to her again – but I forgive you, and have mercy on your soul….You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. If God forgives you, I forgive you.” Her words came spontaneously, and she has never regretted a word she uttered on that memorable, awful day.
Viktor Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote about certain prisoners walking “through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing --- the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Extravagant forgiveness is a deliberately chosen attitude. It insists on doing what seems impossible, namely, to forgive the grievous sins of grievous sinners. I remember reading in the newspaper about a couple who pleaded with a judge not to sentence to death the cold-blooded killer of their young daughter. Most of us would probably secretly hope for an execution, but they did everything they could to prevent one.
Do you recall the disturbed man who went into an Amish school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania? For whatever twisted impulses ran through his skewed mind, he shot several young children, and calmly walked away. When he was arrested shortly afterward, he too was taken to a courtroom. And there the parents of the slain children with deep emotion declared their forgiveness for the man and for the heartbreak he had suddenly thrust into their lives.
It is a gargantuan grace note when the catastrophic crimes of savage sinners are forgiven. To have wronged someone terribly and to be forgiven for it can bring astonishing calmness to the turbulent heart of the perpetrator. But even more so, extravagant forgiveness is far more important for the forgiver than for the forgiven. Johann Kasper Lavater, the man who is quoted on this morning’s bulletin cover, was a Swiss theologian, philosopher, and poet. He made an enormous observation when he said, “He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the sublime enjoyments of life.” When we forgive someone who has wronged us, especially when the infraction was deliberate, we lift an enormous burden from our own assaulted spirit, and we free ourselves to move forward in life, relieved of the intolerable burden.
There was not just one son in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but two. And now to the older son we turn. He was the one who stayed home and worked hard and did what he thought was required of him. In truth, however, nothing was required of him by the father, because the father in the story had turned over two-thirds of the value of the entire estate to the older son when he gave the younger son his one-third. Therefore, when the older son came back to the house and heard music and saw people dancing, he was mystified. Who had decided to throw a party? It was now his house, not his father’s, and who had ordered a feast to be held for everyone in the village? He was told by one of the servants that his brother had returned home, and in a joyous response, their father had arranged a big party to be held in honor of the joyous occasion.
However, the older son was not happy. He was enraged. He snarled at his father, “Lo, I have never disobeyed your command, yet you never threw a party for me. But when this son of yours came” (not “my brother” but “this son of yours”), “who has devoured your living with harlots” (who said anything about harlots? There were not harlots in the story; it is a deliberate cheap shot by the incensed brother), “you killed for him the fatted calf!”
In Jesus’ parable, I imagine the father throwing his arm around the shoulders of his spiteful son, saying to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. I gave all the rest of the inheritance to you when your brother took off for the far country. But now it is fitting to make merry and be glad, for this, your brother, was dead, and he is alive again, he was LOST, and Is FOUND!”
Forgiveness, especially extravagant forgiveness, is a central feature of what it means to perceive oneself as a child of God. Do you think it is easy to be a Christian? It isn’t. It is hard. It is incredibly difficult. We must often defy basic human nature and seek to allow divinity to take control of us. We must rise above what comes so naturally to those who have been hurt by others, now to exhibit the attitude which was in Jesus Christ, an attitude placed there by none other than God Himself. Jesus represents what should be to everything which can be, if we allow our lower nature to get out of our way. As Viktor Frankl so wisely observed, our freedom to choose the attitude we shall exhibit in the most trying of circumstances is ultimately determined by us, and by no one else.
People who forgive extravagantly can do so only because they take God and Jesus very seriously. It won’t --- and can’t --- happen otherwise.