March 18, 2007 - Two misunderstandings

4th Sunday in Lent
18 March 2007
Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32
Two misunderstandings
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

My brother got all the special stuff. He wore braces to straighten his teeth. He also had a brace for his leg, because of polio. He went on outings with Mom all the time: the orthodontist, the orthopedic surgeon, the physical therapist. All these people were taking care of him. Early on, he had his own wheel chair. Sometimes I got to play with it for a few minutes, but he got to play with it all day, every day. When he went to bed, my mother massaged his leg with olive oil. I still see them at his bed across our room whenever I someone pours out olive oil. My brother went to a special school, where they gave him special education to catch him up on all the class time he lost while in the hospital or recovering from his many surgeries—which were also things I never got to do. My brother got all the special stuff.

I kept begging my mom for something, anything, that was special. Finally, I got glasses. I don’t think I even needed them, but I was so happy to get a pair. They were dark plastic, and I wore them, literally, day and night. Mom scolded me for bending my glasses out of shape by sleeping face down on them on the pillow. I’ve never asked but have long suspected my mother of deciding that eyeglasses were something easy enough, and harmless enough, to satisfy my hunger for special attention. So she got me some. I was so happy.

How do we know we are provided for well enough by the universe? How do we know God cares? How to people get what they deserve? How do we know that we matter? We suppose that children will grow into an understanding of these things, but the truth is, most of us keep wondering.

The two brothers in Jesus’ parable are certainly still wondering. We usually focus on the younger brother, who is at once so brash and yet so naïve, so insolent and yet so touching. But the older brother has issues, too. In fact, it is the older brother who does not resolve matters by the end of the story. At the end of the story he’s worse off than his once dissolute sibling. Both brothers make major life decisions based on misunderstandings of what matters in life. One brother almost kills himself with his misunderstanding. The misunderstanding of the other brother leaves him dying of envy.

Let’s look at these two misunderstandings.

The younger brother. What does he ask for? He asks for his share of everything he’s going to get someday anyway. In today’s culture, who would see the crime in that? These days, you claim what’s yours, and it’s nobody’s business how you use it. The younger brother wants his half, and his father gives it to him.

It’s this part, the father’s part, that’s hard to understand. You’d think the father would put his foot down. You’d expect him at least to be insulted. Doesn’t he understand about teaching a child responsibility? Why doesn’t he tell the impudent child, No? But this isn’t that kind of father. It isn’t the kind of father that matches his will against the will of the child. He is the kind of father that looks at things in the long term, and in the long term, this boy is going to get his piece of the family pie eventually. No matter when he does, his misunderstanding will determine his fate. Neither how much stuff he has nor how long he waits to get it will change his fate. The son has free will. The father understands that much.

What the younger son doesn’t understand is that having something does not also mean being something. Having wealth doesn’t make you important. Riding in luxury doesn’t make you a star. Gourmet dining doesn’t make you refined. Buying drinks for the whole bar doesn’t make you a friend. A night with a prostitute doesn’t make you a lover. In so many ways, we see the younger son’s failure to understand.

It’s easy to see the failings of the younger son in other people, of course. To see such thinking in ourselves, on the other hand, is very hard, and it is part of the art of becoming fully human. As a little exercise, take an inventory of what you own. Start with the big ticket items: house, car, jewelry, clothing, appliances, gadgets. How much of all that did you acquire in order to look better, feel better or display how many notches above average you are? Go ahead. Think about that a minute.

Is this stinging a little? It stings me. Whatever I really, really love having is very likely a problem for me. I really love having my books, for instance. Most of the time I read them once. A few I read twice, and only a small handful of books to I read many times. I could give them away for others to read. I could check them out of the library and save the money and the trees. But I love the books, just love ’em. There’s a small part of me that wants people to know that I read and study. Minister’s are supposed to read and study a lot, and I want people to see that I’m doing my job.

But it’s even more than that. I just feel better with all those books around me. If I want a new idea, I might start leafing through books, instead of struggling with my creative blockage. I think there’s even a tinge of fear that makes me hold onto books. If there’s a thought in one of them that I want to retrieve, I want the book there so I can look it up. The fear is: I may not remember something important, something essential to my ministry, my life or my happiness.

Now, all of this may sound innocuous enough, but it is really a small example of something that has infected our way of life. Just like I think I can’t have too big a library, other people think they can’t have too fast a car, or too big a house, or too many houses, or a too big a diamond, or too much money, or too much fame, or too much power. Even people in modest circumstances can want too much. They can want too much control over the people close to them. It is even possible that someone have too many friends. Too many friends? Yes, if the reason for all the friends is not friendship so much as fear that being alone with yourself for a while is unbearable, your friendships may be a way to avoid the discomfort of being alone in the quiet with yourself.

The younger son asked for everything he wanted, and he got it. He used it up like there was no tomorrow, until he came perilously close to the point where no tomorrow was exactly his situation. He was down to eating pig slop, if he could get it. After you run out of pig slop, I think that’s when you die. In any event, the younger brother had become pretty much dead inside. There was hardly any identifiable soul left in him, and if soullessness isn’t death, what is?

So the younger son looks at the situation and decides—in ways that he is probably not even aware—for life. He decides for life in the sense that eating as a servant in the family compound is surviving, of which the younger son, no doubt, is aware. But he doesn’t seem to be aware that choosing to live in a community of mutuality is a choice for life. He does not seem to be aware that pressing through his humiliation is a choice for life, even if mere humility, which is noble and the antithesis of humiliation, is all that’s called for. The younger son does not understand that there is a love in the world that waits for us at the very heart of the universe which will never pass away, which never alters, which judges for goodness but does not condemn out of anger, and which burns with eager longing for the return of us all. The younger son makes a most important choice for the sake of his life and for the life of his father and family. He is not even aware of how profoundly he is changing not only his life but also the world.

And though the younger son makes the life-saving, life-changing choice, he still misunderstands the father. He thinks that if he comes back and grovels deeply enough, his father will condescend far enough to permit him a lowly place in the household. If the younger son displays himself in deep enough shame, the father’s ego will be lifted enough in the eyes of the world, and the son will be granted a mean survival. The father needs to see the son’s shame. Or so the son believes.

But shame and ego and the eyes of the world are irrelevant to the father. Rather, gratitude and goodness and blessing are relevant to the father. Hope and life and joy are relevant to the father. Reunion, embrace and devotion are relevant to the father. Mercy is relevant to the father. Love is relevant to the father. Grace is relevant to the father. The son has completely misunderstood, but, albeit for his own mistaken reasons, he shows up back at home, and the father bestows grace. There is the fabulous robe, the bright glint of the ring, the clean sandals, the fatted calf and the feast. The son is restored, the family is made whole, the community is renewed.

But there is yet more misunderstanding, the misunderstanding of the older son.

The older son misunderstands the world in about the way I misunderstood my life as compared to that of my brother. Of course, all the things he was getting came to my brother as a result of various kinds of misfortune and calamity, but I understood what came to him as signs that the universe somehow favored him. As for me, I just lived my life and did my duty. I had my share of childhood misadventures, but mostly I got up, dressed myself, did my school work and obeyed the rules of the household. I wanted the world to repay me with a celebration of my obedience and loyalty with a special celebration—at least as much attention as the world gave my brother. To me, love meant special attention and acknowledgement. I wanted every day to be Valentine’s Day.

Now, we all of us appreciate the importance of demonstrating our affection as signs of love. We all enjoy the surprise of a special gift or act of kindness that signifies grace, but something goes wrong when we become alienated for the failure of a loved one or the universe or God to brighten the dark place in us where the light of our own soul should be. For the older son, the important relationship with his father had at some point ceased being the love between them. At some point, the older son’s relationship with his father became the extent to which the father granted him gifts and public approval.

It would be as if we gave a medal to someone for being the church’s best Christian, whereas the reward for the faithful Christian life is the deep connection the believer has with God. What God does for us in our outward life to prove God’s love is never the point. I wonder how much our prayer life would change, if we really understood this. We might spend less time giving God instructions about how to improve our lives and start spending our prayer time searching our soul for the rivers of mercy, love and grace that God has supplied with the waters of blessing. We might spend our prayer time grazing in pastures of joyfulness so green and lush that we seek others to join us there and be fed in those pastures. We might not ever again worry that whatever we have, little or much, is not enough.

The older son, for all his virtuous loyalty and discipline, is left at the end of the story with his relationship—and his very happiness—unresolved. He might die a lonely and bitter man. When we esteem ourselves the good and responsible ones who deserve what we have, this is the danger we face. It is the danger a comfortable and safe American way of life presents to us, unless we learn to understand and accept God a God of mercy, love and grace, a God who does not honor our cultural standards of work and reward but who abounds in mercy and sheds grace on all for the sake of love. The younger son, for all his failures and violations of the relationship with the father, arrives at the moment when he is able to receive grace. There is something about our need to reach the point of deep humility there for us to learn. There is something about the love of God that desires to draw us in, embrace us and grant us the fullness of life that we cannot resist, when we finally surrender to God’s grace. Amen.