Possible theme for the week: that God chooses outsiders or outcasts, or calls insiders to come out from their cultures and be foreigners or sojourners in another land.

Joshua 5:9-12

Reflections and Questions

1. God has brought them out of Egypt and is about to make them foreigners in the new Promised Land. Their food for wandering is no longer available as they begin to live out their exodus identity in the new land.

2 Cor 5:16-21

Reflections and Questions

1. We are called to be ambassadors. What is an ambassador? Someone called out of their own nation to represent it in a foreign land. We are called out from the human point of view, based on vengeance and expulsion, to know Christ in a totally new relationship based on forgiveness and reconciliation. Christ himself was expelled for us, was made an outcast, so that we might begin to reveal what a right relationship with God really means.

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Resources

1. James Alison, "'He opened up to them everything in the Scriptures concerning himself' (Lk 24, 27b): How can we recover Christological and Ecclesial habits of Catholic Bible Reading?" (online essay). Alison uses Luke 24:27 as a banner for a form of reading the New Testament more like Midrash on the Hebrew Scriptures, using The Parable of the Prodigal Son as his central example. It is highly resonant with contemporary approaches that take seriously the Jewishness of Jesus.

2. Gil Bailie, "The Vine and the Branches Discourse," Contagion, Vol. 4, Spring 1997, pp. 120-145. Bailie reflects on modern nihilism as a waning of our psychological substance. We are prodigal children who have refused to recognize the grace of our existence and have thus squandered our substance. We become like withered branches, cut-off from our source of substance, and we are thus fuel for the conflagration of violence in our time.

3. Gil Bailie, "The Gospel of Luke" (audio lecture series), tape #8.

4. James Alison, Raising Abel, p. 35. Alison references this group of parables with a nice summary:

The image of God which [Jesus] proposes to us in the parable of the Lost Sheep (Lk 15:3-7) is exactly the inverse of the god we've seen. According to this parable the mercy of God is shown not to the group, but to the lost member, to the outsider. I ask you to consider quite how extraordinary this change of perception with respect to who God is turns out to be: mercy has been changed from something which covers up violence to something which unmasks it completely. For God there are no 'outsiders', which means to say that any mechanism for the creation of 'outsiders' is automatically and simply a mechanism of human violence, and that's that.

What has occurred? We would suggest that the father is a failed scapegoat. In the beginning of the parable, both sons, one verbal, one silent, wish their father dead. But the father who takes this insult and grants this request is as humble and forgiving in the beginning of the parable as he is in the middle when he runs to the younger son and at the end when he addresses the elder brother. The brothers are not reconciled in their rejection of the father. A father who loves unconditionally and forgives each son in the same way can never be sacralized. BUT a father who is unconditionally gracious and forgiving can form the basis for a new family, by calling all to forgiveness.

Finally, some have noted that it appears that reconciliation occurs here without atonement and this has been a bother for some. Actually, it is the point, there is no need to ‘repay’ God; God neither demands it nor requires it. Atonement is about reconciliation not transaction.

The amazing thing about grace is that it bears the fruit of repentance, not the other way around. Repentance doesn't merit grace. Grace creates the possibility of starting over and living a life of repentance. The question (which I'm borrowing from N. T. Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays, p. 47) is, "What did the Prodigal Son do the next morning?" Did he begin to live a life of repentance in response to his father's free gift of life and sonship? And did the elder son finally realize that that which he thought his was also a free gift from the father?

6. Andrew Marr, "The Parable of Two Brothers and Their Father" (online article).

Reflections and Questions

1. How far has the younger son gone away from home? So far that he is dead. Now, that's an outsider! And, as such, he represents for his older brother a call to find out what living by grace is truly all about. At the beginning of the story, the two sons both live by the grace of Father's substance, but they apparently don't know it. They are both trapped in thinking that the substance of their living is somehow deserved. But they take different paths in living it out. The younger son takes his share and goes to the foreign land where he squanders it all. The older son stays home and conserves his share, no doubt thinking that he has done even more to deserve it. In becoming an outcast, the younger brother realizes that his very existence depends on the grace of his father. By the story's end, the older brother has yet to realize it.

2. An overarching theme that occurs to me is that of celebration of life. Luke 14-15 are all about parties of various sorts, and God's seeming open invitation to join the main party of creation. The only ones who seem to be left out are the self-righteous sorts who think they have something better to do. Typical of this sort is the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, who refuses to join the party. For a sermon on this theme, link to "The Moral of the Story: Life Is a Party . . . to Be Shared."

3. An important exegetical issue with this theme of celebrating life is the translation of ousia in 15:12, 13 (and nowhere else in the entire New Testament) and bios in 15:12, 30.  In the NRSV the four instances of these two words are all translated as "property." But ousia was already a technical term in Greek philosophy for Being; it also has the connotation of substance or existence. And bios is the standard word for life. So a more literal rendering of Luke 15:12-13 would be:

The younger of them said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of [your] existence that will belong to me.' So he divided his life between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his existence in dissolute living (zao).

There is also the father's response to the elder son: "all things mine are yours." This seems to erase property lines. We human beings think in terms of property, but is this parable inviting us to go beyond such thinking to more fundamental issues of "being" (ousia) and "life" (bios)? Is property-thinking a sign of our unfaith in a God who richly gives us being and life?

4. During Lent 2001 I led a five-week mid-week reflection on this parable. What a treasure! We centered on Henri Nouwen's reflections on this parable from his book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, and also a lenten devotional booklet by Nouwen called From Fear to Love: Lenten Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal Son (published by Creative Communications for the Parish). The greatest nugget of insight for me revolved around one of the devotions that centered around a eucharistic image that Girardian Gil Bailie frequently highlights as well. It is that of Jesus taking the blessing of his life from the Father, entering into the brokenness of our world, and giving himself away in love.

But it occurs to me that we might add one further step to the eucharistic actions of blessing, breaking, and giving away. At the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus commands one further step from his disciples: gather up the broken pieces. In the resurrection, Jesus' broken body is gathered together and raised to new life. The scattered disciples are re-gathered under a new and Holy Communion. In the parable of the prodigal son, the spent pieces of the son's now dead 'life' are gathered up into the embrace of father's life-giving arms. The father, despite having divided his life between the two sons at the beginning, continues to be a never-ending source of life.

So what does this parable show us about ourselves? We do not ordinarily live eucharistic lives. We live in fear of brokenness and death and so we live at least two different stratiegies of trying to avoid it. One is the prodigal son's strategy: take the blessing of life from the father and spend it on oneself. It is the "eat, drink, and be merry" approach to trying to avoid death. Unfortunately, it actually leads to death, instead of avoiding it, because it cuts itself off from the true source of life.

The older son has another strategy: take the blessing of life from the father for granted (the irony of his charge against the father that he has taken him for granted) and hoard it for oneself. This is a strategy with a much higher quotient of self-delusion and so is much harder to come to see as deadly. One can always point the finger (the Satanic, sacrificial finger of accusation) at those prodigal brothers and sisters who waste their lives and so obviously find themselves broken and dead. They avoid their own brokenness and death by pointing the finger at others. These are the children who are more likely to stay disconnected from their source of life, more likely to stand outside the party, filled with resentment.

Jesus comes as the perfect Son to live the eucharistic life we are all called to live: to know the blessing of life from the Father (baptism), to enter the brokenness of this world, and to give ourselves to others in love, trusting in God as a never-ending source of life. We are re-connected to that never-ending source of life, "eternal life," as we become disciples of the Son.

5. In 2004 I was an interim in a city parish of Kenosha. Every Thursday morning we had a Community Bible Study on one of Sunday's text. I regularly walked out of there with a wholly different way of reading the text, from the experience of the poor in our neighborhood, mostly People of Color. I went in with the common tactic of relating to one of the sons: a son who screws things up and finds himself lost and an envious older brother who always does the right thing. This was blown apart by their common experience of doing the right thing and still getting screwed by the rules of our human sense of justice. Perhaps they represent the servants or slaves in the story, namely, those who go along with the program but still are treated as outsiders. Mimetic theory understands that all human culture depends on a group of outsiders. Can the father's gracious love in this parable even finally erase the lines between children and servants? The younger son returns home because he will be treated better as a servant in his father's house than as a hired hand in a distant land. Can the servants in this father's house ever come to feel as adopted children?

The bottom line is that it is a good thing that God's justice seems to be completely outside our human justice. We base things on property and merit -- but only for the majority. There are always some for whom the justice based on property and merit is out of reach. It's Good News that God's justice is based on an ample supply of Being and Grace.