Lent 4C Prodigal Son and a Seat at the Table
St. Mark’s March 27, 2022, Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32
One time-honored method of studying scripture is practicing Ignatian Spirituality. Saint Ignatius calls us to place ourselves into the biblical scene with each character, get into their clothes, their minds, their skins./ When we first approach today’s familiar parable, we might try to be the father, the elder son, the younger son, or maybe even the mother who is not directly in the story. Instead, let’s get into the hearts and minds of the audience for the story, the Pharisees. This is not hard. Pharisees have so many qualities we admire. They are dutiful, responsible, faithful in worship, love scriptures, are faithful givers, caring for the poor and the hungry as God’s law commands. Sounds like good upstanding Episcopalians to me!
For the Pharisees, a meal is literally a religious experience. To eat together is to celebrate their faith with specific rules about what happens around the table. This is getting closer to home. Cleanliness is paramount: clean food, clean dishes, clean hands, clean hearts. A proper Jewish meal is a worship service where believers honor God by sanctifying the most ordinary details of their lives. Sounds something like a sacrament, one we practice here several times a week./
But Jesus seems to have a different view of the Jewish sacrament. He frequently offends people with his table manners at meals. He ignores the finger bowl by his plate. He eats whatever is put in front of him. He thinks nothing of sitting down to eat with filthy people whose lives proclaim their contempt for religion. The Pharisees see Jesus as someone who has lost all sense of what is right; who condones eating with sinners, condones eating with those who dishonor God. What’s more, Jesus seems to enjoy it, actually takes pleasure in their company!! Even more, at these meals, Jesus forgives people freely, without demanding proof of repentance first. Sounds like Jesus is soft on sin and low on church ritual./
One fine day, when Jesus sees some Pharisees frowning and muttering about how he ought not to be so accepting of sinners, Jesus tells three stories about how God sees sinners. The first story in the 15th chapter of Luke is about the good shepherd, who never gives up looking for the lost sheep, until he finds it, and how his joy is so great that he calls everybody to celebrate with him. You remember the second story about the woman who keeps looking for the lost coin until she finds it, and calls everyone she knows to rejoice that this single lost coin is found. And then there is today’s story of two lost children and a parent who never gives up on them.
In Jesus’ day, sinners fall into five basic categories: people who do unclean things for a living (pig farmers, tax collectors), those who do immoral things (liars, adulterers), people who do not keep the law up to religious standards, foreigners such as Samaritans, and lastly gentiles.
So let’s put together a sinners’ table at Boulevard Bread Company in the Heights. The table might include a quack doctor over-prescribing narcotics, a suspected murderer, a Russian oligarch, the young man who breaks into our cars in the early a.m., a Muslim extremist terrorist, a homeless young man who has just come from St. Francis House, an illegal Mexican chicken plucker who gets food from our Food Pantry, a teenage crack dealer, a well known alcoholic hitting bottom, a politician on the take, and an unmarried woman on welfare with five children by three different fathers. Did I miss anyone? Let’s put Jesus at the head of the table, asking the young man to please hand him a Greek Sampler,/ and offering the doctor half of his Caprese Panini.
If this offends you even a little, then we are ready for the next part of our story. What then happens is the appearance of a group of proper Episcopalians, clergy, and lay, mind you not from St. Mark’s but from another nearby Episcopal churches stopping at Boulevard for lunch on their way to a meeting at the diocesan office… or they could be Episcopalians from out of state. The proper Episcopalians sit down at a large table across from the sinners. They all have good teeth, and there is no dirt under their fingernails. When their food arrives at the table, they hold hands and pray before eating. (Maybe not) They are all charming people, but they can hardly eat their Pastrami and Smoked Turkey sandwiches without staring at the strange crowd at the table by the window with Jesus.
The chicken plucker is still wearing his white hairnet, and the alcoholic reeks of cheap wine. The addict cannot seem to find his mouth with his spoon. But none of this is the heartbreaker. The heartbreaker is Jesus, sitting there as if everything were just fine. Doesn’t he know what kind of message he sends? Who will believe he speaks for God if he keeps this kind of company?/
As I keep imagining this story, I see other meals, which many of you prepare for the homeless, veterans at St. Francis House, lunches at Stewpot or the library, or filling orders for groceries at our food pantry. I see you who not only handout, cook, or serve food, but also sit down and eat and talk with these men and women who are so different /and yet so similar to all of us.
All of these stories may seem different from the one about the man with two sons, but they really are not. “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them,” the Pharisees grumble, and everything that follows is Jesus’ reply.
Jesus in his preposterous love for all of us, connects God to the man with two sons, who also has difficulty getting his family to sit down around the same table. His sense of unworthiness so warps the younger son that he is prepared to eat his meals in the bunkhouse with the hired hands. His sense of entitlement so inflates the older son that he will not eat with anyone who has not earned a place at the table. Both sons suffer from the illusion that they can be in a relationship with their father/ but do not need to be in relationship with each other. So, what’s a father to do?
This loving compassionate father prepares a meal for both of them and lets them figure out what to do about each other. This is relatively easy for the younger son, who is so glad to be back at the table again that he is not going to cause trouble for his older brother or anyone else. It is more difficult for the older son, who isn’t even told when dinner is ready. When he shows up and finds out who has come slithering back home, he is convinced that he has been displaced. He only sees two chairs at the table, as if no one father can love equally two such different sons. This is zero-sum love. There is not enough love from the father for both sons. Despite his father’s assurance that everything he has is his, the story ends with the older son standing in the yard, while the father goes back inside to sit down with the sinner. Buechner likens the older son to what Mark Twain calls a good man in the worst sense of the word. He is a caricature of all that is joyless, petty, and self-serving about all of us./
Any way you look at it, this is a disturbing story about unending love, mercy and forgiveness. It is about hanging out with the wrong people. It is about throwing parties for losers and asking winners to pay the bill. It is about giving up the idea that we can love God and despise each other. We simply cannot, no matter how wronged any of us has been. The only way to work out our relationship with God is to work out our relationship with each other.//
As I mentioned, Jesus tells this story to a group of proper Episcopalians, who question his luncheon guests at Boulevard Bread. Jesus sees this respectable group eating,/ and knows them/ and compassionately loves them,/ so clean, so proper, so confused. He also wants to be in relationship with them. Jesus turns to the Episcopalians and says, “I cannot hear what you are mumbling about from across the restaurant. Come on over! Pull up some chairs.”/// “Come meet my friends. Dessert is on me!” /
And as far as we know, Jesus is still waiting to see how this story ends.
Joanna Seibert
Mary Harris Todd, “A House of Joy,” Lectionary Homiletics, March 2010, p. 51.
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Table Manners,” Christian Century, March 11, 1998. p. 257.
Frederick Buechner, “The Gospel as Comedy,” Telling The Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale, p. 68.