Lent 4
March 18, 2007

A Boy, Another Boy, a Dad and a Pig
by Anne Le Bas

A couple of weeks ago the Sunday School were working on the famous story
we’ve heard in today’s Gospel reading. When they came back to join the rest
of us they brought up the drawings they had made of the different parts of
the story. I thought it would be fun to see whether the congregation, who
couldn’t see the pictures clearly, could guess what the story was. “What is
the story about,” I asked, “who is in it?”
“A boy”,  one of them answered.
“And who else?”
“Another boy”, they added helpfully.
“And?” I asked.
“A dad”
“And anything else?”
“A pig!” they said triumphantly.
 And that was it.
A boy, another boy, a dad and a pig.

It was an economical version of the tale, but you couldn’t fault it for
accuracy, and actually they probably told us most of what we needed to know
to guess how this story would unfold.

A story about a boy and another boy? It is bound to end up in a squabble.
Siblings, whatever their gender, seem to have no trouble finding something
to fall out about. It happens in the best regulated families. They squabble
because they are alike. They squabble because they are different. They
squabble for no reason at all sometimes – it is just built in. They may be
the best of friends one minute, thick as thieves, but the next moment they
are rolling on the floor apparently trying to murder each other.

And then there is the dad. Who’d be a dad? Who’d be a mum either, come to
that?  It would be really useful if antenatal classes included training for
the Secretary Generalship of the United Nations, because finding solutions
to sibling squabbles is often just as difficult. Usually the best you can
hope for is that they will end up united against you, instead of fighting
each other. You love them both, so why can’t they love each other?

And the pig? Well that is a sure sign that someone somewhere in this story
is going to end up in a mess.

A boy, another boy, a dad and a pig. On the face of it a simple story. A
story about families just like our own, people just like us.
But its simplicity is a bit deceptive, because actually it is a story which
changes, grows and deepens the more you look at it. It is a story with a
lot of room in it – room for us to identify with it and learn from it.

We can take it, for example, on an individual level, identifying ourselves
with its characters and seeing echoes of our personal or family lives in
it. Some people will feel like the younger son, the prodigal. Perhaps
they’ve taken a wrong turn in their lives, done things they regret, and
they have needed to discover that there can be forgiveness and a new start.
They’ve been overjoyed to find that God’s love for them is not grudging or
measured, but overflowing, like the love of this father for his repentant
son.

Others might see themselves in the older son. The sensible one. The
responsible one. That’s the story of their lives. Instead of squandering
their inheritance on loose living, they have squandered it on tight living.
They have worked hard to do what they think is right, but only because they
fear that God wouldn’t love them otherwise – for who they are rather than
for what they do.

There may be some too, who identify with the father. They are waiting and
hoping for a child to come home, for something to change.

As well as our personal circumstances this story can also help us to
reflect on wider issues, though. The scribes and the Pharisees to whom
Jesus first told this story believed that they were God’s faithful
servants. They were the older brother. They disapproved of those who didn’t
live according to the law, who were destined for destruction, not deserving
God’s love. Jesus challenges their judgementalism. Not only are they
cutting others off from God’s love, they aren’t really living in its
fullness themselves either. The tragedy is that God loves them more than
they will ever realise, but they so pre-occupied in anxiously policing what
they think are the boundaries of his kingdom that they can’t see it.

This judgementalism is still rife, of course – not just in religious groups
but in any groups. Groups tend to want to organise themselves – to sort out
the insiders from the outsiders, to regulate their membership, to set
conditions for joining. Once we see ourselves as the guardians of an
inheritance, as this older brother does, it is very hard for us to relax
about letting others share in it – what if they don’t take the same care we
do? We’ve put in the hard labour, they’ve just shown up at the last minute.

This sort of resentment can be expressed towards newcomers to church who
have the effrontery to express ideas about how we might do things
differently, or towards people whose lifestyles don’t fit our mould of
acceptability, or towards people who only come to church now and then for
weddings and baptisms – they are just using us, we think! But in God’s
eyes, this story says, they are just as precious. He rejoices because they
are there, seeing what IS rather than what we think ought to be.

So we can look at this story from a personal angle, or from a wider angle,
seeing its challenge to our judgementalism and exclusivity.

But there is one more facet to this story, which seems to me to be
particularly intriguing and important as we approach Holy Week and Easter.
As I have said, we can identify with it as individuals, or as groups –
looking for ourselves in it. But where is Jesus in it?

Where is Jesus in this story? To be honest it had never really occurred to
me to look for him in it– there was quite enough going on without worrying
about that. But then I spotted something that seemed too much of a
coincidence to be accidental, and I realized that he was there actually. He
has stepped inside this story, just as we do. It was the little phrase that
the father uses of his prodigal son when he returns which gives the game
away. He uses it twice in fact. Once to the servants as he gives his
instructions for the feast they are to prepare, and once to the older
brother. “This son of mine was dead and is alive again”. “This brother of
yours was dead and has come to life.”  Suddenly a bell started ringing in
my head. Who else is dead and comes to life in the Gospel? It is Jesus
himself. I can’t believe this is just an accidental turn of phrase. Luke is
too careful a writer for that.

And when you look at the preface to the story you see another parallel.
What is it that the Pharisees are complaining about? That Jesus eats with
sinners. Just like the prodigal in fact, who has “devoured his father’s
property with prostitutes.” Now, I’m not suggesting that this means that
Jesus IS the prodigal or that he behaved in a dissolute manner. What I
think he is doing here is playing into the worst suspicions of the
religious authorities ABOUT him. He wasn’t a sinner in reality, but these
people who challenged him thought he was. And they disapproved of him
thoroughly for it. He associated with sinners – tax-collectors,
prostitutes, the lowest of the low – even eating with them, which was
strictly forbidden. By doing that he made himself as unclean as they were.

It wasn’t just this that offended them, though. They could see that he was
a brilliant teacher, someone who knew the scriptures, someone to whom
others looked for teaching. He seemed to have received a great inheritance
from God. But instead of using his power and wisdom to reinforce the status
quo, he is squandering his inheritance on people who don’t deserve it. He
might as well go and feed pigs – unclean animals that make unclean any who
associate with them. What a waste! What a disgrace!

Just as those “older brother” Pharisees would have thought that this story
ought to end with the prodigal dying forgotten in that filthy pig sty, so
they believe that Jesus’ story should and will end with his destruction –
crucified on the midden of Calvary with outcast unclean criminals for
company. It is only just, only fair that it should be so.

But it was not so. What Luke tells us is that instead of disappearing
without a trace, the filthy, despised son in fact gets a new robe – the
best one – a ring on his finger, sandals for his feet, and a feast to
welcome him home. And this is how it was for Jesus also. The tomb couldn’t
hold him. The disgrace of the cross was not the last word.

St. Paul writes to the Corinthians that God “made Christ to be sin who knew
no sin”. We think of him, with 2000 years of hindsight as a man in whom
everyone must really have seen goodness, but in fact, to those who attacked
him he was as wicked as this prodigal – taking the riches of faith and
casting them down before those who had forfeited their right to them. His
death on a cross was assumed by many to be a sign of his disgrace and of
God’s rejection. But just like the prodigal in the story, Christ, who was
dead, returned to life again. He had gone out into a distant land too–
beyond the pale of respectable society. There he got alongside the most
lost and sinful. In the eyes of those who held the power, by doing this he
was lost, a sinner, also. And having got alongside them, he stayed
alongside them in the messes they endured, sharing and suffering that mess
with them, just as he is beside those today who sit in the muck of life.
And he is beside them still when they make the long trek back home, knowing
full well that they will be greeted joyfully by their Father who loves them
with a love which is beyond measure and beyond reason, and who will run
down the road to meet them with undignified and unconstrained delight.

It is a simple story. A story of a boy, another boy, a dad and a pig – but
in it lies the whole great truth of salvation, the story of the love of
Christ who became sin for us, so that we could come home with him and find
our Father’s welcome. Amen.

(Comments to Anne at annelebas@DSL.PIPEX.COM.)