Our lavishly abundant God.
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 27, 2022
Joshua 5:9-12 • 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 • Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Have you ever wondered about the meaning of the word ‘prodigal’. It’s always been so firmly wed to the son in my mind, as in our prodigal son for today, that I haven’t spent much time examining it, thinking that it was describing a wastrel who had run through his inheritance in a number of questionable ways.
So, I just thought I’d pop off to check on its meaning, it not being a word that I use regularly. To my surprise, the Merriam-Webster dictionary, while including the definition of ‘profuse even wasteful expenditure’, also had ‘recklessly extravagant’ and even ‘lavishly abundant’.
And then I remembered how our Gospeller Luke sets up Jesus’ telling of the parable. It is in response to those pesky Pharisees who are on his case again.
Jesus responds with this parable. A teaching story about a younger son who makes ‘bad choices,’ as my four year old grandson would say, about what to do with his money, and his father’s response when the son returns, tail between his legs.
It is undoubtedly a story about prodigality: undeniably a tale about incomprehensible excess. My question is, whose?
The Pharisees are criticizing Jesus for sharing himself with the unworthies, the deplorables of society: the tax collectors and sinners. And in response, they get a story about God, because Jesus’ parables are always about God, right. A God who is lavishly generous and unquestionably forgiving, in this case to an errant younger son who has run through his inheritance and wants to come home and work as a hired hand.
Maybe you’ve never been limited in your understanding of the word ‘prodigal’, but I think I had it tangled it up with a similar sounding word: ‘profligate’. Prodigal coming from the Latin ‘prodigus’ and meaning lavish, and profligate again from the Latin ‘profligere’ and meaning overthrown with the added implication of dissolution.
I at least need to rehabilitate the word ‘prodigal’. To consider that, while we might not understand the seemingly reckless extravagance of a behavior, it might not be necessarily bad.
What would you think about the idea that perhaps this parable would be better described as the ‘Prodigal Father’?
There is so much about God that we simply can’t understand. God’s ways are not our ways as we hear in this familiar passage from Isaiah 55,
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts
Isaiah 55:8-9
In this parable about prodigality, the father’s behavior throughout is extraordinary from our human perspective. He unquestioningly gives his younger son his inheritance, with seemingly no wise words on how to invest it, no words of warning about what will happen if he spends it carelessly: he just hands it over.
While we get a general sense of what the son got up to as he ran through his inheritance, we can only imagine how it must have been like for the father. How many of us have grieved the absence of a loved one? How many of us have gone through the experience of a child going off to college or moving away?
I know that when my daughter went away to college, I was thrilled for her. I was excited for how she would grow, all she would learn and experience, and the adventures she would have. But I was a mess. I felt that a part of me had died. As indeed it had, the mother of a child living at home had to grow into something new.
Did I yearn for her phone calls? Oh yes. Did I try so very hard not to get in her way by calling her too often? Oh yes.
We know almost nothing about the father in our parable, and yet we know he must have hoped for his son’s return, and has looked down the road every day, just in case he can spot him. Then one day,
while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.
There are no words of recrimination, just compassion, love and joy. Just as with the one sheep returning to the fold, there is rejoicing in heaven, and there is a lavishly generous response on earth.
The elder son behaves in a more typically human way. He is resentful. And how easy it is for us to identify with his feelings of being unfairly taken for granted, with not even been given a goat to celebrate with his friends. What about him? He’s been doing everything right.
And yet, the God who is in us and with us, is never going to comply with human expectations. This God does not love like we do. This God does not give like we do. This God will never be inattentive. This God will never be petty or resentful.
Instead, our God is always lavishly abundant, even if we don’t recognize it. Always waiting for us to come home, yearning for us to turn into the open arms of the tender embrace that is always, and is always be waiting for us.
There is that bumper sticker: “Oh the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God.” How many of us have had a moment of shock on reading that. What sort of indiscriminating, careless sort being is this God? Who would be like that?
Of course, the answer that we find again and again in scripture and indeed our own experience, is that this is our own incomprehensibly, shocking prodigal God who is always yearning for us to come home.
And so we pray:
Undignified God, spirit of dangerous feasts, inviting the unclean to your table: find us in the far country of hopelessness and greed; free us from the prison of resentment and envy and bring us back to life; through Jesus Christ, the friend of sinners, Amen.