(Lamentations 3:19-33; Matthew 20:1-16)

The kingdom of heaven is like this.  There was a man who owned a vine­yard.  One year, as the harvest was beginning, he decided to go himself to hire temporary workers rather than giving that job to his steward.  He rose early and went at 6am to the corner of the village market where the unemployed gathered, looking for work as day laborers.  He chose some, hired them for the standard wage, and sent them to work in his vineyard.

A few hours later, he went back to see how the rest were faring, and found many men still there.  Some, who were beginning to lose heart, were sitting on the ground, but there were many others who were still standing, eager and hopeful and ready to put themselves forward if an opportunity came.  The owner didn’t really need more men, but he hired several more anyway, sending them off to his vineyard with the promise that he would treat them fairly.  By mid-day, he figured the rest had either gotten jobs or gone home, but he decided to check on them anyway; when he found a crowd of men still waiting, out of compassion, he sent a few more out to the vineyard with the assurance that he would do right by them.  He did the same again three hours later, perhaps to honor the determination of those who were still there.

An hour before sundown, the master went back to the market, thinking surely all the men would be gone; it was really quite unusual that any had remained there past noon.  Amazingly, he found a few diehards, depressed and humiliated but just not willing to give up.  Surprised, the owner asks, “Why are you still standing here?”  They respond, “We want to work!  As long as there’s light to see, we won’t leave unless someone hires us.”  In his compassion, he tells them, “You go work in my vineyard too.”  He promises them nothing, and they can’t hope for much, but it’s the best they have, and so they go.

When night falls, the owner calls his steward—who’s been wondering what the master’s been on about all day, why he keeps going to the market and sending back extra workers—and the master says, “Call the men and pay them the wage.”  The steward is taken aback by this; he says, “Master, you want to pay them all the full wage?  They didn’t all—”  The master says, “Yes, I know.  Isn’t it my money?  Just do it.”

The steward starts to walk away, muttering under his breath, “OK, we’ll start with the guys who’ve been here all day, and work our way down the list—”  The master calls him back and says, “No.  Begin with the last ones hired, and work up the list.”  The steward can’t believe his ears.  “Master, you know what’ll happen if you do it that way—”  The master says, “Yes, I do.”  “They’re going to be pretty angry—”  “I imagine some of them will.”  “But—”  “Not another word.  You heard what I said.  Go do it.”

The first group is called, and everyone is stunned into silence when those who worked just one hour are given a full day’s wage.  That group, of course, goes off rejoicing; those first hired, meanwhile, start calculating how much extra they’re likely to get.  But then the next group is called, and they too are given a full day’s wage, and so is the next, and the tension in the first group begins to rise.  When those who worked nine hours also receive one denarius each, the tension reaches the boiling point.  It explodes into anger when those who worked the whole day are called forward and paid—exactly what they were promised, exactly what they agreed to.

Now, those workers have every reason to keep their mouths shut.  They were paid on time and in full, so they haven’t really been cheated.  More than that, they’ve been hoping for more than just one day’s work—hoping the master would keep them on for a second day, or all the way through the harvest, or maybe even longer; if they make him mad, all hope of that is gone.  But they feel cheated, and some of them are too angry to keep quiet.  One man bursts out, voicing their common complaint:  “It isn’t fair!  We worked all day, we did all the hard work, we deserve more than them!  You’ve made them equal to us—how dare you!”  Are they angry because they were treated unjustly?  No:  they’re angry because someone else was shown grace.

The master reads them the riot act.  “Mister,” he says, “I promised you a just wage, and that’s what I paid you.  That’s what you earned, and it’s all you earned—take your money and get out.  You’re free to do what you like with it, and I’m free to do what I like with my money.  If I chose to use it to pay these other men a living wage so that they can feed their families, too, what gives you the right to complain?”

How do the angry workers respond?  We don’t know—the story stops.  Once again, the final response is left in our lap.  It’s interesting that the master doesn’t respond gently and graciously, as the father does in Luke 15 or Abraham initially does to the rich man.  I’m not sure why that is, but I wonder if it might be a matter of context:  this is right on the verge of the Triumphal Entry, in the last days before the crucifixion.  Time is shorter here, things are more urgent, and the division within Israel is continuing to widen and harden.  There comes a point when grace ends, not because God stops being God but because time simply runs out; here in Matthew 20, that point is perilously close for Jesus’ opponents.  They have rejected gracious words; if they don’t hear the hard words, then soon there will be no more words for them at all.

That said, I suspect most of us would have to admit we understand the anger of those full-day workers.  I know I’ve been there.  Some of you have heard this story before, but at the church I served in Colorado, there were some deep divisions in the community and the congregation, and thus unfortunately in the Session.  There were several other issues that compounded the problem in the Session, and at one point I was absolutely furious with a couple of the elders.  I was stalking back and forth in the sanctuary—as usual, nobody else was around—praying at the top of my lungs, just venting at God, when I heard his voice in the back of my mind:  “Show them grace.”  Well, I knew that was God because it absolutely wasn’t me, and I didn’t want to hear it; I snapped back, “They don’t deserve it.”  He replied, “I know.  That’s why it’s called grace.”

I don’t mind telling you, that put me flat on the floor.  It has continued to resonate with me for a number of reasons, and not least for the lesson that sometimes God’s grace is infuriating.  When is that?  It’s when I start to let myself believe, in my natural pride, that I actually do deserve God’s favor—that for me it isn’t really grace, at least not to the same degree.  “They don’t deserve it”—and I do?  Really?  Maybe I’m closer to deserving it than that person out there that I don’t like very much, but maybe an amoeba’s bigger than a diatom, too—I still can’t see either one without a microscope.

Grace infuriates us because we want to believe we earn the good things we want.  We want to believe that we don’t need grace, that we deserve success and the satisfaction of our desires, and that justice is on our side.  The workers confused justice and grace; they objected to the grace given to others, demanding grace for themselves and calling it justice.  They got justice, not according to their own self-righteous perspective, but by the master’s definition:  he gave them no less than they had earned, but not one bit more.  They got one day’s pay and expulsion from his presence, with no hope of any future employment, or any future relationship.  Whenever we’re tempted to demand justice, we do well to remember the proverb:  “Be careful what you wish for—you just might get it.”

(1 Samuel 26:5-12; Luke 16:19-31)

In the last two parables we’ve read, we’ve seen the rich man of the village, the great landowner, in the story as a figure for God—merciful, generous, loving, someone who uses his wealth to give life to the community.  This morning, we have the polar op­posite.  The thumbnail sketch of this man in verse 19 is brilliant:  he’s ostentatious, self-indulgent, indifferent to people, and indifferent to God.

To start with, every day, he wears purple.  As you may know, purple dye was obscenely expensive, so only the wealthy could afford even one piece of purple clothing; and of course, even today, when we have a particularly expensive piece of clothing, we’re very careful to keep it clean—how much more then, when they didn’t have washing machines or detergents.  This guy is so rich, he has enough purple clothes to wear them every day of the week; he’s so rich, he has enough of them that he can afford to let them get dirty.  And just to put the point on it, that bit about fine linen?  That means, not only did he wear the most expensive clothes, he also wore the most expensive underwear.

Then too, he feasted every day, which means two things.  First, he didn’t even observe the Sabbath, let alone the Jewish fast days.  Second, he didn’t let his servants do so, either.  All he cared about was indulging his own appetites, with no regard for God and no concern for anyone else.  His servants existed to serve him, nothing more.  He should be ashamed by his flagrant selfishness, but he isn’t—he flaunts it.

Verses 20-21 give us an even more loaded picture.  “At his gate”—this guy’s so rich, he doesn’t just have a house, he has land in the village with a wall around it—“at his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus.”  First thing:  was laid.  By whom?  By the community.  Remember this:  the community is always present in Jesus’ stories—if not right onstage, then just offstage.  Almost everything happened in public in that culture, and they’re always a part of the events.  They laid Lazarus at the rich man’s gate because they loved him, but they didn’t have the resources to help him.  The rich man did—it was his responsibility.  But he didn’t care, so he did nothing.

Second, this is the only character in all of Jesus’ parables who’s given a name, so his name must be important.  “Lazarus” is the Greek form of the Aramaic name El‘azar, “the one whom God helps.”  He’s so sick he cannot stand, and so poor he has to beg; he can’t walk, so his family and friends carry him to the gate each morning and then back to wherever he sleeps at night.  This is the one whom God helps?

He lies there every day as the rich man’s guests come for the feast, listening to them eat and drink and talk, watching them all go by again as they leave.  He’s desperately hungry, but they give him nothing.  There’s food left over each day, and of course, no refrigerators, so the rich man could easily feed Lazarus with no effort at all; instead, he throws the food to the dogs.  Dogs were despised in Israel, barely a step above pigs; they didn’t have pet dogs, just half-wild guard dogs.  The rich man would rather feed them from his table than Lazarus.

The final irony is in the last line of verse 21.  We read that the dogs licked his sores and it sounds painful and disgusting, when it’s actually a blessing.  Centuries before Christ, the ancient world discovered that wounds licked by dogs healed more quickly.  For one thing, their rough tongues cleaned away the dead skin, dirt, and pus; not only did that promote healing, it also made the sores less likely to attract flies.  More than that, saliva contains natural antibiotics, so the dogs were actually disease fighters.  The rich man actively refuses to give the beggar anything, but the despised, violent, unclean guard dogs care for him, and do what they can to help.

In time, of course, both die.  Now Lazarus is at a feast, reclining at the table on Abraham’s right side, in the position of the honored guest, and the rich man is in torment.  As you might guess, he handles this situation very differently than Lazarus did.  For the purposes of the story, he can see into heaven, and he calls out, “My father Abraham!”  Family is everything in the Near East and Middle East; when you’re in need, you can go to the patriarch of the family and throw yourself on his mercy, and he’s honor-bound to help.  The rich man is making a racial appeal as a Jew to Abraham as his father, and on that basis, he demands services.

Note the sheer gall of the man.  He recognizes Lazarus, and he demands that Abraham send Lazarus over to ease his suffering.  He doesn’t even ask Lazarus!  In life, he thought he was important and the beggar at the gate was nobody, so he was indifferent to the beggar’s torment.  Now he’s in Hell and that beggar is Abraham’s honored guest, and he still thinks he’s the one who matters, not Lazarus.

The unrepentant arrogance of this rich man is infuriating, and Lazarus would have been justified to respond with a torrent of purely righteous rage; but he is silent.  Like David before the sleeping Saul, he has the chance to get his own back against one who caused him pain for no reason, but refuses to strike; like God in his patience with us, as the Lord holds back his judgment to give us opportunity to repent, Lazarus sets his anger aside.  In so doing, he refuses to allow the evil done to him to drive him to respond in kind; he chooses to act differently, and to create his own meaning from the situation.

In his place, Abraham responds—and his response is also gracious and kind, you will note, but unyielding:  this is justice.  Interestingly, as Kenneth Bailey points out, Abraham doesn’t say that Lazarus is now healed or well fed, but that now Lazarus is comforted.  His greatest pain wasn’t physical but emotional and spiritual, from the way he was treated by the rich man.  God gave the rich man good things; out of them he passed on only evil to the beggar at his gate.  Now things have been set right.

Abraham continues:  not only is this justice, but changing it is impossible.  What the rich man asks can’t be done, even by those who want to.  But why would Abraham add that last?  Who could possibly want to?  That’s such a jolt, it has to mean somebody does—and as Dr. Bailey notes, there’s only one other person on stage:  Lazarus.  It appears that not only is Lazarus not seething with rage at the rich man, he has compassion on him and is volunteering to go!

If anyone thought this exchange would make a dent in the rich man’s arrogance, they were wrong.  As far as he’s concerned, Lazarus exists to serve him, one way or another, and so he says, “Well, if he can’t wait on me, make him my messenger boy.  Send him to my brothers with a warning.”  Again, Lazarus is silent, and again Abraham refuses.  Moses gave the rich man and his brothers alike the law of God, so they know what God requires; the prophets showed them God’s anger at unrighteousness, and called them to repentance.  If they care to listen, they don’t need anything else, and if they won’t listen, nothing else will get through to them.

Does that shut this man up?  No—he actually has the nerve to contradict Abraham, even though his own actions prove Abraham right.  Why would Lazarus coming back from the dead with a warning make the rich man’s brothers repent?  He himself is in Hell, and he hasn’t repented!  Abraham tersely cuts him off:  if they aren’t willing to listen, they aren’t willing to listen.  If they can ignore Moses and the prophets, they’ll find a way to ignore someone who rises from the dead.  On that note, the story ends.

The problem with the rich man is that he had an instrumental view of the value of human life.  You may not know what I mean by that, so let me explain.  He valued other people solely for what they could do for him—for their usefulness.  He thought he mattered more than anyone else because he was richer than anyone else.  Those who didn’t have the money to do for themselves, and didn’t do anything for him, had no worth at all in his eyes.  We can see that in his treatment of Lazarus—both in life and in death.

This is a common spiritual disease in modern Western society—that is, the last 250 years or so.  In Buck v. Bell in 1927, the Supreme Court upheld the forcible sterilization of a young woman on the grounds that “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . .  Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  Similar arguments were made in favor of legalized abortion—and continue to be made.  The British National Health Service rations care based on the economic value of the patient—they only approve expensive procedures if they figure you’re a good investment—and there are those in the White House who think America should do the same.  The worth of a life is calculated in dollar signs.

God does not approve.  The gospel does not let us look at other people that way.  You have never met a person whom Jesus Christ considered not worth dying for; if we treat anyone as any less, we’re selling him short.  The meaning of our lives is not—ever—in our possessions, our abilities, or anything the world can make of us, because none of those things are really ours at all; they belong to God, and we’re just stewards.  The only thing that’s truly ours to keep from this life is whatever we gain of the truth of God.  “Let not the wise boast in their wisdom, let not the strong boast in their strength, let not the rich boast in their riches, but if anyone wants to boast, let them boast in this:  that they understand and know me,” declares the Lord.  Let’s pray.

(Micah 7:18-20; Luke 16:1-8)

This parable has given the church fits for centuries.  Jesus seems to be holding up this servant as a role model precisely because of his dishonesty, and telling his disciples, “You go and be just as dishonest”—and that doesn’t fit with the rest of his teaching, or with his character.  Part of our problem is that we aren’t familiar with the culture in which Jesus was teaching; I’ve been leaning on the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey quite a lot this year, and especially for the work he’s done on the parables of Jesus, but I’m indebted to him above all for making sense of this one.  Beyond our cross-cultural issues, however, part of our problem here is the chapter break.

That might sound odd to you, but if you’ve been around long enough to hear me go off on the headings they stick in our Bibles, maybe it doesn’t.  The thing is, the chapter and verse numbers aren’t original to the text, but were added quite some time later.  Imagine if this wasn’t Luke 16:1-8 but Luke 15:33-40—mentally, where would you connect it?  To the parable right before it.  You’d read that great story of the Father’s mercy, and you’d go right into this one and understand it as a continuation of the same theme.  The chapter break tells us “This is something new,” however, so instead of attaching it to the parable of the two lost sons, we naturally connect it to the poem on money that follows it, and we read this as a parable about money and how we ought to use it.  It isn’t.  Jesus uses money here to make a point about something else entirely.

He gives this story a common setting:  a great landowner hired an estate manager to take care of renting out the land.  Some of the tenants would farm the land or tend the trees themselves; others were rich enough to rent larger pieces and hire people to do the work.  Each one paid a fixed amount of their yield as rent—and note that:  a fixed amount, not a percentage.  They owed the same regardless of how good the year was.  The manager was paid a salary by the master, and also collected a fee from each renter as they signed their contract; that fee was not reflected in the contract, which stated only what the tenant owed to the master.

In some way, this manager was abusing his position and stealing from his master; the master was liked and respected in the community, so someone came and told him about it.  The master, of course, went through the roof, summoning his servant and demanding, “What’s this I hear about you?”  The servant doesn’t answer; the master has him dead to rights.  Since he doesn’t know how much the master knows, if he says anything, all he can do is make things worse.  His silence is its own confession, of course, so the master continues, “Turn in the books—you’re fired!”

Now, there are a couple key points to note.  First, the master is showing him great mercy here.  Under Jewish law, he could have had his servant hauled off that instant and thrown in jail until he could repay or work off his crime, but he didn’t; he left the steward at liberty.  Second, Jesus’ listeners would have expected the steward to loudly and firmly protest his innocence.  There were manytime-honored defenses he could have used, and many people to whom he could have tried to shift the blame, including the master himself.  That would have been the classic response.  Amazingly, however, he just turns and leaves the room, affirming by his silence his guilt and the justice of his punishment.

The situation is hopeless and he knows it, so he doesn’t waste his breath trying to get his job back.  Instead, he puts all his energy into trying to find himself a new one.  He considers manual labor, which would have been a tremendous comedown for an educated man in a white-collar job, but rejects that because he isn’t strong enough for the work.  He also looks at the possibility of begging for a living—it was considered a legitimate occupation, though extremely low-status—and rejects it on the grounds that he doesn’t want the shame that would come with it.  But having decided against both these options, what others does he have?  He’s been fired as a scoundrel, so who would hire him?

He’s clearly a gambling man; his master has already showed him great mercy, and he decides to stake everything on that mercy.  He’s been told to turn in the books, but no one else knows he’s been fired, and by leaving his master without a fight, he’s avoided having any sort of guard on him.  He has the freedom to act, and he uses it.  If his plan fails, he’ll be thrown in prison, but that might happen anyway.  If it works, he’ll be a hero in the community.  Sure, the whole story will come out, but someone will hire him anyway, out of gratitude for his actions and respect for his ability—they’ll just keep a very close eye on him, is all.

He has to act quickly, as he can’t delay long to turn in the books.  Before he does so, he calls in the tenants, one by one.  Because no one else knows yet that he’s been fired, the lower servants obey his orders, and the tenants answer his summons; they would only have come because they believed the steward had a message for them from their landlord.  He treats them rudely, for he’s in too much of a hurry for the usual courtesies:  at any minute, the master might discover his plan, and all would be lost.  The tenants would never cooperate with him if they knew he was cheating the master, for that would end their relationship with their landlord—not only financially, but socially as well.  That would cause them serious damage in the community, and could not be risked.

As it happens, however, the manager is not discovered, and his plan goes off without a hitch.  He asks each tenant, “How much do you owe my master?”—not because he doesn’t know, he has the contract right in front of him, but just to bring the full force of their debt home to them.  He reduces their debts by about the same monetary value in each case, about 500 denarii—some twenty months’ wages for an ordinary laborer—letting them believe he talked his boss into making the reduction.  No point in doing this if he doesn’t get the credit, after all.  He has them make the changes in their own handwriting, so it’s clear they’ve signed off on the deal, and away they go, rejoicing.

That done, he takes his newly-changed account books and turns them in to his master.  The master looks at them and knows immediately what his former employee has done.  He can be quite sure that as a result, the whole village is throwing a party in his honor.  His tenants think he’s the most noble and generous man who has ever lived, for he has given them an unprecedented and almost unfathomable gift.  Legally, he has every right to cancel the unauthorized reductions—but if he does that, their joy will turn to rage, and he will be cursed by the whole community for his stinginess.  It isn’t rational, but it’s human.  Otherwise, all he can do is keep his mouth shut, accept the praise of the community, allow the manager to do the same, and act like he meant it all to happen.

This was the servant’s calculation:  that faced with such a choice, his master would choose to keep quiet.  After all, he was a generous man (even if he hadn’t meant to be quite that generous), and generosity was one of the qualities expected of the rich and powerful.  He was also a merciful man, as he had already shown by not jailing his errant manager.  And so he reflects for a moment, turns to his former employee, and says quietly, “You’re a shrewd man.”  You’ll note that’s all he praises the manager for, certainly not for his morals; that’s the point of Jesus’ comment which follows.

The manager is an example for us not in his dishonesty but in the fact that he was wise enough to know where his salvation lay.  In a way, his actions are a compliment to the master—backhanded, to be sure, but no less sincere for all that; the manager knew his master to be generous and merciful, to the point that he was willing to stake his entire future on it.  He won.  Out of his generosity and mercy, the master chose to pay the full price for his former employee’s salvation.

The principle here is a standard one in rabbinical teaching, commonly referenced as “from the light to the heavy,” which roughly means, “how much more.”  In other words, if this crooked manager got out of his crisis by relying on his master’s mercy, how much more will God help you in yours if you will only trust his mercy?  And all humanity is in crisis.  God—the master—is a God of judgment, but also of mercy.  We are the steward who has misused what was put in our trust.  Excuses are worthless.  All we can do is stake everything on the unfailing mercy of God, trusting that he will pay the price for our salvation; and indeed, he has already done so.

For those who haven’t thrown themselves on the mercy of God, the application is obvious.  Those of us who have might think this is irrelevant to us, but it isn’t; this isn’t just a one-time thing, and then we go back to business as usual.  Watching us sometimes, you’d think we were saved by mercy and then spent the rest of our lives earning it, but that isn’t the gospel.  As we were saved, so we live—all of life, at every point and every moment, wholly dependent on the mercy and grace of God.

(Psalm 133; Luke 15:11-32)

I said during the previous series that there were two groups of people following Jesus—the disciples, who were focused on Jesus, and the crowds, who were focused on what they could get from Jesus.  There were two groups within the crowds, as well.  One was the religious folk.  There were several different factions—the Pharisees, the teachers of the law, the Sadducees, who were the priestly party, and so on—and they disagreed about a great many things, but not about Jesus:  they hated him.  There were exceptions to that, but not many.  They followed him to gather evidence against him.

On the other side, you had the “people of the land”—which was actually what the Pharisees called everyone who wasn’t as serious about keeping the Law as they were.  What they meant by it was “scum of the earth.”  This included the professional sinners, of course—the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and the like—but it also included all the ordinary folk.  You might think of them as your typical pew-sitters.  They did the required stuff, but otherwise, they weren’t all that focused on the things of God, so the serious religious types lumped them all together with the rest of the sinners.

As Jesus looked out, he saw both groups.  One was lost and knew it, or at least had been told so on many occasions; the other was equally lost, but thought itself the very model of godly living.  To both, he told a story about a man who had two sons.

The story begins as the younger son says, “Dad, divide the property and give me what’s coming to me.”  That translates as, “I wish you were dead so that I could take my inheritance.  I would rather have the money than you—give me what’s mine and let me go.”  At this point, two things would be expected, in that culture.  The father would be within his rights to beat his son within an inch of his life and cast him out of the house for such an insult; the elder brother has the responsibility to try to patch things up and reconcile his father and his younger brother.  Neither happens.  The older son waits in silence for judgment to fall on his brother; the younger son is determined to go, no matter what, and the older one wants him gone.  The father, grieved and hurt by both of them, withholds judgment and offers grace.

The scandal this caused in the village only got worse for the way the younger brother used the gift his father gave him.  His inheritance wasn’t money or jewels but a portion of the family land, and he didn’t want to stay there, he wanted out; so he sold it off as quickly as he could, just to be on his way.  Since that land supported the whole family, he left all of them quite a bit poorer.  In response, the elders of the town went down to the property and performed the qetsatsah, formally casting him out of the commu­nity.  If he were able to come back with enough money to re-purchase the land and restore it to his family, he could resume his place; otherwise, he was banished—forever.

The younger son must have known that was coming.  Cut off from his name, his family, his community, and even his nation, he headed off to a far land.  The money in his pocket gave him a feeling of security, and so he lived expensively––a penthouse suite, eating at the finest restaurants, dating rich women.  Somehow, though, his business ventures never quite turned out.  He ran through his money, and his associates abandoned him.  He managed to scrape by, until drought brought economic collapse; when the famine hit in earnest, he was out of a job and out on the street.

In desperation, he went to one of the leading men of the city, someone he had wined and dined in the good times, begging for work.  In an effort to get rid of him, this man offered him a job tending the pigs—surely no Jew would accept such a job.  It was an insult, but to his surprise, the young Jew took it, and went out to live with the pigs.

Sitting there in the mud, his stomach aching with hunger, the younger son wised up and faced the facts: he’d made a complete mess of things, and if he stayed there, he would starve.  “The craftsmen who work for my father feed themselves and have money left over, and here I am dying of hunger!  What’s the sense in that?” he asked himself.  “I know what I have to do.  I’ll go back to my father and say, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and you, and right now I’m not worthy to be called your son.  Let me be trained as a craftsman—I’ll be able to support myself and save up money, and eventually I’ll be able to buy back the land I sold.’  It will take some doing, but I bet I can talk him into it.”

At this point, Jesus’ hearers were listening raptly—especially the religious leaders.  Feeding pigs!  The ultimate degradation for a Jew.  This man betrayed his father, and he wound up an exile feeding pigs!  What a perfect picture of the consequences of sin!  Even they had never described it so well.  To earn back his father’s favor, he would have to return to his hometown in utter humiliation and take terrible abuse from the village.  Then, perhaps the father would lock the door on his son and make him grovel for a while; perhaps he would never open the door at all.  It would serve the son right.

But the door wasn’t locked.  The father was on his front porch, sitting on the hill in the middle of town, watching the road.  If his son ever came back, he must be protected from the hostility of the town; if he had to fight past all the people who hated him for what he had done, he might never make it home.  When the father saw his son in the distance, he took off running, leaving his neighbors in shock.  Adults never ran; that was for children, and the more important a man was, the slower he walked.  Running meant lifting your robes and exposing your legs, which was humiliating.  To see this rich man running with all his might—they would as soon have expected him to flap his arms and fly.

The younger son was dumbstruck.  For long, weary days he had been rehearsing the arguments he would make to win over his father, dreading the humiliation and abuse he would face on the long walk through the town—but his father took it all himself, suffering it for him, and it broke him.  His entire plan was gone, for he was being welcomed back as a son.  He said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you, and am not worthy to be called your son,” and he meant it.

Having welcomed his son in full view of his neighbors (most of whom had followed him down the street), the father now set about making perfectly clear to them that this was still his son.  He ordered one of his servants to bring his best robe and cover his son’s rags with it, told another to go get a ring for his son’s finger, and sent a third to bring sandals—servants went barefoot, the family wore shoes.  A fourth was ordered off to kill the fattened calf—which could feed 200 people—and start up the grill.  Then the father announced in a ringing voice, “My son was dead and now he is alive––he was lost and we have found him––and we will celebrate.”

This turn staggered Jesus’ audience.  This father had violated every right he held as patriarch, had thrown away his reputation and humiliated himself before the whole town—and for what?  To protect a son who had insulted and humiliated him from the proper consequences of his own actions; to restore to his place in the family a son who had betrayed him, making it possible for the son to betray him again.  What sort of love was that?  It went much too far.  How could he do that?

Someone was sent to bring the elder son, but missed him somehow, so the elder son started back from the field with no idea what was happening.  As he drew close to the town, he could hear the music—first the drums, then the sound of many voices, and soon the various instruments.  As he walked through the streets, it quickly became clear that whatever the reason for the party, it was in the great hall of his own home.  When he reached the courtyard, he asked one of the boys dancing there what was going on.  The boy looked up at him and said, “Your brother is back and your father made up with him, so your father killed the fatted calf and threw a party.  They’re waiting for you inside.”

This hit the elder brother like a ton of bricks.  That shiftless, good-for-nothing brat was back, and his sentimental father had let himself be used again and had let him back in the family.  Now there was a party going on, and he was supposed to go in and pretend the brat hadn’t done anything.  He wouldn’t do it.  He turned his back and stalked off.

This was the second major shock of the day for the village, for this was an act of absolute disrespect to his father.  It was fully as bad as the insult the younger son had originally offered the father—in fact, it was worse, because it was in public.  Within moments, someone had hurried in to tell the father what was happening.  The townspeople would have expected the father to have his son dragged off to be beaten, for that would be the proper response—but who knew with this man anymore?

Instead, the father rose and went out to the courtyard to ask his son to come in.  Once again, he did what a servant should do; once again he put his suffering on public display.  His son snapped back, “All these years I’ve slaved for you, and you never gave me so much as a goat to have a party with my friends—but when this, this, this son of yours came back after wasting your money on prostitutes, you killed the pride of the herd for him!  It isn’t fair!”  He insulted his father a second time by addressing him with no title, as he would a servant; the townspeople’s eyes widened, but he didn’t care.  This reconciliation was insufferable, and he would do everything he could to shatter it.

The religious leaders in Jesus’ audience leaned forward as the elder brother spoke, bringing their own reactions into the story; they shared his firm conviction that this was not how things should be, and wondered how the father could possibly answer him.

Within the story, the villagers had their own questions.  The elder son had publicly insulted and shamed his father, and yet he had the nerve to claim never to have broken his father’s commandments.  He had refused to acknowledge his brother and tried to destroy the peace which the father had made between the younger son and the community.  Surely now the father would defend his honor and punish the elder son?  Instead, the father looked sadly at his son and said, “Beloved son, I’ve provided for you all your life, given you everything, and all that I have is yours; you haven’t been my servant, you’ve been serving yourself.  You don’t need to worry that I’ll give what’s yours to your brother—your rights and privileges are intact.  But your brother was dead and has come alive, was lost and we found him; it is necessary to celebrate.  Come in, be reconciled to him.”

With that outstretched hand, the father humiliating himself to reach out to his first son as he had done with his younger son, the parable ends.  Having drawn the religious leaders into the story through the elder son, Jesus left them with the father’s appeal.  The elder son’s decision was yet unmade, for it was theirs to make.  Would they accept his call to reconcile with the younger son—the “sinners,” the “people of the land”—or would they instead hold to their bitterness and reject God?  They did not have any other choice, Jesus was telling them, for he had already reached out to the lost to bring them home.

And for us?  Some of us identify with the younger brother, having gone far away from God into all sorts of wrong lifestyles.  Others see ourselves in the elder brother, because we always stayed close to the house—but maybe on the inside we wandered a long way from God, seeing him as a stern taskmaster and a slave-driver.  All of us need to know that no matter how far from God we go, the Father’s heart goes farther.  His love for his children will not let go no matter what we do.  We need to remember that this is for us, that God will not leave us in our wanderings; we need also to remember that this is for everyone else too, even those we hate and despise.  No matter what they might have done, God wants to bring them home and celebrate.  He longs for the day when he will be able to say, “Look, my children were dead and have come alive, were lost and I found them!”  Heaven rejoices at such words.

(Leviticus 19:17-18, Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Luke 10:25-37)

The curtain rises on one of Jesus’ opponents trying to test him.  The teacher of the Law asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  He wants to know how he can earn his inheritance.  Over the centuries, contrary to what the Old Testament actually taught, the Jews had come to believe that was possible—that by keeping the Law, they earned their reward from God.  In pointing them back to the truth that they hadn’t earned God’s favor (and couldn’t), Jesus was challenging the conventional wisdom.  That’s never a popular thing to do, so the scholar was trying to use this to get him in trouble.

It failed, because Jesus is a master of verbal judo; one of the things I love about him as a teacher is that he never does the expected.  Here, he turns the question back on his questioner:  “What is written in the Law?  How do you recite?”—which is to say, when you stand to recite the Law in your worship in the synagogue, what do you say?

The scribe answers with the same summary of the Law Jesus gives in Matthew 22, and Jesus responds, “You’ve given the right answer.  Do this, and you will live.”  Note three things here.  First, Jesus praises the teacher of the Law for his knowledge, then questions his behavior:  is he willing to act on what he knows?  Second, where he asked about eternal life, Jesus answers about all of life:  “do this now and now you will live.”  This isn’t just about life after death, it’s about real life before death.  Third, this man asked, “What specific things do I have to do in order to inherit eternal life,” and is handed a commandment—in his own words!—to live a life of unlimited and unqualified love for God and for other people.  “You want to do something to inherit eternal life?” Jesus says.  “OK, just continually love God and your neighbor with every part of your being.”

This is an impossible standard.  There’s no line drawn, no list, no limits—no point at which it becomes possible to say, “I’ve done enough, I’ve kept the Law.”  There’s no requirement anyone could actually meet.  Looking for some sort of limit, the scribe asks, who actually qualifies as his neighbor?  If the list is short enough—maybe just his relatives and friends—he might be able to claim that he has fully loved them, and thus fulfilled the Law’s demands.  But Jesus responds with this story:

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, seventeen miles of dangerous road; like far too many travelers down that road, he was robbed, beaten, and left lying naked by the side of the road.  He couldn’t identify himself to anyone who might come along, because he was unconscious; his clothes would have identified him as a Jew, but they were gone, leaving him not only unprotected, but anonymous.

A little while later, a priest came riding back down the road to Jericho after his two weeks of service in the Temple in Jerusalem.  He saw the man lying there naked, and suddenly he had a problem.  The rabbis taught, “If a man sees his fellow drowning, mauled by beasts, or attacked by robbers, he is bound to save him!  From the verse, you shall not stand by the blood of your neighbor.”  But, the priest hadn’t seen it happening, and he couldn’t tell if the man was a Jew.  What’s more, he might already be dead.

He ought to help, but he was a priest—he had to stay ritually pure in order to do his job.  If he touched the man, it might make him unclean, and then he’d be out of work until he could complete the week-long purification ritual.  And if he found the man dead, he would have to tear his clothes, which would be such a waste.  There was no way he could try to help the man without losing status—and while he was absolutely commanded to maintain ritual purity, the command to help others was conditional.  Clearly, he should just ride on.  So, he did—as far to the other side of the road as possible, since even coming within six feet of a dead body would defile him.

Riding some distance behind him came a Levite, also returning from his two weeks in the Temple.  Unlike the priest, he only had to stay ritually clean, not pure, so he was a lot freer to help.  Where the priest stayed as far from the wounded traveler as possible, the Levite went up to him and looked him over; he could tell the man was still alive, but not if he was a fellow Jew.  Still, he might have helped; but obviously there were robbers about.  If he stopped, he might end up the next victim.  What’s more, he knew the priest was ahead of him—like any smart traveler, he knew who else was on the road—and the priest hadn’t done anything.  Who was he, a mere lay leader, to question the judgment of a religious professional?  If he helped this man when a priest had left him there to die, it would only make the priest look bad, and he didn’t want to do that.  Next to that, how important was one wounded man, really, anyway?

After the Levite’s departure, Jesus’ audience would have expected an ordinary Jew to come along, making the same trip home from the Temple.  Instead, to their shock and horror, the next traveler is one of the hated Samaritans.  To get the full effect, imagine the first traveler is Billy Graham, the second is Dr. Kavanaugh, and the third is an al’Qaeda terrorist.  Or tell this in a Palestinian community and make an Israeli officer the hero—how do you think they would take it?  And yet, that’s what Jesus does:  he tells a group of Jews that after two of their religious leaders have left a man to die by the side of the road, along comes one of their most hated enemies to redeem their sin.

And redeem it he does, step by step.  When he sees the man, he doesn’t start calculating what it would cost him to help; instead, he is seized with compassion.  The Greek word here is derived from the word for “guts”—the Samaritan sees the plight of this man by the side of the road, a man he knows has already been ignored by two other travelers, and he reacts at a gut level:  I have to help this man.  Where the priest just passed by, where the Levite only got close enough to look, the Samaritan actually goes to him and cares for him.  This involves considerable risk for him:  he too risks being made unclean, which would also make his animals and goods unclean, and he makes himself a prime target for the robbers, if they’re still around.  And yet, he steps forward.

He begins by clean­ing the man’s wounds with oil, disinfecting them with wine, and binding them with soft cloths.  This was standard practice, but it was also fraught with symbolism.  Oil and wine were among the sacrifices which the priest and the Levite would have offered at the Temple, and yet they refused to offer them here; it was left to a Samaritan to do that.  What’s more, in the prophets, God promises to bind up his people’s wounds; yet here that promise is kept by a rejected outsider.  Despite that, the Samaritan might receive no thanks, but only rejection, because the Jews said, “Oil and wine are forbidden items if they come from a Samaritan.”

Nevertheless, the Samaritan continues to show mercy.  The priest could have put the wounded man on his animal, but didn’t, so the Samaritan makes up for his neglect.  What’s more, though he has several animals (probably carrying goods), he puts the man on his own animal and walks the rest of the way, leading the animal like any servant.  Where the priest’s chief concern was for his dignity and social standing, the Samaritan throws both to the winds in order to care for a complete stranger.

Nor does he stop there:  he takes the man to an inn, gets him a room, and stays overnight to take care of him.  This is the bravest thing he’s done yet; as a Samaritan riding into town with a badly wounded man, he risks the man’s family taking vengeance on him for the attack on their relative.  Never mind if he’s guilty or not, he’s available, and he’s a Samaritan, so he’s the sort of person who would do such a thing.  It’s not rational, but when those we love are hurt, it tends to make us irrational.  The fact that the Samaritan had gone to considerable effort to save this man’s life would make no difference.  The smart thing to do would be to leave his burden at the door of the inn and disappear—but he doesn’t do that.  In fact, when he heads out in the morning, he leaves the innkeeper with a blank check.  He’s just asking to be swindled.

This is Jesus’ response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?”  He isn’t answering it, but reshaping it, before turning it back:  “Which of these three do you think became a neighbor to the man attacked by robbers?”  There is only one possible answer, and the teacher offers it:  “The one who showed him mercy.”  Jesus responds, “Go and do likewise.”  In other words, “You wanted a standard?  That’s it.  If you want eternal life, that’s what loving your neighbor means.”  To that, there was nothing to say.

The proper question isn’t “Who is my neighbor?” (in other words, “Who do I have to love?”), but “To whom must I become a neighbor?”  The answer is, everyone in need—even an enemy!  The teachers of the Law put limits on the command to love your neighbor as yourself—family, friends, other Jews, the righteous, but not the unrighteous, definitely not non-Jews, and certainly not one’s enemies.  We tend to do the same.  Jesus won’t allow that.  Who is your neighbor?  The abortionist, or the pro-life activist; the homosexual, or the gay-basher; the boss who fired you, the man who abandoned your daughter with a baby, the swindler who took your parents for their life savings, these are your neighbors, just as much as your nearest and dearest.

This is impossible; which means our salvation is impossible, at least for us.  We can’t justify ourselves, because the standard is too high; there’s no way we can meet it, and yet we’re held to it nevertheless.  We can’t earn eternal life, no matter how hard we try; our best doesn’t even begin to come close to an approximation of being good enough.

That’s where Jesus comes in.  The wounded man is left to die by his own people, and then along comes the Samaritan, the rejected outsider, to bind up his enemy’s wounds and bring him healing, to save his life.  To do this, the Samaritan risks his own life and all that he has.  This is Jesus, the despised and rejected outsider, the unique agent of God’s love and salvation; the amazing compassion of the Samaritan is the amazing love of the Son of God.  This is the love that led him to the cross to heal our wounds and lead us to safety; it is the love that is our only hope; and it is the love he gives us to share with all our neighbors, everywhere, wherever we might find them.  Let’s pray.

(Isaiah 11:1-9; Luke 9:57-62)

The first thing you need to know if you’re serious about being a disciple of Jesus is that Jesus is unreasonable, and following where he goes is unreasonable.

Having said that, I’m going to back up just a moment.  We’ll spend the rest of this year, through Advent, in the parables of Jesus.  This is officially the first sermon in this series, but really, last week was.  There, we saw Jesus drive home the point that there are ultimately only two ways to live:  either you build your life entirely on him, or you don’t.  He was quite clear that building on him is the hard way, and the other is the easy way.  Here in these three encounters in Luke 9, he makes that point even more clearly.

A few verses up the page from this, Luke says, “As the time approached for him to be taken up, Jesus set his face like a cliff toward Jerusalem.”  (That’s the Rich Mullins version, by the way.)  Everything that happens in Luke from this point through his arrival in chapter 19 happens as Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem:  he is going to his death.  In these brief encounters, he offers parables about the way spoken on the way.

First, someone volunteers for the mission, in the most grandiose terms:  “I will follow you wherever you go.”  No limits, no exceptions, no fine print.  Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will follow.  I suspect he saw Jesus as a rising star, a gifted religious leader, maybe even the long-awaited Messiah, and wanted to go along for the ride.  This as Jesus was literally on the road to Skull Hill.  Would this guy have said this if he’d known it would mean suffering, rejection, and the cross?  I doubt it.

So does Jesus, clearly, because he doesn’t welcome this would-be disciple; instead, he says, “Foxes have their dens, and the birds of the air have roosts, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  It’s a powerful picture of poverty and rejection:  even the animals and the birds have someplace to rest, but Jesus has nothing.  This man would have to give up his social position and all assurance of comfort and safety for the uncomfortable, risky life of a vagabond.

Jesus’ rebuke must have come as a shock.  How could the Messiah be a homeless wanderer?  And yet, he had to be, for the reason Rich Mullins captured in his song “You Did Not Have a Home”:  if he’d had a home, a wife, a formal position in society, he would have been part of the system.  The world would have owned a piece of him, and that would have given it leverage.  Instead, he was outside the economic and political system, a free radical with no handles for anyone to grab.  The only thing the authorities could take from him was his life, and that was part of his plan.  Jesus’ powerlessness was necessary to his power.

We don’t know how this unnamed volunteer responded; as with other parables, we’re left hanging.  As Kenneth Bailey puts it, “We do not know whether the volunteer tightened his belt, ‘set his face steadfast,’ and stepped into line with the others, or whether, stunned at the price to be paid and at the shocking prospect of a rejected leader, he fell back . . . and watched them pass.”  Either way, the point is clear:  following Jesus costs.  Are we truly willing to pay the price?

That question hits us from another angle as Jesus continues on his way.  This time, he calls out someone along the road:  “Follow me!”  The man responds, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father, and then I’ll follow you.”  To us, that sounds reasonable; if his father has just died, shouldn’t he stick around for the funeral?  But that’s not what’s going on.  This man wouldn’t be hanging out by the side of the road if his father had died, he’d be with his family keeping vigil over the body.  The twelfth-century Arabic scholar Ibn al-Ṣalibi tells us the real story:  “‘Let me go and bury’ means:  let me go and serve my father while he is alive and after he dies I will bury him and come.”

What we have here is a clash of competing authorities.  Jesus has issued a com­mand:  “Follow me!”  The person he’s called, however, has a duty to take care of his parents, and he knows it—and what’s more, so does his community, which expects him to fulfill that duty.  Even into recent times, Dr. Bailey tells us, young men in the Near East who wanted to emigrate would be asked, “Are you not going to bury your father first?”  In other words, “Aren’t you going to do your duty to care for your parents until their death before you go off and do what you want to do?”  So it was for this recruit, and so he responds, “I have a duty to my parents which my community is counting on me to fulfill.  Surely you don’t expect me to set aside their requirements in order to follow you?”

But that’s exactly what Jesus does expect, and in fact, demand.  He replies, “Let the dead bury their own dead.  You go proclaim the kingdom of God.”  The expectations of those around you—your family, your friends, your company, your community—are not sufficient reason to set aside the call of Christ to follow him.  Let the spiritually dead, who don’t care about Jesus’ mission and don’t have kingdom priorities, fulfill society’s expectations.  His command to go proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God must take precedence.  He accepts no authority as higher and no claim as stronger than his own.

This becomes even clearer in the third encounter.  Here again someone volunteers to follow Jesus, but in this case the offer is dishonest.  You see, he isn’t just asking to say goodbye to his parents, he’s asking to take leave of them.  That might seem like nothing, but the difference is critical.  In that culture, the one leaving would ask permission to go from those who were staying; this was “taking leave,” and it was those who were staying who would say goodbye.  Thus, for instance, a dinner guest who desired to go home would say, “With your permission?”  The hosts would respond, “May you go in peace.”

This supposed volunteer tells Jesus, “I’ll follow you—just as soon as I go home and get permission from my parents.”  They of course will refuse to allow him to do any such crazy thing.  He can then claim that he wants to follow Jesus—like the first guy, he no doubt sees a bright future ahead—without actually having to do so.  After all, his father’s authority over him was obviously higher than Jesus’ authority, so of course he would have to have his father’s permission in order to follow Jesus.

Again, Jesus responds with a brief parable.  Plowing was done with a light plow worked with the left hand; the right held the goad to keep the oxen moving.  With that left hand, one kept the plow upright, held it at the proper depth, lifted it over stones in the field, and—above all—kept it straight.  This needed careful attention and skill; with a moment’s distraction, the plow might catch on a rock, cut back into previously-plowed ground (destroying work already done), or veer the other way, making the next furrows more difficult.  A mistake could damage the field’s drainage, or leave seeds exposed for birds to eat.  Plowing took intense focus to work in harmony with the oxen, with the work already done, and with the work that remained to be done.  A distracted plowman could not maintain this harmony, and in fact could destroy it, ruining an entire year’s work.

Jesus’ point is clear:  there’s no room for divided loyalties in the kingdom.  Anyone who would follow him must accept his authority absolutely, above all other authorities and loyalties—even family.  This was a shocking demand in that culture, where parental authority was absolute, family loyalty was of ultimate importance, and calling God “Father” was giving him a promotion.  Dr. Bailey recalls a class of Middle Eastern seminary students turning pale when they realized what Jesus was saying—the idea that he was claiming a greater authority than their fathers was that shocking and disturbing.