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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Some may be better or worse than others, but every fallen family has its own dysfunction. Some fallen families may live together pretty well in God’s forgiveness of sins, while other fallen families may not even know what forgiveness of sins is at all, let alone what God’s forgiveness of sins is. For some, extreme family dysfunction may even get in the way of Holy Scripture’s using familial relationships to illustrate God’s great love for us His people, such as in the so‑called “Parable of the Prodigal Son” of today’s Gospel Reading. Today, on this more‑joyous Fourth Sunday in Lent—when the Psalm’s antiphon called the righteous to rejoice and the upright in heart to shout for joy (Psalm 32:11), when the Old Testament Reading called for the inhabitants of Zion to shout and sing for joy (Isaiah 12:1-6), and when the Gospel Reading spoke of the Divine necessity of “being glad” (or, better, “rejoicing”) over a dead and lost sibling’s being alive and found—we consider the Gospel Reading and thereby rejoice over “God’s Functional Family”.
The familiar and much‑loved so‑called “Parable of the Prodigal Son” comes as the third of three parables that Jesus apparently told primarily to Pharisees and scribes who were grumbling that Jesus received and ate with the tax collectors and other sinners who were all drawing near to hear Him. In the first two parables, as we will hear again later this Church Year (on September 15th, the 14th Sunday after Pentecost) a man and a woman initially lost but later found, respectively, one of one‑hundred sheep and one of ten coins, and so they rejoiced with their friends and neighbors, as there is joy in heaven over even one sinner who repents (Luke 15:4-10). But, as we heard, in the third parable, one of a father’s two sons was angry and refused to eat of the meal celebrating the other son’s being found and received back safe and sound.
In considering the Parable, we can easily get so bogged down in all of the rich and perhaps meaningful detail that we miss the Parable’s main point in the context that the Divinely‑inspired St. Luke reports it: the main point that the grumbling Pharisees and scribes were like the angry older son, alienated in their own way from God the Father, refusing to rejoice and to eat with God Himself and the repentant sinners of their extended family. Perhaps the father of the parable never should have divided his property between the two sons before his death, and perhaps the younger son never should have taken all that he had to a far country and squandered it in reckless living, whether or not he did so with prostitutes, as the older son alleged, perhaps with some Biblical basis (Proverbs 29:3). But also, perhaps the older son never should have thought of himself as a “servant” (or, better, “slave”) of his father, one who never disobeyed his father’s commands, one to whom his father never gave a young goat, and should never have wanted to celebrate with his friends instead of with his family. Every fallen family has its own dysfunction.
Where do you and I find ourselves in this Parable? Does the Parable apply more to you and to me as those who wantonly and selfishly go out from our Father’s House and live godless and remote lives of the world with all its desires and its filth (Schrenk, TDNT 5:983-984; Grundmann, TDNT 1:303)? Or, does the Parable apply more to you and to me as those who wrongly think that we remain in our Father’s House but self-righteously point to our own obedience, ungraciously receive our Father’s gifts, and, outside of our own vocations to do so, judge our brothers and sisters in Christ? Of course, whether we sin in the first way and/or the second way does not really matter in the end, for, in one fashion or another, we all sin and, on our own, we are unworthy to be called children of God. Like the dysfunctional family in the Parable, and like the first dysfunctional family, we destroy our relationship with God our Father, and then we destroy our relationships with our siblings (Genesis 3-4; confer Lutheran Service Book 569).
Now, lest anyone think that I am preaching to someone else, let me say this: when I preach God’s law, at least in a general sense, I am directing it both at you as an individual and at myself as an individual. We should never think that God’s law is being directed at others and so deflect it from ourselves, but rather each of us should let the Holy Spirit apply God’s law to us as individuals. One individual may sin in one particular way, and another individual may sin in another particular way, but we all sin (Romans 3:23; 5:12), and, the Bible says, whoever fails to keep the law in one way is guilty of failing to keep the law in every way (James 2:10).
In the Gospel Reading, the key differences between the guilty tax collectors and other sinners and the guilty Pharisees and scribes are that the tax collectors and sinners repentantly drew near to hear Jesus, were received by Him, and ate with Him, while the Pharisees and the scribes impenitently grumbled about it. Whatever the younger son’s original motivation for leaving the far country, the father received him back safe and sound as a son and feasted with him, while the older son, as far as we know, remained outside, despite the father’s going out to entreat him to come in. Where do you and I find ourselves in this Parable in terms of repentance? Are we repenting children of God feasting with Him? Or, are we impenitently keeping ourselves apart from the feast?
When we repent, then God our Father, for the sake of His Son Jesus Christ, through the work of the Holy Spirit, shows us the same kind of gut‑wrenching compassion that the father showed his younger son in the Parable. In a sense, repentance is the way to God who lovingly receives us sinners (Grundmann, TDNT 1:303). In Jesus, God loved sinners, sinners like both the Parable’s younger son and older son, sinners like you and me—in Jesus, God loved such sinners to the point of death, even death on the cross (Schrenk, TDNT 5:994-995; confer LSB 432). As we sang in the Gradual (Hebrews 12:2), Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before Him. As we heard in the Epistle Reading (2 Corinthians 5:16-21), for our sake, God made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God; through Christ, God reconciled the world, including us, to Himself, not counting our trespasses against us, and He works that reconciliation yet today through the ministry of reconciliation that God entrusted to Paul and his coworkers and entrusts to pastors today.
Just as we can easily deflect the reading and preaching of God’s law from ourselves to others, we can easily deflect the reading and preaching of God’s Gospel from ourselves to others. So, among other reasons, God connects His Word to means that we can see, feel, and taste in order for us who repent to be sure that His Gospel applies to us as individuals. We are baptized individually, made new creations, clothed in Christ’s righteousness, adopted as God’s children (Romans 8:15, 23; Galatians 4:5; Ephesians 1:5), and given the privileges of being His children. When we privately confess to our pastor the sins that we know and feel in our hearts, we are absolved individually, as validly and certainly, even in heaven, as if Christ our dear Lord dealt with us Himself. We individually receive the Sacrament of the Altar, the true Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, but here, in being so united with Christ as individuals, we also are united with one another—all those communing here, and all those communing at every faithful altar of every time and every place, including those people who have gone before us in the faith and even now are alive with Christ in heaven.
Every fallen family has its own dysfunction, but in Christ we are part of “God’s Functional Family”, not perfect yet here and now, but forgiven—by Him and forgiving one another. God receives sinners into His family and eats with them, and we rejoice that we and others are included in His family and in this family meal. Returned to right relationships with Him and one another, we joyfully go about His work in our individual vocations as His children now, until He perfects us, in the life to come.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +