If
someone were to ask you to explain yourself, to spell out what it is that makes
you tick, or why you do the things you do, chances are you couldn’t do it. You might fumble around for a while, trying
to put into words the inner workings of your heart and mind, or to come up with
nouns and adjectives that seem to describe your values and motivations. But sooner or later what you’d probably do is
tell a story. Part of my job is to meet
a lot of people, and to get to know them, and give them a chance to get to know
me. And while everyone is different, and
the conversations we have as we are getting acquainted are all different, as
people ask me questions about myself, to better understand where I’m coming
from, I find that there are certain stories I tell over and over again.
There’s
the story of how I became a Zen monk and organic farmer, and my story of going
from Zen monk to Episcopal Priest, and there’s the story of the rebirth of St.
John’s, Petaluma, from the ashes of schism and how I came here to be the
Rector. I never tell these stories
exactly the same way twice, and I never mind telling them again, because they
are alive—they are stories that live in me, and I live in them. And sometimes that’s what it takes to really
come alive to the deeper truth about who we are, and the higher purpose for
which we strive—sometimes it takes a story.
So
when some Pharisees and scribes were grumbling about Jesus, about the way he
welcomed sinners and ate and drank with them, Jesus could have tried to explain
to them in abstract terms about his own experience of the unconditional and
gratuitous love of God. He could have
told them how he had come to give the last word about any idea or system of
religion that seeks to put barriers around that love and control people’s
access to it on the basis of human judgements about morality and justice. He could have told them that he had come to
identify himself completely with the people whom such conventional ideas and
systems of religion had ruled out of bounds with respect to God, and to invite
those people to feast with him at the inaugural dinner of a new creation, a
world remade, where the only power is the grace of God, and love is the only
law, where no one is excluded or estranged.
I
suppose that Jesus could have tried to explain himself in these terms, but no
one would have had the foggiest idea what he was talking about. You and I can talk this way because we have
the advantage of being able to reflect on the whole arc of the gospel, and see the
entire tapestry of Jesus’ words and actions that weave together to make it up. Not only that, but the identity and mission
of Jesus have had two thousand years to infiltrate and colonize our ideas about
holiness and God. Not that this process
is complete, not by a long shot. That is
why we keep going back to the Gospel stories, day by day, week by week. It’s why we keep placing ourselves imaginatively
in the moments where people were seeing and hearing it all for the first time. Because we know that the truth that Jesus was
trying to get across in those moments, by saying and doing the things that he
did, has yet to take full possession of us.
People
sometimes complain that the teachings of Jesus and of Christianity in general
are short on practical advice for the spiritual path. There may be some lofty ethical principles to
guide our behavior, in places like the Sermon on the Mount, but there is very
little in the way of instruction on how to train oneself, and to surmount the
psychological barriers to spiritual progress.
And I think that something like this is what got the goat of the scribes
and Pharisees. They were masters of the
path, with a well-worked out system for what you had to do to get closer to
God, and people respected them for it.
So it drove them crazy that Jesus didn’t show the slightest interest in
being like them. They could see that he
was a person of extraordinary spiritual gifts, who could have been such an asset to their efforts to
encourage and instruct the good and the faithful in the synagogues and in the
temple. He could have had the best and the
brightest in the land as his disciples, and rallied up a real religious
revival. But instead he went around
like a bum, squandering his talents on losers, on crazy people and prostitutes,
on tax-collectors, lepers and Samaritans.
And
when they grumble about it, he doesn’t have the decency to explain himself, but
tells them another of his stupid stories.
It’s actually the third of three stories, the first two of which the
lectionary left out, but they are all about losing something and finding it
again, and a party to celebrate the finding.
So maybe Jesus really is explaining himself, and is simply on a mission of
mercy to the outcasts and losers, to help them become upstanding citizens
again. Maybe his feasting with them is a
celebration of their returning to the fold, and thanksgiving that one of the
righteous men of Israel bothered to come looking for them. This is a common enough interpretation. It’s the sort of thing that has led
generations of Christians to take up works of mercy to the marginal and poor,
as if that were the preferred method
to get right with God.
Such
charity often imagines that the lost will dutifully express their gratitude for
being found, and show themselves deserving by cleaning up their act. And at first it seems as if the story about
the son who was lost and is found, meets these expectations. After all, the younger son in the story is
shame-faced, and is prepared be a hired hand on his old family farm. But there’s a lingering question in our minds
about repentant he really is, or whether he’s simply figured out that this what
he needs to do to get his three square meals a day. Because while most of us have been in the
position of the younger son now and again, we can more readily identify with
his older brother. It's not that we’re
mean, or unforgiving. We wouldn’t demand
that our brother be sent away to starve.
We just ask for a little respect for fair play, a little accountability,
a little incentive for good behavior, and consequences for bad.
But
it is the father in the story who sees the bigger picture, who understands what
is really at stake, which is not a goat or a fatted calf, or which son is the
favorite, or who stands to inherit the family farm—what is at stake is life and
death. “This son of mine was dead,” he
says, “and is alive again!” And so the party begins. Pondering this, we might say that Jesus went
to the tax collectors and sinners, not because they were the people who needed
the most help, but because they, unlike the upstanding scribes and Pharisees,
were able to understand the deeper purpose of his mission. Which was not to show screwed-up people how
they could get back in favor with God, but to put to everyone the question—can
the dead come back to life?
It’s
a question only God can answer, but in the company of Jesus, the tax collectors
and sinners find it possible to imagine that the answer to that question might
be “yes.” And that is the possibility
that animates not just the story of the lost son, but the whole story of Jesus. Because the gospel is about more than helping
losers become winners again, or readjusting misfits to polite society. It’s a story about one who goes looking for all
that has been lost, from the foundation of the world. To do that he must become the lost, the
outcast, despised and forsaken. He must go
in search of us even to depths of the earth, to lie, the dead among the dead. The story of Jesus is the story of one who
lives, not for spiritual progress, or moral perfection, but for love for us,
and for hope in what could come to him, and to us, in that place of absolute
surrender.
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