March 14, 2010
‘The Rightness of Wrong’ March 14, 2010
Rosedale United Church
(2 Corinthians 5:16-21 , Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32) Doug Norris
There is an old saying which I heard once as the response of a dancer to a question about what she had meant by a certain movement she had just danced. She replied to the questioner : ‘If I could explain it, why would I have danced it?’ Perhaps the quote was really a painter, though, or a sculptor, or anyone using some medium to say what might otherwise be unsayable.
So in a sense the parables Jesus told fit this category – they should be told and then left alone, not overly explained.
And today’s story in particular, perhaps the most memorable of the parables Jesus told, ought to be enjoyed with little interpretation. The parable of the Prodigal Son, or, as it is sometimes called, the Father With Two Sons.
With it’s climactic moment of homecoming and feasting it is a towering emblem of unconditional love. It is God’s love for us, and, at our best, it is our love for one another. But is also the most dense and nuanced of his stories, with angles and facets that catch light from all kinds of directions, and you may hear something different each time you hear it.
- Read parable – sing hymn -
Two Irish songs
It’s a long way to Tipperary
This is about a far off place ,a distant country, and it is about where the heart belongs. So it is not a theological notion so much as romantic notion. But it may help out.
Here’s where it leads me this week.
Most, in fact, almost all of the people I encounter who have come to this far off country from wherever they’ve come have not come to squander but to make a new life. As have many of your families – our parents and grandparents. And with the view from this side of the story – from the topside – as the secure hosts now, living in the far off country, we hear this parable differently.
A couple of nights ago, came off the Danforth bridge onto little curve to come into the neighbourhood – a car in the middle, stopped, no driver, pointing the wrong way. Driver came hurrying over – Indian or Pakistani – clean cut man in his 60’s, looked a bit frantic. Could I tell him, please, how to get to O’Connor and Victoria Park.
He was wearing a Pizza Hut baseball cap, and my guess is that if he took more than the next ten minutes to get there somebody would get free pizza and he would be docked his wages, and perhaps end up unpaid for his work on a miserable night. Here, perhaps, in a beat up Hyundai going the wrong way with cold food is the local version of the younger son feeding carob to the pigs and thinking about home…
My first instinct was, unfortunately, annoyance. I had trouble understanding him. Cars were arriving behind me. Just look at you, I thought – wrong way in the wrong lane and you took the wrong exit, and I found that I couldn’t explain to him how to get to Victoria Park and O’Connor, and I didn’t say but I might have thought unkind things about this immigrant.
In our fear of the other we are derisive and scathing. And so much of the worst of human evil has always been born in our fear of the ‘other’, the foreigner, the stranger.
Made me wonder how long I might last if I was suddenly uprooted and found myself in downtown Mumbai –
Small wonder that Jesus, in some other stories, spoke about work and pay and what was right and what the kingdom of God might be like – a day’s wage for those who needed it… Remember that parable? Some worked the whole day and some arrived late and just worked a couple of hours but they all got paid a day’s work – Jesus rarely explained a story he told but it seems clear there is a merciful generosity that is present in the Kingdom of God.
And the narrative of the Jews, our Bible, is always clear – look after the stranger – offer hospitality and protection to the sojourner who is in your midst. This is not only good manners – it is the acknowledgement that every one of us is one tragedy away from being uprooted, sent into exile. Every Jew recites the words in Deuteronomy 25 ‘A wandering Aramean was my father…’ –which is not simply to say that our ancestors were migrants, the word wander is more weighted – it means – in danger of perishing.
It’s a long way to Tipperary…my heart lives there.
Second Irish song. ‘Irish Washerwoman’ You may know this one better by the campfire song that is set to it’s tune :
McTavish is dead and his brother don’t know it…
His brother is dead and McTavish don’t know it.
They’re both of them dead, and in the same bed,
And neither one knows that the other is dead.
In this parable – and now we are back in the home country and the father has welcomed the lost son and the other son has heard the feast and is angry – in this story both of the brothers are dead, and they don’t know it. Only the father is alive.
The younger son is effectively dead because he has never learned to see anyone or anything beyond himself. He has no capacity to be a son to his father, seeing his father as only a source of money, and he had no capacity to build relationships in the far off country, only to buy pleasure and then abandon or be abandoned by his companions. And even when he ‘comes to himself’ and seems to repent, his only desire is to get himself into a position where he can have some food. He is led home by hunger, not a new spirit. He is dead in the sense that to only ever see the self is the moral death that makes any relationship impossible.
And the elder son, the dutiful, hardworking deserving son, is absolutely right and correct and in his argument with his father he has the high moral ground – he has done exactly what a decent boy should do – but if he insists on his rightness he will kill anyone who can’t meet that standard. He has become so right he can’t now see how to be compassionate.
Only the father is alive – because he is the one who in a flash of insight has shown mercy.
How has he come to this? Here’s a theory I have : The father is now fully alive because he has died.
Right at the beginning of the story he dies.
The younger son demands half of the estate that he would have received at the father’s death – and when the father divides his property between his two sons he brings upon himself his own death. Now he has nothing, no power, no resources, certainly no honour – he is King Lear dividing his kingdom between Regan and Goneril, and then wandering off into the storm to experience the madness of powerlessless.
We are not around to see what happens between that first part of the story and the end.
But somewhere along the way the father comes to life. Where, as a man now with no power and no resources, he might have become bitter or gone mad, he finds another way.
Maybe it is only those who have died, or who have seen and come to terms with their death, that can fully grasp the mercy that comes from powerlessness.
As long as we still have a chance, a few dollars, a stick to swing – we can imagine we can still power our way through – but to come to a death and to let go of what we thought was the only way, to open up to humanity.
Here is perhaps the basic enquiry of the Christian tradition : who is alive and who is dead? Or, more pointedly, who has been dead and now has discovered that they are actually alive?
And who, in the death of their power and the loss of ego, has discovered that a new way comes, a way which is wrong because it ignores all the usual ways of being right – ignores the Pharisees who will not eat with sinners, and simply says : Mercy. This is how it is to be alive. Mercy.
We had to celebrate, the father explains to all Pharisees everywhere – this brother of yours was dead, and has come to life – he was lost, and has been found….