I was reading through one of Jesus’ parables this morning. Here he is sitting with a bunch of outcasts. The Bible specifically calls them “tax collectors and sinners” which might seem like a palatable pairing but it doesn’t really hit us they same way it would have Jesus’ audience. In the context of first century Judaism, where the social etiquette was controlled by the religious establishment, sinner was not a particularly welcome designation. “Sinner” meant you were an outcast, shunned, a loser.

These poor tax collectors keep getting lumped in with the sinners all through the gospels and this gives us some idea of the social context. We all hate paying taxes but tax collectors of Jesus time were considered more than a nuisance, they were seen as traitors to the Jews. They were Jews who worked for the Roman government collecting money from their own people. On top of that they weren’t monitored very well and a lot of them were pretty dishonest. All that to say, sinner was more than a comment on your morality it was a comment on your social standing.

So while Jesus is sitting and eating with these people the Pharisees walk by and they can’t believe what they are seeing.

“What the heck are you doing with them?”
“Aren’t you embarrassed to be seen with them?”
“We would be humiliated if someone saw us sitting and eating with these people.”

And so Jesus, as he likes to do, tells some stories. Just like all of Jesus’ stories he challenges the people listening to find themselves in the stories. He tells a story about a woman who loses one of her coins and searches her house to find it. He tells a story about a man who loses one of his sheep and leaves the rest to find the missing one. And then he tells this story, this story about a man and his son.

The father is a wealthy man and one of his sons comes to him one day and asks for what’s coming to him, he asks for his inheritance. He says, “listen Dad, I know you’re still alive but I can’t wait any longer. I’ve been doing my best just to wait you out but for what ever reason you just won’t die and I want my money.”

Now I don’t have any kids but I can imagine how painful that would be to hear from your son. I wish you were dead. They only significance you have left for me is your money and I want it. I imagine that it was the shock of the request the moves the father to say okay. Maybe if he had waited a couple days he would have told his son to take a hike. But in the pain of the moment he agrees to the request.

So Jesus tells us that the son goes out and squanders his money on “expensive living”.
Now what exactly is expensive living? Well I imagine it has more to do with the question of living than it does with the question of expense. I imagine it carries more to it than just the simple economics of spending more than you make. I think Jesus is hinting at some of the unsustainable patterns in our lives, the ways in which we exchanging the effort of investing in life and relationships for the idea that we can just buy happiness or buy friends.

But whatever the particular fault of this young man’s lifestyle was, a famine happens. The economy hits a downturn and this guy gets into trouble. So after a period of selling himself out as a laborer in some questionable working conditions he remembers his father and his generosity towards the people in his employ. Jesus says that in that moment he came to his senses.
This is an interesting statement because it has this idea of coming back to reality, that his present situation apart from the context of relationship to his Dad didn’t make sense. It wasn’t the way he was intended to live.

So in this moment of clarity he decides to return, to journey back towards his father.

He thinks to himself about what he’ll say. “I have sinned against heaven and against you.”
An alternate translation could say “to heaven against you”, the idea being that he is aware of the magnitude of his offense, and that his sins were so great that they reached to the heavens. He decides that his only choice is to humble himself and ask not to be forgiven and restored but simply to be employed by his father. And so he starts his journey back home.

And this is where the story gets really interesting because Jesus says that even as he was far off in the distance his father saw him and ran to meet him. And while we may not be particularly surprised at this point, this is the punch-line. We may miss it but everyone listening would have got the surprise square between the eyes.

Jesus’ culture was a patriarchy. The father’s position as head of the household may have been compromised when he acquiesced to his sons request at the start of the story but as a father he would never stoop so low as to run to meet his son. He could never humble himself so lowly as to embrace and kiss his son in public, a mother maybe but certainly not a father. See this is more than just an act of forgiveness he is humbling himself to take a position below that of his son. And Jesus stretches the believability of the story here to make his point. He is pulling on every literary device he can think of to show the significance of the man’s actions.

Now there is one more character in the story of this father and son. There’s the second son. The angry son. The one that is annoyed when his brother comes home. You can admit it, you can identify with this guy. He is our sense of fair play in effect. Our belief in the justice of karma.

He has been faithful. He has stayed home and helped Dad even though his idiot brother took half the money and left. And now that the money is gone the kid brother shows up to move back in, presumably to get another half of the inheritance when the old man dies for real. His father may forgive but for him it’s not that easy.

And this is where the story finds a deeper level of significance because this where it leaves the realm of cold, objective, rules and begins to find some roots in our experience of the story. We realize the story isn’t as simple as its first reading implies. The characters are not just one-to-one analogies of our relationship to God. We realize that we are not just the first son in the story. We are all of the characters.

We are the son who needs to feel forgiveness.
We are brother who finds the taste of grace bitter at times.
We are the father who extends his forgiveness in this incredible humility.

It’s only as we place ourselves within the story that we begin to hear God’s voice. We are called to respond to the love of God with more than gratitude, we are called to change our posture in the story. Once we have been the son, we become the father.

Remember Jesus told this story when the Pharisees asked why he was sitting with the “sinners”. He was sitting with the sinners to remind them that we are all the prodigal son in need of forgiveness and he was sitting with the sinners to remind them that we are all the humble father in the position to offer forgiveness to others.

It’s from this place of entering the story, of stepping back from the cold reading of the letter of the law. It’s when we removing the edits we have placed on the story of God, that we start to experience something of his truth.