"Outrageous Bible Stories"

Story for children of all ages:

Our story this morning is a Bible story – the one that most people call "The Parable of the Prodigal Son." Lots of people think it’s one of the most important stories Jesus ever told, but when Jesus’ followers heard it, most of them thought it was pretty peculiar.

Bible stories often have rather strange words in them, and this story from the Gospel of Luke (Chapter 15, verses 11-32, for those who might like to go look it up again later) is no exception, so before we start, I want to check to be sure that just a couple of the trickier words won’t totally confuse everyone…

There are other words in this reading that may also sound a bit strange, but I’m going to ask parents to explain them later. And parents, I would also invite you on the ride home to ask your kids if they did understand the story – and if they didn’t, well, maybe this gives you something a bit different for your Sunday supper table talk. This is a modern translation, by the way, of the Scripture:

A Fine Confabulation Filling Folks In on a Fellow’s
Foolishness and His Fine Father’s Fidelity:

Feeling footloose and frisky, a featherbrained fellow forced his fond father to fork over the farthings and flew to foreign fields and frittered his fortune, feasting fabulously with faithless friends. Fleeced by his free-loading fellows, flung off by the fancy floozies and finally facing fierce famine, he found himself a feed-flinger in a filthy farmyard full of fine fat farrows. Fairly famishing, he fain would have filled his frame with foraged food from fodder fragments.

"Fooey! My father's freelancers fare far finer," the frazzled fugitive finally franticly figured, frankly facing the facts. Frustrated by failure and filled with foreboding, he fled forthwith to his family. Falling at his father's feet, he fumbled forlornly: "Father, I've flunked and fruitlessly forfeited family favor!!"

The farsighted father, forestalling further flinching, frantically flagged the flunkies to fetch a fatted calf from the far-flung fields and fix a feast. The fugitive's fault-finding brother frowned on fickle forgiveness of former folderol. But the faithful father figured, "Filial fidelity is fine, but the fugitive is found! What forbids fervent festivity? Let flags be unfurled! Let fanfares flare!"

And the father's forgiveness formed the foundation for the former fugitive’s future fortitude and faith.

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read?" And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have answered right; do this, and you will live."

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, `Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.' Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed mercy on him." And Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

And Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, `Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.' And he divided his living between them.

Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country, and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything.

But when he came to himself he said, `How many of my father's hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants."' And he arose and came to his father.

But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, `Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'

But the father said to his servants, `Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.' And they began to make merry.

Now his elder son was in the field; and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what this meant. And he said to him, `Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has received him safe and sound.' But he was angry and refused to go in.

His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, `Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf!'

And he said to him, `Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.'"

The Sermon:

Before I start, I have one question: Did I really need to read the full Scriptural accounts of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son? From your responses, it seems that I did.

Talking about Biblical texts among Unitarian Universalists is always risky, because our backgrounds are so diverse it isn’t safe to assume everyone knows the Biblical references. And it’s not just us.

More and more people in our "Christian" culture know the Bible only by hearsay, by other people’s retellings and interpretations of it. Those who do know the stories tend to be those who see the Bible (or at least their understanding of it) as inerrant and infallible, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for discussion about their interpretations. And those who retell the stories the loudest are rarely the ones whose interpretations match what our tradition at least insists that Jesus himself was trying to say.

It really would be a shame to hand the Bible – both the Jewish and the Christian parts of it – over to those who use Scripture as a weapon against those with whom they disagree, and I for one am not willing to do it.

The Bible is part of our heritage. Our most basic beliefs – whether we identify as Christian, Jewish, Pagan, Buddhist, humanist, atheist or anything else – our most basic beliefs are part of the teachings of the Rabbi of Nazareth known to us as Jesus. And the most radical and most basic of his teachings are found in the Parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.

If you’ve followed any of the controversy over contemporary efforts to get through the Biblical texts and back to the historical Jesus – through the work of the Jesus Seminar, for example – you already know that we don’t have a whole lot that anyone can say for certain actually comes from Jesus, and what we do have is often buried under layers of doctrinally-inspired editing. But of the materials we have, these two parables – the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan – are generally regarded as authentic. They are so regarded in part at least because they are so outrageous.

A little contextual analysis:

On the surface, these are both nice stories about compassion, kindness, forgiveness and acceptance. A traveler is rescued by a kind and generous stranger, and everyone agrees that the Samaritan’s a really good guy. A younger son pulls a typical cliché younger son stunt – he takes his trust funds, spends it all foolishly, goes home fearful of his welcome and is received by his father (although not by his brother) with open arms. The Samaritan reminds us that everyone is our neighbor, and the Prodigal reminds us that God’s love is inexhaustible.

Both of those messages are indeed part of what Jesus was saying. They’re not especially surprising to us because we’ve heard ’em before. But imagine, if you will, being a member of the Judean society two thousand years ago, and hearing those stories from this traveling teacher who’s just wandered into your town.

Jesus does not identify the traveler on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, but his listeners are going to assume it’s someone like them. The Jericho road in those days was about 20 miles of awful conditions, including the likelihood of robbery. The man is attacked, beaten, stripped and left for dead – no clothes, no wallet, no drivers license, no way for anyone looking at him to know who or what he is, and he’s unconscious, so he can’t either call for help or give an accounting of himself.

A priest comes by. Now, the priest doesn’t know if this guy in the ditch is a fellow Jew or not. He has to assume, however, that he isn’t, because the threat to the priest’s ritual purity if he approaches a non-Jew is tremendous. And the consequences of approaching a dead non-Jew are even greater – he’d be unclean and need to undergo ritual purification if he approached the body of a member of his own community, but it would be a much longer and more expensive process to restore his ritual purity if the man in the ditch were found to be a foreigner. Just getting close enough to try to find out if the man in the ditch is alive or dead, Gentile or Jew, is too risky. If the victim is not a live Jew, then the priest can no longer perform any of the ritual activities necessary for the well-being of his community, he loses his ability to receive the sacrificial left-overs at the Temple, he cannot collect offerings from the faithful, he can’t do any of his work, and his whole family, all his servants, all become ritually unclean right alongside of him. They could all starve. So he’s got a decision to make: does he risk sacrificing the needs of the many – his family, his community and himself – for the sake of this one, who’s probably already dead anyway?

At this point, Jesus’ hearers are starting to get a little bit uncomfortable. They have information, after all, that the priest doesn’t have – that the victim’s probably one of them and he’s still alive, but he won’t be for long if he doesn’t get some help. On the other hand, if the priest doesn’t maintain ritual purity, that endangers their whole community. One of the many apocalyptic beliefs widespread in Jesus’ day was the belief that if the Jewish people could maintain God’s laws – including the complicated Levitican purity codes – for even a few days, then the world would be ready for the Messiah to arrive. The priests especially had to be careful. So the listeners could understand the priest’s dilemma. They didn’t blame him for passing by.

Next comes the Levite – not as important to the community as the priest, perhaps, but still it’s not just the priests who have to avoid contact with foreigners and the dead – that’s in the rules for everybody. The Levite doesn’t want to have to undergo a period of purification, either, and he certainly doesn’t want to be the one to be responsible for postponing the arrival of the Messiah. So he too passes by.

This is a little tougher for Jesus’ hearers. Because they know that the burden on the Levite would be far less than that faced by the priest, and they (most of them, anyway) aren’t really sure the people of God’s Israel are even capable of 3 days of perfect goodness, and finally, they know, or they think they know, that the man in the ditch is someone they’d regard as their neighbor, and he’s still alive, but sinking fast.

They’re all imagining themselves walking along that road, and they’re all getting the message, which was that the priest and the Levite could have helped but didn’t, and they’re feeling all smug that they’d have stopped and helped that guy in the ditch, because they were catching on to Jesus’ point here – and then Jesus throws the real curve.

The next man down the Jericho road is a Samaritan. Now, the people of Judea regarded the Samaritans in much the same way you might expect, for example, Dr. Laura to regard an enthusiastic adulterer, or a "right-to-life" activist to regard an abortionist, or Newt Gingrich to regard Bill Clinton – you get the point here. One ancient source comments that "He who eats the bread of the Samaritans consumes the flesh of swine." You would have a hard time being more insulting than that.

Yet the Samaritans were not really gentiles. They were a branch of the Jewish people who had blended into the pagan culture of Samaria. Their faith was a combination of Jewish and Canaanite laws and beliefs – and they were bound by the same Jewish holiness codes that regulated the conduct of the priest and the Levite. That’s important – the Samaritan was not exempt from the rules about avoiding dead strangers. He had just as much reason – more, really, because he was a foreigner on the Jericho road, and it was not a high statistical probability that the guy in the ditch would also be a Samaritan – so he had more reason than either the priest or the Levite not to risk himself for the sake of that beaten, unconscious man.

But he did it. He picked the man up, put him on his own "beast," took him to an inn, took care of him, left the equivalent of two days’ wages to cover any expenses the innkeeper might incur, and promised to stop on his way back to take care of any additional costs – opening himself up, by the way, to the possibility of the Judean equivalent of a lawsuit for defiling the injured Jew by touching him! It would be like Archie Bunker waking up from a heart attack to discover his life had been saved by a black lesbian abortionist. Gratitude is not necessarily the first response of the rescued self-righteous.

All this is pretty outrageous all by itself for Jesus’ listeners – because he’s saying to them that God doesn’t give a damn about religious rules and ritual purity and has no patience with anyone who thinks that obedience to God could ever be compatible with cruelty or malice or disdain or indifference toward others. The Samaritan knew as well as everyone else did what God’s "laws" were supposed to be. What’s important about the Samaritan wasn’t so much his compassion (although that was part of it) as it was his willingness to go ahead and give aid – to violate the rules of ritual purity – without caring about God’s opinion one way or the other. The Samaritan could have passed by like the others did, sighing over the sadness and the injustice of it all. But he didn’t.

Now, some think that Jesus did indeed then ask his listeners who they thought had acted like a good neighbor. The obvious answer, of course, is the Samaritan, and that would be pretty hard in itself, having a Samaritan held up as an example of goodness, as someone who understood that his neighbor was anyone who needed his help, regardless of the degree of inconvenience or risk involved. And that is part of the point of the parable. But it lets the listeners off the hook. They’re thinking, heck, if a Samaritan can do it, so can I. My neighbor is anyone who needs me – OK, I can get that.

But it gets worse – it gets even more outrageous. Jesus had another point, one that we still tend to ignore to this day. Remember, the original question that started all this was not "Whom should I help?" It was, "Who is my neighbor? Who am I supposed to love as I love myself?" With whom were Jesus’ listeners identifying? Some with the priest, maybe, some with the Levite, but mostly they identified with the victim in the ditch – who was saved by that despised dog of Samaria. So if you’re the man in the ditch – and we all are, folks, that’s part of what Jesus was saying – then your neighbor is the Samaritan. Your neighbor, whom you are supposed to love (or at least treat lovingly) is not only the one who needs you – your neighbor is also the one whom you most despise.

Now a quick trip through the story of the Prodigal Son. Again, consider how it sounded to his listeners. We start out with a smart-mouth kid saying to his father, "Dad, you have lived too long and I’m tired of waiting for your money – so give it to me now." That sort of filial impatience didn’t go over any better in Judea 2000 years ago than would with most people today. He leaves town – well, he’d have to, after behaving like that. He’d be shut out of the community. He couldn’t sell his share of the estate locally, either, because no one would buy it, knowing the father was still alive. He had to go abroad to liquidate his assets, because only ignorant infidel foreigners would pay for the rights to that property. He has a great time, spends it all – and then famine hits, and he has nothing – no money, no friends – no one will even give him a crust of bread. He’s a man who in effect killed his father, after all, by demanding his inheritance.

He winds up slopping pigs – working with the most unclean of creatures, and now he himself is ritually dead – impure at a level no amount of prayer or sacrifice could remedy. It occurs to him that his dad’s farmhands are doing a lot better than he is right now, so he decides to go home, make humble noises to his father, and see if he can’t at least get a regular meal going again. So he heads for the old homestead.

And his father, seeing him approach, runs to greet him. That’s appalling to the audience – no father should ever run to his child; that’s humiliating. The son should run to the father; the lesser runs, the superior stands and waits. And the kid doesn’t have time to offer his father a deal – he never does get to ask to be allowed to be a servant – the only part of his rehearsed speech he gets to deliver is the "I have sinned and I am not worthy to be your son" part. But you get the feeling he really didn’t have to say even that.

Jesus’ listeners are shaking their heads at this – you’d have a hard time being less worthy than this young man, but what is wrong with this father, letting this rotten excuse for a son come back? And not just welcoming him – celebrating him, with a robe (the sign of dignity), a ring (the sign of authority), and new sandals (the sign of return to his full status as a son of the household).

The prodigal son has broken God’s laws, and now the father has broken them, too – because this kid is dead, legally, ritually dead. The older son is not at all impressed – and not very polite in his complaints, either. He speaks disrespectfully to his father; the traditional English version begins "Lo" – which is better translated as "Now look here, buddy" – and then complains to his father about "this son of yours." To which the father responds, not harshly, but saying "My child" – the term in the oldest Greek texts is more correctly interpreted as "my child" than "my son" – and then saying, "you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found."

Once again, Jesus is telling an outrageous story, forcing his hearers to consider the possibility that God cared far less about laws than about compassion, forgiveness and love – even in the face of incredible human stupidity. The father loves both of his children, and that love is not negated by the foolishness of one or the disrespect and anger of the other.

The stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son go against many of our own deepest – and basest – instincts. Jesus knew that; what he also knew was that we are capable of moving beyond the limitations of our self-righteousness, our cultural pieties, our stubborn refusal to recognize our neighbor and to welcome our imperfect brothers and sisters into our own hearts.

Jesus wanted his hearers to know that they were each of them – each of us – all of the characters in all of his parables: the Prodigal and the brother, the priest and the Levite, the victim and the Samaritan – and the loving father – the embodiment of the divine – caring more about persons than about theological correctness or ritual purity.

The God of Jesus cares about every person. And if we are serious about pursuing what is good, so should we.

It’s as simple – and as challenging – as that.