We are, Paul says, ambassadors for Christ, entrusted with the message and the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:16-21).
That’s some charge, so let’s set it to one side for a moment and look at the parable instead, the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Such a familiar name, even if we rarely use the word prodigal in any other context any more. But who named it this way?
I have to think that, if the father had named it, it would be called the forgiven son.
If the servants had named it, it would be called he’s so lucky he doesn’t know he’s born.
If the younger son had named it, he might have called it amazing grace.
But we know it as the parable of the prodigal, the profligate, the wasted, the wastrel son.
Why? Why do we persist in calling him by his sin instead of by his salvation?
If Jesus published a collection of his short stories, what would he call this parable? I think it’s worth asking, since Paul says that from now on we regard from no one from a human point of view. In Christ, rather, each becomes a new creation. We’re known no longer by our sin, but by our salvation.
It could, and would, have been such a simple and straightforward and frankly delightful tale of sin and sorrow, fallout and forgiveness, ruin and reconciliation, were it not for the insertion at the end of the elder brother’s bitterness. Surely it is he who has named this story for us, so that still we read it from his point of view.
I mean, I get it. We are all tired right now, tired of bad news and bad actors and bad outcomes.
But let’s be honest, we get tired, too, of new awakenings; the people who have only just noticed that there is injustice in the world, who have only recently recognized that all is not well with the world that God created to be good, so very good. We see the people rushing in with their repentance and their suggestions for repair, and, hey, I could count myself among them.
And the person who has been out tending the fields, day in day out, without so much as a goat to celebrate the little wins, to commiserate the myriad losses, they see the scene that is made, the fuss and the palaver, and they are weary.
It would be such a simple tale of family forgiveness, were it not for that wrinkle at the end, but that’s what makes it real. If there were no sin, there would be no need of salvation. If there were no rift, there would be no need for reconciliation. That’s why this story calls us to remember our charge as ambassadors for Christ, ministers and messengers of reconciliation, members of the beloved community of Christ that somehow brings together the sinner and the sinned against.
It isn’t easy work. It isn’t a fairytale. Howard Thurman wasn’t commenting on it but he might as well have been thinking of this parable when he wrote, “Disagreements and conflicts will be real and germane to the vast undertaking of man’s becoming at home … under the eaves of his brother’s house.”[1]
The response of the elder brother recognizes that while all may be forgiven, there is still work to be done on the other side of repentance.
Nor is the decision to cut his losses and come home the end of the story for the younger man. He has squandered his entire inheritance – he possesses nothing. He has burned so many bridges; his father has forgiven him generously, but how will he make amends to the others he abandoned, betrayed, or worse on his way out the door? Including his brother. What will the household look like now, this family, as they shift and adjust and bump elbows and hips and sharp corners making room for one another in a new configuration?
Repentance is not easy. Forgiveness is not easy, either. It is not as simple as rolling out the barbeque to roast the fatted calf. It is the work of the next morning, waking to a new reality, finding a way to go on. What does the next day look like for this family, broken, shattered, then pieced back together by the blood of the fatted calf? What comes next for them?
Back in the snippet of the story from Joshua that we read this morning, the people whom God rescued, liberated from slavery in Egypt have spent forty years wandering in the wilderness. Only now, two generations later, have they come to the promised land (Joshua 5:9-12). God’s grace has preceded and pursued them through the wilderness years, and yet we know that in the stories to come, there will be further trials, more faith and faithlessness, even greater grace and forbearance needed. We know from the stories on the news and the cries that we hear even from here that there is still little peace to be found in the promised land.
Living into the grace and mercy of God is more than the work of a lifetime, more than the work of a generation. It is more than our work. We know that.
Yet we are ambassadors of Christ, entrusted with the message of reconciliation in our time, in this place, today.
Jesus told this parable to those who were grumbling at his welcome of sinners and outcasts. He told it not to the prodigal sons, sure enough of the father’s forbearance and love to ask too much to begin with and to run home when he needed – would that life were so simple. But Jesus told this story to the elder brothers, the ones struggling to come to terms with God’s expansive forgiveness and generous grace, struggling to put it into practice themselves, struggling to see how it could possibly make right what has gone so wrong, how one could ever break bread with one’s own betrayer, as Jesus did, and will soon.
Yet in the parable the father loves both of his sons. Runs out of the house for each of them. There is nothing either of them can do to make their father love them more or love them less. And so God not only runs out into the road to welcome us home with open arms, but God has been there all along, saying, “All that is mine is yours. All that I have created is for you. Beloveds, you need do nothing to possess it, only rejoice with me in the life, the love, the freedom that grace embodies.”
Wherever we find ourselves in the story, whatever we want to call it, that’s what it’s about in the end. That’s what we are about, in the end, as ambassadors for Christ, our reconciler: the love of God, ever-present, ever-living, all-forgiving, all-embracing, all-reconciling, forever.
[1] https://www.bu.edu/htpp/files/2017/06/1965-Desegregation-Integration-Beloved-Community.pdf
over the water 