Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

The Pharisees and scribes complain when they see Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners. In Jesus’ time, “sinners” fell into several categories. There were the people in unacceptable occupations, including tax collectors because they worked for the Romans and profited from graft and corruption. There were people who did immoral things; okay, fair enough. But you could also be a “sinner” just by being born into the wrong group; both Samaritans and Gentiles were “sinners.” Finally, there were people who didn’t keep the law to the rigorous standards of the religious elites, which included many ordinary folks who couldn’t sit around debating the finer points of religious law. The question for us is this: Putting aside these first century definitions of who was a sinner, who would you be scandalized to see having breakfast with Jesus at Denny’s? An ex-convict? Your ex-spouse? A terrorist? Someone in human trafficking? Someone currently holding elected office in the United States? The relative who made off with Grandma’s silver tea service an hour after she died, the guy who bullied you every day all through middle school? Whose name is crossed off your guest list forever? That’s who’s at the table. If you aren’t scandalized by the thought of Jesus eating with that person, then that’s not who was eating with Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t argue. He tells a story about a man with two sons. The younger son essentially tells his father he can’t wait for him to die. He wants his share of the estate now. That’s a big slap in the face even today, but even more so given the huge honor owed the patriarch of a family and the elaborate code for keeping that honor in place. The father divides the property between the two sons, no questions asked. The younger son takes the money and runs to a distant country where he spends it all on what Jesus delicately calls dissolute living. This means the older son has to support the rest of the family on two-thirds of the family resources, their mother is more vulnerable because now she only has one son, and the family is dishonored.

When he’s broke, the younger son takes a job working for Gentiles feeding hogs, which, for a Jew, is hitting bottom and then some. He “comes to himself,” but we don’t know if he’s contrite or repentant; maybe he just remembers where there are clean sheets and three meals a day. On the road home he rehearses his speech: “Just treat me like a hired hand but let me come home.” His father sees him coming. Has he been out there every day, scanning the horizon, hoping? The father runs down the road, which an honorable patriarch wouldn’t do, and before the son can spit out his speech his father has his arms around him. The son finally blurts out, “I have sinned; I am not worthy,” but the father is busy planning a celebration. He orders his servants to kill the fatted calf, a sign that the celebration is a feast for the entire village. It’s a feast to restore the family’s honor as well as a feast to restore the family’s son.

As one of my preaching students put it, if the story ended there, it would be a happy ending. But it doesn’t. We typically call this the Parable of the Prodigal Son but there’s that other son, the elder son. He’s done everything right; in his mind, he’s earned his father’s love, and he isn’t about to sit at the same table with that self-centered brat who caused his family so much grief. Right there in front of everyone, he refuses to come in the house. The father could ignore his elder’s son conspicuous absence until his guests leave, but as we’ve seen, honor doesn’t matter to this man; keeping his family together does. He goes to talk to the elder son.

Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that both sons have their father’s love not because they earned it, but because loving is what their father does. That is what we call grace. But if that were the end of the story, if God’s grace were the single point of the parable, then it would be the theological equivalent of both brothers’ saying, “We like to sin. God likes to forgive. What could be better?” Which, by the way, is not the gospel.

“Sin” is a loaded word, a word that has been used to label and hurt people, but sin is not a check in the demerit column made by a cranky scorekeeper God. Sin is whatever hurts our relationship with God and with each other. That’s why God hates sin: because God loves us. What the younger brother did caused serious harm to the family, even to the community. And so did what the older brother did. The older brother is just as self-interested as the younger brother when it comes right down to it. And just as lost. Both are forgiven because forgiveness means the past doesn’t have all the power in this relationship. The father is saying to the older son, “We have a different future than anything the past has led us to expect. This is the reason for the party.”

The older brother, having heard his father’s pleas, stands in the yard. Fade to black. No happy ending. Now, remember who is listening to the story. The Pharisees, and the sinners and outcasts around the table, and, of course, Christians down through the centuries. So it isn’t so much a parable without an ending as it is a parable in which the ending is left to us. Will we come home, like the younger brother? Will we come in, as the older brother was invited to do? Will we get over being scandalized by Jesus’ dinner companions, and imagine a future in which God’s love counts more than someone’s past or our own self-righteous conviction that we are the ones who are right? As Frederick Buechner wrote, “True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”

Copyright © 2025 Joanne Whitt all rights reserved.

Resources:
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Table Manners,” in The Christian Century, March 11, 1998
Gary Inrig, The Parables (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Press, 1991).
Leviticus 11:7
Isaiah 65:4, 66:17.
Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family,” March 18, 2007, http://www.fourthchurch.org/031807sermon.html.
Mary Hinkle, “Wherever you Are,” March 16, 2004, http://maryhinkle.typepad.com/pilgrim_preaching/2004/03/wherever_you_ar.html.