2020.06.21 | A Father's Love
A Father’s Love
Pastor Pepper
What wild and exuberant joy the Father has for his youngest son! I love imagining him dropping everything and running pell-mell, in a very un-father like way, to grab and hold and kiss his long lost boy.
Today’s scripture reading is a story, a story that Jesus tells to answer a simple but challenging question posed by those who are beginning to oppose him and his ministry among tax collectors and others they heartily disapprove of: Why does he eat with sinners?
One way of understanding the story Jesus tells us is to compare and contrast it with other stories that address the same theme. I did a little poking around in the folktale collections online and found a Ukrainian folktale that provides a useful comparison to the story that Jesus told.
I’ll tell you a shorthand version of the Ukrainian story, which is called “The Ungrateful Children and the Old Father Who Went to School Again.” If you want to read the full story, check out the link I put in the bulletin to a book called Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales on the World of Tales website.
The story goes like this:
Once upon a time there was an elderly man with four sons. When they grew up, he divided his estate among them and went to live with his eldest. He was treated fine at first but in time his eldest son and his family began to resent his presence and the resources it took to feed the old man. So he left that home and moved into his second son’s home, where the same problems took place.
Feeling uncomfortable with his treatment, the old man moved again to his third son’s house only to find the circumstances repeated. Alas, a final move to the fourth son’s house was met by the same problems and soon it became clear that none of his sons wanted him to live with them.
Depressed by his treatment the old man gave up and tearfully accepted his sons’ decision that he should go to school in another city where he could sit on a bench and eat out of a knapsack like the small children. On the long walk to this school, the man cried nonstop and was noticed by a rich man who asked him what the problem was. After he tearfully explained his situation, the rich man gave him a small chest filled with something that jangled and clinked and told the man what he needed to do. The old man took the chest and, arriving back at his home town, explained to his sons that it was a chest of money that he had buried in the forest when he was a younger man.
Promising to give the chest and its contents after his death to the son who treated him the best, the old man was then warmly received by his sons and treated by each of them like an emperor for the rest of his days.
After his death at a very old age, his sons gave a banquet in his honor and it was decided by the attendees that they had treated their father equally well and should divide the contents of chest four-ways. Each son gratefully made a large contribution in his name for special prayers at Church and the chest was finally opened! Only to discover that it was filled with glass and had no value whatsoever. The sons were enraged but the townspeople chuckled that the father had certainly learned a lot from his one day away from home at school.
There are many similarities between this Ukrainian tale and the story that Jesus tells. Both stories highlight that there are two fundamentally different ways to relate to people, whether they are your father or not. You can relate to someone as if they have intrinsic value or you can relate to someone on the basis of their utility to you or your utility to them.
In the Ukrainian story, despite having divided his wealth among his son, the old man was of no utility to the sons and their families, so they resented his presence and sent him away. The same two choices are present in the story Jesus tells, in a much more subtle fashion. The father is able to greet the prodigal son, who took his inheritance and squandered it on a dissolute life, with open arms because he loves him intrinsically — he loves him for who he is, his son, and he revels in his return and his presence. While we often feel great sympathy for the older brother who remained at home, working to support his father and to care for their farm, his concern about the father’s reception of his younger brother shows the same basic utilitarian approach of the four sons in the Ukrainian folktale, which is that he, the older brother, has value to the father because he is useful and his brother, who was extremely un-useful to the father and to the family, should not be so highly valued or rewarded. The father reminds the older brother gently that both he and his brother have intrinsic, not utilitarian, value to him.
Such is Christ’s answer to his opponents: these people, who you call sinners because you disapprove of their occupation or behaviors, have intrinsic value to me. I do not love and associate with them or with anyone solely because of their utility to me. This is divine love: being loved for who we are regardless of whether we are useful to you or not.
It is such a good time to examine the question of who we love and care for and why we love and care for them as well as how we will love and care for them going forward.
I’m thinking of both the emotional and physical well-being of our elderly and vulnerable friends and family as local shelter in place orders end even as COVID-19 continues to spread. Will we love them for their intrinsic value? Or only for their current utility to us? I am also thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement and observing that many of our racial problems are rooted in our failure and the failure of the police and social system to recognize that all people have intrinsic value, to both us and to God. As Keith Smith said at our recent Bible Study, we are praying for recognition of our common humanity.
The moral of the story — both the Biblical story and these folktales — is that we need to remember that other humans were not placed on this planet solely to serve our purposes or even the purpose of what we deem the greater good. Jesus invites us to examine who we value and why we value them. Because we ourselves are not divine, it’s highly probable that one or more of the ways we think about family, friends, and strangers, about different races, religions, and classes, falls into the danger zone of being overly-utilitarian. At the end of the story, wouldn’t you rather be the father who loves people for who they are intrinsically than the son who lives filled with doubt about the value of others?
My friends, we often say that God loves you beyond measure. It isn’t a story. Jesus sat with sinners like you and me because they had intrinsic value to him and to God. Make this your story too — love one another, and everyone you meet, as God has loved you. Amen.