Jesu Juva
St. Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
March 30, 2025
Lent 4C
Dear Saints of Our Savior~
On today’s menu it’s the parable of the prodigal son. Or is it? German theologian Helmut Thielicke turned this parable on its head seventy years ago. He published a volume of sermons on the parables of Jesus, which he titled: The Waiting Father. It was a not so subtle suggestion that our Lord’s famous parable is not primarily about the son and his sins and his reckless living. It’s about the Father who waits and watches for his son’s return home.
This father endures everything—dishonor, disgrace, mistreatment, and shame—all at the hands of his children. And yet this father never stops hoping, never stops enduring, never stops loving his wayward sons. He never disowns them. This waiting father rejoices in the return of his sons, is prodigal with his forgiveness, is quick to throw a party, and is outrageously lavish with his grace.
It all begins with a scandal. The younger son tells the old man to drop dead. By requesting his inheritance early, the unspoken message is: “Dad, I wish you were dead.” Words that make the Fourth Commandment blush for shame. But this father incredibly grants the request: He drops dead in a legal sense—divides his property between the boys—as should have happened only if he were six feet under.
As you might imagine, it rarely goes well for young men who suddenly inherit large sums of money. The younger son headed to a distant country with his newly acquired wealth and began to squander it in reckless living. And “reckless living” does not mean that he invested in the wrong mutual funds or occasionally forgot to balance his checkbook. No, as one wordsmith expressed it: “He whored with the best of them. He swore with the best of them. He gambled with the best of them. He drank with the best of them.” All that he had been given by grace—the inheritance, a good name, a father’s love—all that he wagered and wasted and tossed out like trash.
Hard times set in for the boy. Destitute and hungry, he took a job working in a gentile’s pig pen. I’m not sure where the closest pig pen is to Whitefish Bay. But in my years in Kansas and South Dakota, I can tell you that there’s little doubt when you’re in the vicinity of one. The smell and the flies are what start to give it away—especially after a rain on a hot afternoon. Slopping hogs is as bad as it gets for a good Jewish boy—for whom pigs were considered unclean in every way. When he started longing to eat what the pigs were eating, the young man finally came to his senses.
The pig pen has a way of doing that—of slapping sinners across the face and awakening them from their downward spiral. It should make us think of times in our own lives when we’ve found ourselves in the pig pen, so to speak—knee-deep in a sinful squalor of our own making—far away from our Father’s house and embrace.
But this is actually one of the best things about our heavenly Father: He sometimes allows you to wallow in the mess you’ve made, until you come to your senses and repent. Our sinful nature doesn’t much care for this kind of fathering. We’d prefer to have Him swoop in and bail us out of every sinful situation we dive into. In the pigpen you can either rail against your heavenly Father—blame Him for the mess you’ve gotten yourself into; OR you can just go home to your Father with a repentant heart.
That moment of repentance is depicted on the cover of today’s bulletin. The great Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer shows us the
prodigal son in the pigpen. Take a look at that engraving with me. Notice that the son is literally down on one knee with his hands folded—the posture of repentance. It’s also true that the prodigal son bears a striking resemblance to the artist himself. Might it be that Dürer has cast himself in the place of the prodigal? Don’t we all need to see ourselves there?
Notice also that he’s looking off into the distance toward home—toward his father’s house. And doesn’t his father’s house in the top right hand corner look remarkably like a church? Don’t we all need to see this place—this church—as the Father’s house—the place where repentance leads us—the place where we are welcomed and forgiven and embraced?
On his way home, the boy planned what he would say to his father:
Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.
I am no longer worthy to be called your son.
Treat me like one of your servants . . .
That little speech is the way we expect the story to go. It’s certainly what Jesus’ hearers expected. They expected the young man to return home on his knees, groveling, begging, pleading for a second chance, and promising to make things right.
But the last thing anyone would have expected is for the father to go running down the road, past the neighbors, to greet his wayward son. The last thing anyone would have expected is for the father to throw his arms around the boy and shower his son with kisses. The last thing anyone would have expected would be for the father to listen to the son’s confession of sin, but not even allow him to speak that third line about how he was going to make things right by becoming a servant. Before he can even get to that line, his father places the robe and the ring of sonship on the boy. He gives orders to kill the fattened calf and throw a party for this kid who was dead, but is now alive—who was lost, but now is found.
The last thing the religions of this world expect is for God to be merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. The last thing the religions of this world expect is a God who justifies sinners—while they are still sinners. The last thing the religions of this world expect is a God who shows undeserved kindness to sinners for Jesus’ sake.
The son never gets to say that line about becoming a servant. And this is important. He never gets to make a deal with dear ol’ dad—to make things right by his works. Our God doesn’t make deals. He strikes no bargains. Our God drops dead to save sinners. This is the God who, in Jesus Christ, dies for His enemies, who seeks and saves the lost, who scans the horizon for sinners so that He can meet them at the gate and gather them up in His embrace.
Like the prodigal son, we too have an older brother. His name is Jesus. He is the Son of God who left His Father’s home to join us in the pigsty of our sin and misery and death. Jesus did what the older brother in the parable did not do. He went out to seek us and find us, to rescue us from the slop of our sin, and bring us back home to the Father. Our older brother, Jesus, laid down His life as a ransom to save us, to buy us back. God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Jesus we might become the righteousness of God. He was executed as our sacred substitute, and reconciled us to the Father.
The older son in the parable, he behaves like a lot of firstborn sons. He’s the rule-keeper—the serious, stressed-out, straight “A” son. He can’t believe what a pushover his father is: “Lo, these many years I have served you, never disobeyed, yet you never gave me so much as a goat. But now this scumbag son of yours comes crawling back home after burning through your money with prostitutes and you roll out the red carpet.” To which the father essentially says, grab a glass and join the party. Your lost brother is found. Your dead brother is alive.
And there the parable ends. We don’t know what the older brother ends up doing. What will we do? We’ve walked in this son’s footsteps too. Will we get angry at the Father’s prodigal grace? Will we become judgmental, looking down our noses at those who can’t seem to get it right, wanting them to be “good” like us before we permit them to join us? OR will we grab a glass and celebrate? Will we learn to laugh out loud at the grace of God who wants all of His children—the rule-keepers and the rebels, the first born and the last born—at His eternal party? Will we come to Communion rejoicing that Jesus receives sinners and eats with them? Will we “get it,” that grace that’s bargained-for and worked-for isn’t grace at all? Will we draw strength each day from the fact that we who were dead in sin are now alive forevermore in Jesus? Whatever happens, of this we can be certain: Our Father is waiting to welcome us.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.