Demoted
Joshua 5:9-12; Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32

March 18, 2007


Deep into the fasting of Lent, food is on our table. The Pharisees are swarming around Jesus and the worst thing they can mumble and murmur against him is, “He associates with a disgusting sinful crowd and he eats with them!” You are who you eat with in most social circles. It did not really matter what ideas Jesus taught, for his table mates and the kind of food he ate mattered a lot more.

You are what you eat too. Before Jesus’ table talk gets back to the main menu, let’s recall what it was like to eat manna. It was the kind of food you instinctively have to ask, “What is this?” And that is exactly what ‘manna’ means in Hebrew - what is it? Sweet droppings of the digestive tract of a certain desert insect is not what you really want to hear before you begin to eat, but since the Israelites had no choice of food in the wilderness, since their freedom narrowed their menu, they quickly realized that this was God’s bread from heaven. They mumbled and murmured about it, however, all the way.

Forty years they were sustained on this stuff, always enough for one day only, so that it became a discipline of how to live by grace. But now, Israel has arrived in the Promised Land, walked through the River Jordan and they began to eat from the land flowing with milk and honey. And the manna stopped coming. Now they were all grown up, weaned, and from now on had to decide what to eat for themselves - and with whom to eat.

The younger brother no longer wanted to eat at home. Not that his desire to go elsewhere is unusual, least of all in Saskatchewan, but in his requiring his share of the inheritance from his father, he humiliated and bankrupted his father. “You are dead to me” is the translation of his demand. The father did not hold back or remonstrate. The younger son did not hold back either and spent all of his father’s fortune on riotous living in a foreign land. He did not go to make his fortune, he went to spend his father’s fortune. And his fortune was played out in an ensuing famine that ravaged the land.

A famine means there is no food, a fast that is not voluntary and therefore not a true fast. The son attached himself to a person with pigs and he fed the pigs, coveting and probably sneaking some of the pig slop on the side. This is as low as a Jew can go, an uncleanness virtually seeping into his DNA. He had become a Gentile.

He came to himself amidst the pigs and their disgusting food. This is not some modern English expression, but the original words. Obviously, he had left his real self, his real mind, behind in his riotous living. Whether this coming to himself was motivated by an authentic act of contrition and repentance is not possible to say for sure. For sure, he knew what he needed to say to his father. “I have sinned against you and against heaven.” That is, I have hurt and humiliated you undeniably and moreover, what I did was just plain wrong.

Some have said that he was conniving in his strategy, that he was still self-centred, that he was going to manipulate his father once again. But clearly, the young man was definitely willing to demote himself from the one status he still possessed, that of a son. He was willing to be a slave, and by now he had good practice being a slave.

By now our minds are all scurrying about, trying to pin down just who we are identifying with this time. The elder brother still is in the on deck circle, of course, and the father hasn’t yet revealed himself totally. Who is the most prodigal of the three: the spendthrift lad, the repressed and stingy older brother, or the criminally generous father?

Karl Barth offers a different possibility: the prodigal younger son is Jesus, who asks for his father’s divine inheritance and travels to a foreign land where all of God’s children are human and obviously don’t comprehend the godly way of life. Human life isn’t easy and there are problems and suffering and famines. Being reduced to live at a level humble beyond his imagination, a level called sin, he came to himself and emptied himself of divinity, not as something to be grasped, and became fully human returning to his father’s home to be a slave. As Jesus would say regarding another banquet, when you allow yourself to be demoted, you will only be asked to come up later and sit in a higher seat of honour.

Outside the father’s house the moment comes when the father catches sight of his lost son and runs to greet him. An old man then never ran, for there was no dignity in that; and no dignity in that father, just a superfluous love and joy. The young man had his speech prepared, but he was so surprised by the father’s running all-embracing joy that he couldn’t spit it out. We hear nothing more from this son as he is surrounded by joy, by music and dancing and kisses, and by a fatted calf, the third of this trinity of Lenten foods.

There is another self-centred son in the family, the one who never left, the son of the father’s house as he was called back then. He virtually ran up to the father to complain bitterly, declared that he had been a slave to his father all these years! But he saw no joy, either in his father’s sharing of his possessions - he had received the other half of the inheritance, remember - or in the exuberant joy of the resurrection of the dead.

All I have is always yours, the father tenderly reminds him. Yet the elder brother never recognized the extravagant joy of his father, always willing to include and to share. He could not stand a father who was so joyful and so overflowing with gifts, as if they would never run out. All he could see and understand was to get his share and that meant staying put, never leaving, keeping his position at all costs, and making certain that no one else received more than he deserved, especially a stranger which his younger brother was officially now. He would never consider demotion.

All I have is always yours. That includes food, whatever it might consist of - manna, pig slop, fatted calf, pot luck - for food is more than nourishment, it is the occasion for joy and community and for celebrating that one who was lost, now is found, and is eating with you. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see. All I have is always yours.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan