This past Sunday’s gospel reading was the very familiar passage known as “the prodigal son.” In the sermon I encouraged us to consider that this text is not about repentance and forgiveness, but about the persistence and the inexorability of love breaking into our world. It is clear in the text that the so-called prodigal son who has squandered his prematurely granted inheritance is not penitent. Instead in the text we are told that he collected his wits enough, “got smart” to concoct a plan of self preservation by asking to be hired on to his father’s farm just so he could eat and live. He would know that social convention would see to it that he was shunned by his family and the community in which the family lived, so egregious was his squalor, cavorting among gentiles and losing his wealth among them, a profound social and cultural faux pas.
This shunning in ancient Hebrew culture is called a qetsatsah, a ceremony at which a pot of ashes is dropped at the shunned one’s feet, a symbol of his death as to living equally in community….a sentence to live out one’s life in indignity. That was the custom. It was also a custom that men of station don’t run in public. We are told in the text that upon seeing his heretofore lost son, the father runs to greet him. Before the son can get out a word of his planned speech, the father has called for not a qetsatsah, but a glorious banquet, again utterly subverting convention….celebrating one who was lost, but is now found. The patriarch of the household is breaking boundaries for the sake of the beloved, the beloved being all the found of our world. This is God acting as God acts in Isaiah, raising up valleys, making the rough places smooth, clearing an inevitable path on which love travels….love that will not be denied. The notion that salvation depends on repentance is upended here. The cycle of repentance and forgiveness is a necessary dynamic in the cycle of life, but it is not the means of salvation according to Luke, but don’t doubt, this story is all about salvation.
Salvation is synonymous with dignity….and God will not cease from breaking barrier after barrier; custom and convention; boundary after boundary, even the boundaries we acquire on life’s journey around our hearts, or the boundaries we construct as well. God will break them all for the sake of the ones God seeks to find; and God will not rest until all are found, all of humankind; God will not rest until every impediment to love is broken …and what a banquet that will be. I can smell the feast; I can hear the music; I can see the dancing , all celebrating the reconciliation of the lost and the dignity of the lost of our world…God’s love is coming for all, all resistance notwithstanding. It comes with or without invitation… Know that we are worthy. This parable bears witness to a love that never shuns but only celebrates. Be prepared, put on your dancing shoes. The banquet of love is surely coming.
