Sermonstudio

The first birth is extraordinarily exciting, isn’t it? My wife and I were married less than a year when our firstborn came along. We knew right away that she was the most beautiful, most intelligent, most promising human being that had ever come into this world!

Parenting the firstborn is an experiment in everything new. First smile, first coo, first steps, first words… One first we did not anticipate, however, was the first time our little Kristyn recognized herself in the mirror. We had often held her up in front of the mirror when we tried new outfits on her. “Isn’t she cute?”

For many months, Kristyn did not “see” herself when we did this. We were enamored by her wondrous beauty but she did not lock eyes with her own image reflected back. She was not self-aware.

Then one day it happened. We held her in front of the mirror again and suddenly she knew she was there. She held her own gaze. She smiled herself into smiling and laughed herself into laughing. She jumped up and down on the counter with her little legs as we held her there. She saw herself for the first time.

Reflected Identity
This is what happens to each of us when we read Jesus’ stories in Luke 15. They are interesting. They are cute. They are captivating. But suddenly, as we scan these words again, we are caught staring at ourselves. Jesus held the mirror up to us, and we see ourselves.

At first we do not even realize it. After all, Jesus talked about sheep and the one that was lost. We are not sheep farmers. This was a tale of folks who lived long ago and far away, wasn’t it?

And then Jesus told the tale of a woman who lost a coin. It dropped and rolled out of sight. She crouched and looked, she swept and moved furniture. She pointed her light into dark corners. Finally, the coin winked, and she reached back into the dusty spaces to reclaim it. She threw a party, and welcomed all the neighbors, sporting her repaired jewelry as she hosted the event.

Then came the big story of a wealthy man with two sons. The older boy was a typical first child ― rules and regulations, duty, hard work, rigor and righteousness. The younger son was a spoiled brat that always got what he wanted. He never had to work. He made those eyes and his parents melted all over him, even after party nights out with his friends, drinking, carousing, and destroying property.

The brothers clashed, obviously, and the hometown became too small for the worldly younger brat. He left home, coins jingling in his pocket. New friends “loved” him, as long as he was paying for everything. But one day the money ran out, and so did they.

Having never learned to earn his way, the wastrel became waste. Only an outcast immigrant farmer would pay him a few cents to do the dirty work every Jew thought reprehensible. He slopped the hogs and crawled up next to them at night.

In the wee hours of one restless morning, gnawing hunger in his belly and snorting hogs grunting their noisy dreams, he knew he had to head home. Not, mind you, as the proud son of his privileged family. He had lost that perch many types of bacon ago. No, he would grovel back, wimpering and crawling. His wealthy father sustained the local economy; surely there was a place for another hobo on the temp line.

Eyes were rolling and heads nodding as Jesus spun the story. Every family had a kid like that, every village knew its lost boys.

An Unusual Turn
But then came the Jesus twist. You know he does that. He tells a story, and we get hooked. He weaved a tapestry of things we know, and we are right there with him. He went down a side road we did not even know was there! Suddenly we see things from a completely different perspective.

So here comes the Jesus twist. The father was not angry but welcomed his lost boy home. Dad even threw a homecoming party. Meanwhile, righteous older brother was incensed. He did not want to see his worthless brother again, let alone lose his special place as the one and only in his father’s home.

When we go back and take a second look at these three stories, we realize that Jesus had been doing the “twist” all along. Think about these things:

• While we like to jump directly to Jesus’ most famous story, the one we often call the “Parable of the Prodigal Son,” we need to see that Jesus was deliberately stacking these three stories one on top of the other. They are related: a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost person. We don’t fully understand what Jesus wanted us to learn from the Parable of the Prodigal Son until we look at the other two parables that it is built upon.
• Second, we need to read the whole of Luke 15 to see the targets of Jesus’ stories. Jesus was with the rejects of Jewish society, we are told, the “tax collectors and sinners.” These were the lost people of that time, the outsiders who were not welcome at family gatherings or in places of worship. We might think that Jesus was telling these lost people that they could be found. That is what we would like to think. But notice that Luke told us something quite different was taking place: the religious leaders, Pharisees, and teachers of the law, happened by. They saw these social rejects, and they saw Jesus in the middle of them. They shook their heads and muttered about what a disgusting man Jesus was because of his association with those horrible nasties. At that moment, Luke said, Jesus turned to them, above the heads of the tax collectors and sinners, and spoke the three stories to them. In other words, Jesus’ parables in this chapter were not directed to “lost” people, but to “found” people; not to the outsiders but to the insiders; not to the rejects but to the self-righteous.
• Third, because few of us are middle-eastern sheep farmers, we may not catch the irony in Jesus’ first story. Most flocks of sheep in that day would have been about five to twelve animals. A shepherd was typically a young boy, sometimes a young girl, or maybe an old man. There would be a personal bond between this little flock and the shepherd who served as their daily guide and protector. But Jesus told of a man who had one hundred sheep. In other words, he was referring to a very, very wealthy man, probably in his late middle years, who owned vast tracts of land and employed many servants. This man would not likely be the shepherd with the flocks. He would have hired young boys, young girls, or old men to do that. Nor would he likely know exactly how many sheep he owned on any particular day: some were being born, some were dying, some were being bought or sold, some were being eaten. But in Jesus’ story, the very wealthy man not only knew how many sheep he had, but he was actively involved in the daily care of those sheep, and noticed when one little lamb was missing. More than that, when he realized a lamb had not returned to the sheep pen at the end of the day, he did not scold the hired shepherd of that particular flock within his herd, nor did he send that hapless youngster out to find the sheep he lost. Instead, the rich owner went on the quest himself, depriving himself of the rest and luxuries that he had a right to. Jesus was beginning to set the stage. He was not just talking about farmers in the area; he was making a clear analogy to God. God is the great shepherd, like David said in Psalm 23. But even though God does not have to involve God’s own self in our little and insignificant lives, God chooses to be personally invested in everything we are and everything we do. Remember ― Jesus was speaking to religious leaders, who were expected to be shepherds of God’s flock, and Jesus was speaking to those religious leaders as he sat among lost sheep! Hmmmmmm…. Perhaps God, the great wealthy owner of all the sheep was more concerned about the lost and the last and the least than are the local shepherds!
• Fourth, we are a bit perplexed about why a lost and found coin should be such a big deal, aren’t we? Perhaps coins meant more back then than they do now. Jesus told us that it was a silver coin. Still, why should its loss be so serious and its recovery so significant that the woman threw a party when it was found? She likely spent more on food for her friends and neighbors than the coin was worth in the first place! But this only shows how far separated we are from Jesus’ world. The coin was probably bored with a small hole near one edge. It had been slipped with nine other coins onto a leather thong as a necklace. Most certainly this had been given to the woman by her father as a wedding present. It was a testimony from her father of the great esteem he had for her. She wore the necklace every day. Everyone in the community knew it because they never saw her without it. So when one coin wore through to the edge and dropped off the leather thong, it was a serious matter. The necklace was incomplete, broken, less than what it was supposed to be.
• And if the woman ventured out into the market, or even spent time outside, greeting her neighbors, everyone would notice the lost coin immediately. That is why she was so intent on finding the coin, restoring the necklace, and celebrating the recovery with her whole village. She was incomplete without it! Then Jesus made the nudge again: so it is with God when just one “worthless” sinner is found and brought back home. Everybody in heaven sings and laughs and has a party!
• And that brings us to the big store, the main event. The parable of the prodigal son. There is, again, more here than first meets the eye. Allow me to list a number of things we do not always catch, from our distant time and culture:
• First, the young son who asks for his inheritance is actually making a public declaration that he wishes his father would die. There was no “inheritance” before the parent had passed on! To ask such a thing was to spit in the face of the father and declare him worthless in the mind of the son!
• So what happened next? I want to know! You want to know! We all want to know! But Jesus did not tell us. He dropped the father’s words on us like a blanket of love and then went quietly. He looked us in the eye until we grew uncomfortable. We do not know what to say, and Jesus will not say it for us.

Seeing Ourselves For The First Time
And that is where this parable, this unfinished story, becomes for us a mirror. Because we see ourselves for the first time, like our little daughter Kristyn did that day we held her in front of the reflective surface and she caught her own eye, when we look into this tale. We catch sight of ourselves first, in the selfish, stupid, sickened, and surprised eyes of the younger brother, the one who does not merit love and yet receives it from the father in abundance. We are the ones who come home to a father and a family we do deserve.

But wait! There’s more! Remember the way Luke 15 began? Jesus was with one group of people when another group of people sauntered high-mindedly on by! Who was Jesus with? He was with the lost, the last, and the least. He was with the tax collectors, sinners, and prostitutes. Remember the words in the story? He was with people like the younger brother, the prodigal son.

And then, remember to whom Jesus told the three stories: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son? Not to the lost boys around him! No! He told the stories to the proud Pharisees and teachers of the law who strode on past, shooting daggers from their eyes at those worthless ones. He told the stories to the righteous religious people who knew they were better than everyone else. He told the stories to the older son, the older brother, and those like him, who disdained the ungodly and happy-go-lucky sinners of this world.

We think we see ourselves in the eyes of the younger brother, the prodigal son ― and we do. But Jesus gently pointed our gaze in another direction, until we realize that we are not so much the younger son, the scandalous wastrel, as we are the old brother, the indignant, godly, righteous, holy, sanctified church people who have always done the right thing! We suddenly lock eyes with the older son and see our deeply dark and bitter and self-righteous souls. And we are shocked! We are indignant! And we complain to our Father that “grace is free, but it is not cheap,” ― that God should not lavish unrequited love on these terrible nasty folks who do not deserve it, like we do.

But Jesus held the mirror there long enough for us to recognize ourselves. Until all sanctimonious self-righteousness melted away in a muddy mess. And we were shocked at what we have become, who we thought we were, and what we really are.

And then… and then… and then came the strangest turn of all. Because the last gaze Jesus gave us, was to look into the powerful, tender, compassionate, gracious, loving eyes of our father ― our Father in heaven. We are reflected there too, aren’t we? We see ourselves in the mirrors of his eyes.

And we are loved.