It is hard
to wait while someone you love “hits bottom.” What will it take before someone
sees the error of his or her ways, and starts to make positive changes? Many
people go through multiple failures. In fact, I would almost guarantee we all
go through a number of what are seen as failures in our lives. We fear getting
sucked down with them. Melody Beatty wrote the classic book, “Co-Dependent No
More,” about the tendency to enable people to live with dysfunctional
behaviour, under the guise of “helping” them.
How often
did the parent in this parable think of his son, praying to God for his safety?
Did the father lie awake at night, heartsick and unable to sleep? When he saw
his son finally coming home, was it because he looked down that road several
times every day for years, waiting and hoping? Did the father ever blame
himself? We focus on the Prodigal Son, because that is the part of the story we
like the most. But we could also rename this story the “The Long-Suffering
Parent,” not necessarily the role we want to play in life.
The
character of the older brother might suggest the title, “The Enabling, Doting,
Ungrateful Father.” This is also the parable of the “Judgmental, Self-Righteous
Older Brother.” Here in Luke’s gospel, (Chapter 15) religious leaders were
upset with Jesus for eating with sinners and tax collectors. Jesus was giving
aid and comfort to sinners. What an enabler! Shouldn’t he let them hit bottom?
What kind of message is he sending our youth? Are these religious leaders, clergy
if you like, the jealous older sibling guarding their role as first in line,
which they believe they have earned through their own hard work?
Do you know
the song of praise, “Come As You Are, That’s How I Want You” (Deidre Browne)—
This song is beautiful, gentle, simple, and very well known. A good song to
start one thinking about what Jesus had to say about any reconciliation. We
need to note that the ministry of Jesus was an incarnation of both grace and truth,
of compassion and credibility. Which is to say, if not “one tittle of the law”
was sacrificed in his proclamation, neither was a single wounded soul bypassed
because of
legalisms.
The kingdom
Jesus proclaimed is the same kingdom of God he enacted, and it is the same
kingdom to which he summons creation. The church is to proclaim and practice
reconciliation, that being the essence of the kingdom: the reconciliation of
all of us to God and the reconciliation of each of us to the other and to
creation, and neither the proclamation nor the practice of reconciliation can
finally exist without the other. We are to be a means of grace and a herald of
truth—not either/or. Either emphasis, without the counterweight of the other,
leads to ruin.
The
“hospital for sinners” model is one model which can leave believers awash in
what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,” namely, “grace as a doctrine, a principle,
a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love
of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God . . . the justification of
sin without the justification of the sinner.” The “museum of saints” model, on
the other hand, can chill nonbelievers (and even the faithful) with a cold and
impassive shoulder. An austere, compassionless rendering of the gospel leaves people
knowing what they are not (righteous) but not necessarily what they are
(forgiven).
In either
view, what might be called true doctrine and true community seem independent of
each other. For Saint Paul, however, authentic community and particular
doctrinal confessions of the gospel are interdependent. The church is not a
group of volunteers who have chosen Christ, but saints chosen by Christ—called
and given identity through a particular confession and hope: truth and grace;
ministry and message; not one without the other. Let us be reminded that Jesus draws
us to all the characters in this parable of the “Good Samaritan:” not just to
the heart-warming story of hitting bottom and changing for the good.
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