The Ninth Sunday After Trinity (August 1, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Six weeks ago, on the Third Sunday after Trinity, our Gospel reading was two parables: the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. Today, our Gospel lesson is the third parable in that series of stories Jesus tells which has commonly been called The Mercy Trilogy.

For context, the occasion for this trilogy can be found early in the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’” So he launches into this trilogy of parables as a rebuttal. The first story is that of the Good Shepherd who leaves his 99 sheep to find the one that is lost. The second parable is that of a woman who loses one of her 10 silver coins so she searches every inch of her house until she finds it. The third and final story is what we heard today, that of the Prodigal Son.

The story is familiar to all of us, I’m sure. The younger son demands his inheritance immediately instead of waiting until his father died. This would have been quite dishonorable to his father, yet the father obliges. The son takes his money and runs, going to a foreign land, where he squanders it on feasting, prostitutes, and all sorts of tawdry things to the point where he has nothing left. In his desperation, he takes a job tending swine so he can eat the pig slop. “And when he came to himself,” realized his station had fallen beneath even that of the servants in his father’s household. So he resolves to return to his home and seek a servile position, working for his father so that he can have his basic needs met.

On his journey back, his father saw him from far away and ran to meet him (a rather undignified act for a wealthy man of his station in that culture). The father gave his wayward son more than he expected or deserved — he clothed him in his best robe, slaughtered the fatted calf, and threw a great feast in honor of the prodigal’s return.

But of course, this gratuitous action didn’t please everyone. The older brother refused to go into the party, staying outside to stew. When confronted by his father, the older brother states, “these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf!” The father’s reply puts to shame the narrowness of the older brother’s mindset: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

The story, then, acts as a rebuttal to the objection of the Pharisees about the kind of company Jesus kept. Why did Jesus spend time with sinners? Because it is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick. Because “God desires not the death of a sinner” and “desires that all be saved.” Because all of heaven rejoices at the repentance of the sinner.

The parable acts as a mirror for us. At some point or another, odds are we have been both of the brothers. Because we are all born sinners, we have all been wayward and can identify with the younger brother. Maybe we left the Church out of rebellion, maybe we gave in and pursued the vices that beset us. Whatever we did, the parable reminds us that the Father was waiting for us with arms wide open and all of heaven rejoiced at our return.

Besides prodigality, however, another and arguably more serious risk lurks: self-righteousness. In fact, I would argue this is the more direct concern of the parable given who Jesus is speaking to. Self-righteousness becomes a risk for us when we forget that grace is gratuitous, and unmerited on our part; it is a gift. Grace acts as a constant reminder of our utter and absolute dependence on God. Biblically, we have an example of self-righteousness gone bad in Old Testament Israel, as St. Paul discusses in our Epistle reading from I Corinthians. Israel had the pillar of fire and cloud to guide them and they were delivered through the Red Sea, phenomena St. Paul links to baptism. They had the rock that g ave them water, which St. Paul says was Christ, the Living Water. Yet, even then, “God was not pleased for they were overthrown in the wilderness” because they forgot the gratuitousness of grace. This manifested in their actions: Idolatry, going after other gods instead of worshipping the one true God who liberated them from slavery; practicing immorality by disobeying God’s commandments; and testing God and grumbling against him, a kind of arrogance that the creature can dictate how their Creator should act. Paul states that their examples are “warnings for us not to desire evil as they did.” In light of Old Testament Israel’s story, those of us in the Church, the True Israel of God, must “take heed lest we fall.”

The prodigality of the younger brother is certainly prideful and self-centered because it’s bent on sheer self-gratification making it myopic. Its hedonistic tendency makes it a slave to the baser passions. Yet one could argue that the holier-than-thou syndrome of the oder brother is even more insidious and grievous because it is more clearly and directly pride, presuming the creature has an entitlement we do not in fact have. The prodigal at some point reaches rock-bottom when the money runs out and when the hedonistic thrill ceases. But the older brother’s spiritual pride causes him to constantly turn inward, not only away from his younger brother who had been lost but then found, but also from his father, the source of his being and blessing. So his self-righteousness alienated and isolated him from the other. In the older brother, then, we see exemplified the attitude of the Pharisees: self-righteous, prideful, and holier-than-thou.

So the text is a mirror for us because it becomes a metric or criterion by which we can measure our own lives. Are there places where we are a prodigal? Are there ways we allow our passions to run amok as we appease our flesh? Those passions, unchecked, will drag our own souls down to the pig sty. But perhaps even more pertinently, the text forces us to inquire of ourselves how we are like the older brother? Where do we have too much self-confidence? Where do we buy into the myth of self-reliance? Where do we turn ourselves inward and away from others? Who do we write off?

It’s for this reason that the Sacraments are so important. Medieval theologian Hugh of Saint Victor believed that there was a reason sacraments use material things like water, bread, and wine to convey grace: they teach us humility. In the Garden, Adam and Eve turned to material things, the forbidden fruit, out of pride; so in our redemption, we are subject to those material things of water, bread, and wine, to make us humble. Further, the Sacraments are all constant reminders of what Christ did for us. Baptism takes us up into his sacrifice; the Eucharist makes his Passion and Death present to us; Confession applies his propitiatory sacrifice to us and purges us of sin; Ordination makes a man a participant in Christ’s High Priesthood; and Marriage reminds us of how Christ is our Groom and we, as the Church, are joined to him as his bride. The sacramental life, then, is a life that is deeply and entirely dependent on our Lord. It is a recognition that we are the prodigal who has been restored purely by the grace of God, a recognition that should always keep us from becoming the older brother.