Atheists

Atheists

Now the tax collectors and “sinners” were all gathering around to hear him. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Then Jesus told them this parable…

“There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a far country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.’

So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.

Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on.

‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’

The elder brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered has father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ (Luke 15:1-3; 11-32)

What do you see here? Two faces? A lamp stand, instead? Maybe neither one. But if that’s true, you’re just plain challenged, OK? The fascinating thing is that if you focus on either image for too long (and they’re both there), it gets harder and harder to see the other. Hmmmmmm.

OK, you can quit staring now.

So, who did you focus on in the parable? If you’re like most, you probably focused on the dead-beat who basically told his dad, “I wish you were dead. But since that ain’t happenin’, give me what I’m owed so I can get outta this God-forsaken place.” And then we marvel at the father’s reaction when the loser returns and the dad takes him back with open arms and no questions asked. Maybe it just makes us feel better about ourselves to think, “Wow. I’m not that bad!” The problem is that if we focus only on the prodigal, we miss the real message of the story because there’s two brothers in the parable (just like there’s two objects in the illusion), each of whom representing a different way to be separated from God. Separated? Separated.

In reading anything, it’s always good to pay attention to the context. So, in the first two verses of the chapter, we read that there were two groups of people who’d come to listen to Jesus. The first were the “tax collectors and sinners.” These folks corresponded to the younger brother. They didn’t observe the moral laws of the Bible, much less the rules for ceremonial purity followed by the religious elite. They partied, instead. And, like the younger brother in the story, they “left home” by leaving the traditional morality of their families. The second group of listeners, on the other hand, were the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law,” who corresponded to the older brother. They held to the traditional morality of their upbringing. They studied and obeyed the Scripture. They worshipped faithfully, and prayed constantly.

And with just a few words, Luke shows how very different each group’s response was to Jesus. In fact, the progressive tense of the Greek verb translated “were gathering” conveys that the attraction of the younger-brother types to Jesus was an on-going pattern in his ministry; kind of like moths to a flame. They were drawn to him. And their reaction puzzled and angered the moral and religiously upright. Luke summarizes it like this: “This man welcomes sinners and (even) eats with them.” Ooooooh.

So what’s wrong with that? Well, to sit down and eat with someone in the ancient Near East was a sign of acceptance. So, you can see their point, can’t you? “How dare Jesus reach out to scum like that? They never come to our church! He’s not telling them the truth like we do; he’s probably just telling them what they want to hear!” Harrumph, harrumph.

Well then, to whom was Jesus directing his parable? Shhhhhhhh. Don’t tell anyone, but it was directed to the second group, the scribes and Pharisees. You know, the religious know-it-alls. The parable’s a response to their holier-than-thou attitude, and takes an extended look at the soul of the “elder brother,” and climaxes with a plea for them to change their hearts.

Throughout the centuries, the almost universal focus on this parable has been on how the father freely received his repentant, younger son. You can even picture the original listeners to this story welling up with tears as they heard how God will always love and welcome them, no matter what they’ve done. But we sentimentalize the parable if we do that because the real targets of the story are not “wayward sinners,” but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. What? Yep. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. He wants to show them their blindness, their narrowness, their self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying their souls, and the lives of those around them.

The truth is that the original listeners were not likely melted to tears by this story, but were flabbergasted, offended and, well, …. ticked off! But the thing is that Jesus’ purpose in telling the story was not to warm their hearts, but to shatter their categories. And through this parable, Jesus challenges what nearly everyone had ever thought about God, sin and salvation. His story definitely revealed the destructive self-centeredness of the younger brother, but it also condemned the older brother’s moralistic life in the strongest terms. Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and the religious are spiritually lost; both life-paths are dead ends, and that every thought the human race has had about how to connect with God has been wrong.

“Older brothers” and “younger brothers” are with us today, sometimes in the very same family. You know the ones. The oldest sibling is the parent-pleaser, the responsible one who obeys the parental units, including their standards. The younger sibling, on the other hand, tends to be the rebel; the free spirit who prefers the company and admiration of his peers. The first child grows up, takes a conventional job, and settles down near mom and dad, while the younger sibling goes off to live in the hip/shabby neighborhoods of, let’s say, New York or L.A.

And these natural, temperamental differences have become more pronounced in the past several centuries. For instance, in the early nineteenth century, industrialization gave rise to a new middle class, the bourgeois, who sought legitimacy through hard work and moral integrity. However, in response to bourgeois hypocrisy and rigidity, communities of bohemians then came into being, kind of like the indie-rock scene today. Bohemians stressed freedom from convention, and personal autonomy.

To some degree, today’s culture wars are playing out these same conflicting temperaments and impulses. More and more people consider themselves non-religious, or even anti-religious. They believe moral issues are highly complex, and they are very suspicious of any individual, or institution, that claims moral authority over the lives of others. Despite (or, perhaps, due to) the rise of this secular bent, there’s also been considerable growth in conservative, orthodox religious movements. Shocked at what they perceive as an avalanche of moral relativism, many have organized to “take back the culture,” and take as dim a view of “younger brothers” as the Pharisees did.

So, whose side was Jesus on, anyway? In The Lord of the Rings, when the hobbits ask ancient Treebeard whose side he’s on, he answers: “I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side …. But there are some things, of course, whose side I’m altogether not on.” And Jesus’ answer to this same question, through the parable, is similar. He’s on the side of neither the irreligious nor the religious, but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly deadly spiritual condition.

Granted, it’s hard for us to realize this today, but when Christianity first appeared on the scene, it wasn’t called a religion. It was the “non-religion.” For instance, imagine a friend of an early Christian chatting with his Christian friend over lunch one day. “So, where’s your temple?” “We don’t have one,” the Christian would reply. “But how’s that? I mean, where do your priests work?” “Uh, we don’t have priests,” the Christian would say.

“But … but,” the friend would sputter, “where’s the sacrifices made to please your god?” The Christian would have responded that Christians didn’t offer sacrifices anymore because Jesus was the temple of all temples, the priest of all priests, and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

No one had ever heard anything like this before. So, the Romans called them “atheists,” because what the Christians were saying about spiritual reality was unique and couldn’t be classified with other world religions. This parable, then, explains why the Romans were absolutely right to call them atheists. And the irony shouldn’t be lost on us as we stand in the middle of our modern culture. To most people, Christianity is religion and is moralism. The only alternative to it, besides some other world religion, is pluralistic secularism, i.e., a system which is not under the control of any religion or singular belief system. But from the beginning, it wasn’t that way: Christianity was recognized as something else entirely.

The point is that the religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, while the ones estranged from religious and moral observances were intrigued and attracted to him. We see this throughout the New Testament. In every case where Jesus meets a religious person and a sexual outcast (Luke 7), or a religious person and a racial outcast (John 3-4), or a religious person and a political outcast (Luke 19), the outcast is the one who connects with Jesus and the elder-brother type is the one who simply doesn’t get it.

Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious, while simultaneously offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. But today, for the most part, our churches don’t seem to have this same effect. The kind of outsiders that Jesus attracted are anything but attracted to today’s contemporary churches, even the most avant-garde. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people, while the broken and the marginal avoid church altogether. And that can only lead to one conclusion: if our preaching and our practice do not have the same effect on people's lives as Jesus’ had, then maybe we’re not declaring the same message that Jesus did.

In other words, if our churches and our lives aren’t appealing to the younger-brother types, maybe it’s because we have a lot more older-brother types sitting in our church pews than we think.

Ouch.

Grace,

Randy