Outcasts
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. (Luke 15; 1-2; 11-12)
When reading the third parable of Jesus’ “lost” trilogies in Luke 15, we tend to concentrate on the flight and return of the younger brother – the so-called, “Prodigal Son.” Though not necessarily wrong, limiting the parable to such a narrow view misses the meaning of the parable. In the parable there are two brothers, each of whom represents a different way to be alienated from God, and a different way to seek acceptance into the kingdom of heaven. And the setting that Luke provides for Jesus’ teaching is crucial to the parable’s understanding.
In the first two verses, Luke tells us of two groups of people who’d come to listen to Jesus. The first were the “tax collectors and sinners.” Jesus used this group of men and women to correspond to the younger brother of the parable. These folks observed neither the moral laws of the Bible, nor the rules for ceremonial purity followed by the religious faithful of their day. They engaged in “wild living,” and like the younger brother they’d “left home” by leaving the traditional morality of their families and society. The older brother in the parable was represented by the second group of listeners, i.e., the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law.” This group held to the traditional morality of their upbringing. They studied and obeyed the Scripture; they worshipped faithfully and prayed constantly.
With great economy Luke shows how very different each group’s response was to Jesus. The progressive tense of the Greek verb translated “were all gathering” conveys the notion that the attraction of the younger brother types to Jesus was an on-going pattern in his ministry; they continually flocked to him. This phenomenon puzzled and angered the moral and the religious, and Luke succinctly summarizes their complaint: “This man welcomes sinners and [even] eats with them.” To the religious, this was a huge moral no-no since to sit down and eat with someone in the ancient Near East conveyed acceptance. In other words, the religious were saying, “How dare Jesus reach out to those people? Why, they don’t even come to church.”
So while many of us gravitate toward Jesus’ teaching about the prodigal, it’s the second group – the scribes and Pharisees – that are really the object of Jesus’ teaching, and it’s in response to their religious attitudes that Jesus shares the parable. The parable of the two sons takes an extended look at the soul of the elder brother, and then climaxes with a powerful plea for the older brother to change his heart. Throughout the centuries the preaching of this text has almost exclusively focused on how the father freely receives his penitent younger son. You can even imagine Jesus’ original listeners’ eyes welling with tears as they heard how God will always love and welcome them, no matter what they’ve done. But we overly sentimentalize the parable if that’s our only takeaway.
The targets of the story are not “wayward sinners,” but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. He wants to show them their blindness, their narrowness and self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying not only their own souls, but the lives of the people around them. It’s a mistake, in my opinion, to think that Jesus tells this story only to assure younger brothers of his unconditional love.
It’s highly unlikely that the original listeners were melted to tears by this story. It’s more likely that they were thunderstruck, offended and maybe even infuriated. Jesus’ purpose was not to warm their hearts, but to shatter their categories. Through this parable Jesus challenges what nearly everyone has ever thought about God, sin and salvation. Jesus’ story reveals not only the destructive self-centeredness of the younger brother, but it condemns the elder brother’s moralistic life in the strongest possible 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. And despite the passage of some 2,000 years since its original teaching, older brothers and younger brothers are still among us; they live in our society, and sometimes in the very same family.
Not to over-generalize, but the oldest sibling in a family is often the parent-pleaser, the responsible one who obeys the parental standards. The younger sibling tends to be the rebel, a free spirit who prefers the company and admiration of his or her peers. The first child grows up, takes a conventional job and settles down near Mom and Dad. The younger sibling, on the other hand, goes off to live in the hip-shabby neighborhoods of Hollywood or Las Vegas.
These natural, temperamental differences have been accentuated in more recent times. In the early nineteenth century, industrialization gave rise to a new middle class – the bourgeois – which sought legitimacy through an ethic of hard work and moral rectitude. In response to perceived bourgeois hypocrisy and rigidity, communities of bohemians arose, like the indie-rock scenes of the 70’s. Bohemians stressed freedom from convention and personal autonomy. It’s no different today.
To some degree, the so-called culture wars are playing out these same conflicting temperaments and impulses today. More and more people consider themselves non-religious, or even anti-religious. They believe moral issues are highly complex and are suspicious of any individual or institution that claims moral authority over the lives of others. Despite, or perhaps because of the rise of this secular spirit, there’s also been growth in today’s conservative, orthodox religious movements. Alarmed by what they perceive as an onslaught 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 is Jesus on? In The Lord of the Rings, when the hobbits ask the 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.” Jesus’ answer to this question, through the parable, is similar. He is on the side of neither the irreligious nor the religious, but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly deadly spiritual condition. It’s hard for us to realize this today, but when Christianity first came to prominence, it was not called a religion. It was the non-religion.
Imagine the neighbors of early Christians asking them about their faith. “Where’s your temple?” they’d ask. The Christians would reply that they didn’t have a temple. “But how can that be? Where do your priests work?” The Christians would have replied that they didn’t have priests. “But … but,” the neighbors would have sputtered, “where are the sacrifices made to please your god?” The Christians would have responded that they didn’t make sacrifices anymore. Jesus himself was the temple to end all temples, the priest to end all priests and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. No one had ever heard anything like this. So in an effort to find a label for this new, religious movement the Romans called them “atheists” because what the Christians were saying about spiritual reality was unique and could not be categorized with the other religions of the world. And Jesus’ parable explains why they were absolutely right to call them atheists.
The irony of this should not be lost on us, standing as we do in the midst of the modern culture wars. To most people in our society, Christianity is religion and moralism. The only alternative to it, besides some other world religion, is pluralistic secularism. But from the beginning, it wasn’t so. Christianity was recognized as something else entirely. The crucial point here is that, in general, religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, but those estranged from religious and moral observance were intrigued and attracted to him. We see this throughout the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life. In every case where Jesus meets a religious person and a sexual outcast (as in Luke 7), or a religious person and a racial outcast (as in John 3-4), or a religious person and a political outcast (as in Luke 19), the outcast is the one who connects with Jesus and the elder-brother type does not. In fact, Jesus said to the respectable religious leaders of his day that “the tax collectors and the prostitutes enter the kingdom before you.” (Matt. 21:31)
Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. Tragically, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even the most avant-garde. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated, or the broken and the marginal, avoid church which can only mean one thing: if the preaching of our ministers and the practices of our members do not have the same effect on the people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, maybe it’s because we’re populated by more elder brothers than we’d like to think.
Which one are you? Jesus encourages us to be neither.
Grace,
Randy
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