Grace is something I think I’m just now, at this point in my life, beginning to understand.
Grace is doing something—or, having something done for you—that isn’t expected, isn’t deserved, isn’t merited in any way.
Grace is hard to give; grace is doing more for someone than you think they deserve, and why should you do that?
Grace is hard to receive; you can never pay back grace, you can never return the favor. All you can do is receive it; and for many of us, that’s hard.
Grace is what the father in the parable showed to his younger son.
Grace is what the older son couldn’t understand.
Two weeks ago, we heard the story of two sisters, Martha and Mary, and now, today, we have the story of another set of siblings; in this case, two brothers. And I can’t help but notice the similarities in these two stories.
You might ask, “What similarities?” Because, on the surface, they are very different stories.
Yet in both stories, the sibling who expected praise and recognition for their hard work didn’t receive it. In both stories, the hard-working sibling expected there to be a reprimand or a condemnation or a chastisement directed toward the other, not-so-hard working sibling.
But that reprimand, that condemnation, that judgment… never came.
In the story of Martha and Mary, Martha is the hard-working one. She’s so busy doing chores and tasks, that she isn’t able to be present to her guests. She expects to be praised, to receive recognition, for all her hard work, but instead, Jesus tells her that Mary has chosen the better part.
In today’s story, the older brother does all that is expected of him, and more. He dutifully stays at home, doing all his chores, and probably all of his younger brother’s chores as well, once the younger brother leaves and abandons the family.
When the younger brother returns, the older brother expects to be praised, to be recognized, to be lifted up as an example of how a good son should behave. The older son wants his father to say to the younger son something like, “Why couldn’t you have been more like your older brother? Look at how good he is…”
But just as Jesus did not praise Martha for all her hard work, so, too, did the father in this story not praise the older brother for all his hard work.
And, instead, the father welcomed the younger son back with open arms, and with tears of joy; and the father celebrated his younger son’s return with a great celebration for which he spared no expense.
And the older brother refused to go celebrate, because it all seemed so unfair to him. This isn’t how the world works! There is an understanding, that hard work is compensated, rewarded somehow. It’s a give-and-take.
And if someone hasn’t done their fair share, if they’ve taken without giving, then they owe a huge debt that must be repaid, before they can be readmitted and welcomed back.
That’s just how the world works!
In the workplace, if I give you eight hours of my life energy, you compensate me with a wage or a salary.
If I do anything for you, you owe it to me to return the favor. To not return the favor would place you in my debt.
And, if I stopped showing up for work, you would stop paying me. That’s just how things are, and everyone understands this.
In our Wednesday afternoon small group—the “brown bag Bible bunch”— we recently read a story about a man who wanted to sell his car; he put out an ad, and a potential buyer showed up, and wanted to test drive it. So the seller handed him the keys, and the guy took off.
Only then did the seller think, “Maybe I should have gone with him…”
Sure enough, the guy didn’t return.
The seller contacted the police, to report that his car had been stolen, and the police found the guy, and asked what he was doing with the car. The guy said, “that man handed me the keys…”
The guy who took the car didn’t understand that there was an expectation of payment. When the police told him that, he just said, “Huh. I didn’t know.”
It sounds ridiculous to us, right? How could you not know that that’s how the world works?
If you want something, you need to give something in return… you need to pay for it.
Diana Butler Bass wrote about this in her book, Gratitude. She wrote that first century society was shaped like a pyramid, and at the top was Caesar. Caesar raised armies, defeated enemies, built roads, and ensured the peace of the empire.
But none of this was free. There was an expectation.
In return for all Caesar did for them, the people owed a literal debt of gratitude to Caesar, which they paid in the form of taxes.
It was a debt that had to be paid. It was one’s duty to pay back the debt that was owed.
Because nothing is given freely. That’s just the way the world works.
So, in today’s scripture, the younger brother had some nerve, showing up, expecting to be welcomed in. He had already taken everything that was due to him, and more. He owed the father and the older brother so much; the debt had to be repaid.
But the father did not ask for any payment. The father set no conditions or requirements. There was no punishment, no judgment. The father just welcomed the younger brother, and in his joy, the father threw a big party in his son’s honor.
When the party started, the older brother was out in the field, working… because, of course he was! He was always working, to prove how good and loyal he was; to prove how deserving he was of his father’s love.
And when he found out that his father was throwing this huge, expensive party for his younger brother, he got angry, and refused to go in.
Didn’t his father understand how the world works? Why didn’t his father demand that the younger son pay back the debt he owed? Even the younger brother, before he returned, thought that maybe he could work off that debt by becoming one of his father’s servants. Even the younger brother knew how the world was supposed to work.
But the father just said, “Forget all that. You are my son! And you’re home!”
…And that is why grace is so hard.
The father in this story is not playing by society’s rules, the rules we all live by. He’s like the guy who didn’t understand that he needed to pay money in order to get the car…
Except the father probably did know the rules, but chose to ignore them. Whatever debt the younger son owed, the father chose to forgive.
Because if he insisted on living by those rules, and making his son pay off his debt, or place certain conditions on welcoming him back into the family, then that relationship between them would never be all that it could be, all that it was meant to be.
And restoring that relationship was the most important thing to the father.
So, he tossed society’s rules out the window. He forgave his younger son, forgave whatever debt the son owed to him, and welcomed him back, unconditionally.
The story never says whether or not the older brother ever went in and joined the party. At the end of the story, he’s still standing there, trying to decide, trying to figure out why his father is being so gracious.
It doesn’t make sense to him. It’s hard for him to accept. All his life, he had worked so hard to prove how worthy he was of his father’s love; his younger brother had done nothing to prove that he was worthy of love; just the opposite! Yet the father showed love to him anyway.
This was a hard thing for the older son to accept.
I bet, if he were around today, the older son would have a hard time with the idea of forgiving student loans. It’s been in the news lately, right? Just forgive the loans? But they signed the papers; they agreed to pay back those loans! They’ve got to live by the rules they agreed to!
Would the father in the story agree? Or would he see them struggling, working hard to just pay the interest, and not being able to get themselves established because of the debt that hangs over them…?
I guess this story forces us to ask ourselves: are we more like the Father, willing to toss out the rules in order to show grace? Or are we more like the son, insisting that we always play by the rules, no matter what?
Jesus talked about forgiving debts. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” And we think to ourselves, well, that debt language is kinda weird, he must have been talking in a general way about forgiving sins…”
But Jesus really did use the word debts. Amy-Jill Levine, in her book The Misunderstood Jew, wrote that “the line [about forgiving debts] does not promote some vague notion that God should forgive us for the occasional taking of the divine name in vain or for yelling at the cat. It goes directly to the pocketbook; it says, ‘Don’t hold a debt.’”
In the background of this idea of forgiving debts is the year of jubilee, talked about in the Torah. According to the laws handed down by Moses, every 50th year was to be a year of jubilee, when all slaves would be set free, all land returned to the original owners, and all debts forgiven.
Grace, and debt forgiveness, were a part of the laws God gave to Israel, laws meant to guide God’s people and ensure they lived in harmony with one another.
Now, scholars can’t tell if the year of jubilee was ever actually observed. Grace and forgiveness on that scale is almost unimaginable! It’s so radical! It’s so contrary to the way the world actually works.
Grace, shown on such a large scale, would be so radical.
Nevertheless, such a radical reordering of society is exactly what Jesus had in mind. How else do you interpret things like, “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first?”
The problem is, when you set out to completely upend all these rules on which society is built, it can get you into trouble. It can get you killed.
And Jesus was killed, by Rome, in collaboration with some prominent religious leaders who had aligned themselves more with Rome than with the way of God.
The way of God, the way of grace, was just something they couldn’t accept. It was too hard for them to accept, just like it was too hard for the older brother to accept, just like it’s so hard for many of us to accept.
Grace is doing something—or, having something done for you—that isn’t expected, isn’t deserved, isn’t merited in any way.
Grace is hard to give; grace is doing more for someone than you think they deserve, and why should you do that?
Grace is hard to receive; you can never pay back grace, you can never return the favor. All you can do is receive it; and for many of us, that’s hard.
Grace is what the father in the parable showed to his younger son.
Grace is what the older son couldn’t understand.
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