Only One Life…?

During this Easter Season we have been touching on the reality of life and death. Three years ago I observed that Eugene Ionesco’s, Exit the King is a clever play about life and death. Reportedly the Romanian-French Ionesco who died in 1994, said about the play: I told myself that one could learn to die, that I could learn to die, that one can also help other people to die. This seems to me the most important thing we can do, since we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die. The play is an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying.

Now I don’t want to be morbid, but I raise the subject for two reasons. First, Ionesco understood that because life is fleeting – as everyone in war-torn countries knows too well – we need to consider our values and priorities. Second, in Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son a key theme is our lostness: we look for life in the wrong places.

Throughout his ministry Jesus of Nazareth challenged us all to consider our hearts’ desires.

The opening lines of Luke chapter 15 reveal that two very different groups of people were in Jesus’s audience at that time – what we might call the sinners and the saints. The sinners were society’s outcasts, the fraudsters and the immoral; the saints were the religious establishment. The first group needed to learn that at the heart of God’s nature is mercy and forgiveness; the second needed to be shocked out of their self-righteousness. The two groups had two very different views about life and death.

Knowing that mindsets are very hard to shift, Jesus didn’t preach a sermon nor engage in debate. He told three stories – about a shepherd who had lost a sheep, about a woman who had lost a coin, and about a father who had lost two sons. I’ll focus here on the father and his younger son (Luke 15:11-24).

The story opens with the younger son asking his father for his inheritance. The son, by asking this implied that he wished his father were dead. Nevertheless, the father gave him what he wanted. But it was not long before the money was gone. Having no friends or credit line, the son was soon without food and homeless. Worse followed. With a drought and a crash in primary industry, the best he could do was become a day-laborer, feeding pigs. Even so, he starved. His thoughts turned to home – to his father, the farm, and the food.

The son weighed the odds. ‘Here I am, feeding pigs,’ he reflected. ‘The casual-workers on Dad’s farm are better off than me. I’m a fool. I’ll have to bury my pride and go home. I’ll have to tell Dad I’m really sorry I messed up and don’t deserve a thing. I’ll ask him to take me on as one of the hired-workers.’

Jesus’s story would have captured everyone’s attention. Some hearers would have been saying to themselves, ‘That’s me.’ Another group would have said, ‘That son doesn’t deserve to be forgiven’.

The critical question was how would the father react.

Like most fathers, he knew what his son was like and what he would do. But he still loved him. In fact, he’d been on the lookout for his return. And when word came that his son was on his way home, he immediately raced out to greet him.

We need to feel the impact of Jesus’s story. No self-respecting citizen in that culture would ever run down the street. He would walk with dignity and deliberation. Furthermore, this father wasn’t racing out to greet a son who had graduated with a doctorate and made his first million before he was twenty-five. The father’s action came at a personal public humiliation.

Yet the father not only ran but he threw his arms around his son and kissed him. The son, no doubt overwhelmed, was honest and expressed his sorrow and deep repentance: ‘Father, I’ve sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’  Period. Full stop.

He had planned to add, ‘Treat me as one of your hired servants.’ But he now realized this was not appropriate. For the first time he understood that he’d never really known his father, nor how much his father loved him. He had never appreciated the privilege of being a son.

What was the younger son’s problem? He wanted his father’s wealth so he could enjoy all the pleasures that took his fancy without accountability.

Here is heart of the human dilemma. We think that our possessions and the pleasures we pursue are the be-all and end-all of life. Reckoning they are secure we find they aren’t secure at all. We look for life in the wrong places because we’ve left God out of the equation of the meaning of life. We also forget that there is life beyond the grave for which we need to prepare.

Jesus’s great longing is for us to be honest and humble enough to say, ‘Lord, I know you are true and I know everything I have comes from you. Please forgive me for turning my back on you. Help me to honor you above all else in life.’

Can God find it in his heart to forgive us? Jesus also answers this. In verse 22 we read that before the younger son could catch his breath, his father was busy ordering new clothes, shoes, and a ring – the best of everything. The most elaborate and expensive feast was prepared, and the father tells us why: ‘For this my son was dead, now he is alive, he was lost but now he has been found.’

The Prayer of Humble Access in the Anglican Prayer Book takes up the principle of God’s willingness to forgive the repentant heart. Our prayer, addressed to the Lord whose nature is always to have mercy asks that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his (Christ’s) body and our souls washed through his precious blood…

We easily miss the force of the father’s words in Jesus’s parable, ‘For this my son was dead, now he is alive…’ We may have everything the world offers but until we turn to Jesus Christ in repentance, we are the walking dead. How truly wonderful it is that Jesus said he came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10).

Is the hope of life that we find in Christ alone something you have found? Is it something you want to pass on to family and friends? Let me encourage to obtain copies of The Jesus Story: Seven Signs to read for yourself and to pass on to others. You can use the button in the banner below or, if you are outside the US, you can get copies wherever you are through Amazon.

A prayer. Almighty God, grant that we, who justly deserve to be punished for our sinful deeds, may in your mercy and kindness be pardoned and restored; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.

© John G. Mason

Note: My comments on Luke 15 are drawn from my book, Luke: An Unexpected God, Second Edition, Aquila: 2019.