It may, in fact, be the most important question we ask ourselves this Lent: Where am I standing?
Am I in the sty? In the field? On the porch?
All three locations capture the heart of the spiritual journey, and all three have ramifications for accepting the grace that God wants to slam us with.
Yes, you heard that correctly: to be slammed with grace is exactly what our hearts should be seeking in this life’s journey. But are we?
The parable of the Prodigal Son has become so familiar to us that we often take the story for granted. By the time the older son appears on the scene, we’ve already started mind-drifting, telling ourselves we know the moral already: don’t be like the younger son; and really -- when it comes right down to it -- don’t be like the older one, either.
Yet, if that’s what we walk away with, we’re missing the point of Jesus’ story: each of us, at the heart of who we are, reflect the lives of both brothers, often both at the same time … but only one of the siblings shows us how to move from brokenness to healing and from darkness to light.
I’ve always been so quick to judge the younger son’s actions, faulting him for taking his inheritance early; accusing him of sinning boldly; and stating with pomposity that he certainly gets what he deserves for his actions – starvation and abandonment.
What I failed to see, however, was the core of the son who ran far away from the Father: in his reckless, he thought the shiny things of this world could fill his hunger; in his youthfulness, he thought he could make it on his own. But when he realized he had hit rock bottom – when he came to see that it was in the pig sty where grace found him – he got up.
And that’s what I missed in this story: the courage of the younger son to return home to the Dad whom he abandoned and considered “dead.” The courage it took to come back Home.
That younger brother/younger son had no idea whether his father would accept him again. By all rights, his Dad didn’t have to forgive him; Dad could have slammed the door in his face. And who could blame him? Shame me, hurt me and wish I were dead: why wouldn’t I do the same in return to you?
And yet knowing all this, the son started walking back anyway, still covered in the filth he was living it – pig slop clinging to every part of him.
And it was in that space of coming back that the father ran to meet him. The son didn’t even get the apology out of his mouth, and Dad came running, filled with compassion. Suffering with the son who suffered. Loving the broken son even as he was still defiled by the remnants of the sty.
Grace slammed the younger son in the “rock bottom” of the distant country and the Father met him on the way back with unspeakable love. Beautifully, the son accepted the mercy – he spoke aloud his sorrow to the father – and he was welcomed into the House with robe, ring and sandals: all symbols of his return to wholeness and holiness.
The younger son courageously received mercy, and it changed everything.
The older son, on the other hand …
I feel for him. Why? Because I have been him; I still am in more ways than I would care to admit. I stay in the field and work, but within the depths of my heart I am seething. Why am I the only one working hard? Why am I always the obedient one? Why does the Father keep looking off in the distance for that no-good brother of mine? Doesn’t he see how good I am?
The real tragedy of the parable of the prodigal son is not so much the sin of the younger brother, but the hardness of heart of the older one: the one who, to the world’s eyes, is doing everything right. The one who feels he deserves the goat on which to feast.
And yet, even to him comes the love of the same Father who ran to the younger boy. Now, he comes again off the porch to the older son who clings not to pig slop but to jealously, bitterness, and resentment. An older brother unwilling to show mercy or receive it himself.
And yet, even to his closed heart, the Father calls out: “My son, everything I have is yours. You are here with me always …”
Here in my heart. Embraced in my mercy.
But the question implied: Will you accept it?
The beauty of the parable is that we really don’t know what the older son chooses. And there’s a reason for that. His choice is ours, too.
Will we accept the Heart that longs for us to turn-over the bitterness, the anger, the need to be perfect in the eyes of others? Will we speak out the pain and hurt we’ve been chained to, just as the younger son spoke aloud his own pigsty, distant country sins to the Father?
How sad is it to live a life that never fully accepts the mercy … that never comes out of the fields and into the House? Equally so, how tragic that the older son could not extend the mercy to his brother. For therein lies the final piece of this tale:
As the Father, so must we be. As a Church and as individual disciples, may we always be willing to run off the porch and meet others who seek to come back, no matter where they’ve been. In a world filled with hatred and jealousy – a world so unwilling to forgive these days – why not be the ones who love all the way to the Cross?
Perhaps this fourth week of Lent is challenging us: Imagine being the compassion of the Father for another who has been so lost, so broken and so alone and with all the courage he or she could muster-up, we run to embrace them.
Many year ago, while I was in seminary formation in a working-class town on the outskirts of Milwaukee, I met a young woman who had recently started her own business – a coffee shop in a downtown strip mall that had seen better days. In conversation one day, after having wished her success at her new venture, she said to me: “I never thought I would make it. I was so lost – drugs, drinking excessively, sleeping around, you name it. But then I hit rock bottom, and God finally broke through.”
For a while, by her own admission, she was in a pretty good place. “But then I became super judge-y. Critical of others who were in the place I once was. I thought I was holier than thou because I couldn’t understand why others didn’t want to give up their broken ways.”
What changed, I asked?
“Someone came into the coffee shop and said right to my face: ‘I thought you were a Christian. Could have fooled me with your attitude toward those of us who are still a mess.’ I realized then I only accepted the grace for myself; I wasn’t willing to share it.”
By 2008, she changed the direction and purpose of her shop, making sure she offered a hot cup of coffee and pastry, plus a listening ear and compassionate heart, to anyone who came in seeking warmth in every way possible.
The name of her business now? Holy Grounds.
Holy indeed …
As for us, what ground are we standing on now: the pigsty, the field or the porch?
More importantly, where is God asking us to go?