Our Father and His Three Sons

Our Father and His Three Sons

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            There are times when a person who likes to write feels wholly drained, and there is a feeling that maybe this time you will never have another thought in your head about which to write.  Perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing since to the making of books and the writing of blogs there is no end.  (Ecclesiastes 12:12 sort of)  Sometimes I think maybe I might never write anything again.  But then I read something or think something and suddenly I feel the compulsion to throw my two cents into the hopper of human opinion and find myself writing a new blog.  On this occasion it was the reading of a tweet by Christena Cleveland that got me thinking.  She wrote:  “Everybody has a story that’s worth listening to, even oppressors.  The moment we lose compassion for the oppressors, we oppress ourselves.”

            I can imagine someone disagreeing with that statement and coming up with some good reasons why they disagree.  But what I am going to write about is how this insight helps me to see more deeply the message of one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, which would be the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke.  In the context, Jesus’ preaching is drawing all sorts of people to hear him, but some of Israel’s religious leaders are critical that this is leading him to be too closely associated with sinners and tax collectors.  Jesus tries to answer his critics by telling three stories, a story of the shepherd who seeks out the one lost sheep, of a woman who seeks for her lost coin, and for the prodigal son who is embraced by his father when he comes home after wasting all his inheritance.  I am sure this is one of many people’s favorite chapters in the Bible.

            We perhaps don’t think of Jesus as associating with oppressors, but a lot of Judeans in Jesus’ day did think of tax collectors as oppressors or at least as quislings who cooperated with Rome against the Jewish people.  Tax collecting in the Roman Empire wasn’t exactly a benign fairly operated work of good government.  The Romans tried to keep their bureaucracies to a minimum.  In the work of tax collecting they did that by farming out the responsibilities of gathering taxes.  The system tended to be corrupt.  Rome wanted its taxes, and those who collected taxes for Rome could charge a fee to help them make a profit.  Rome tended to look the other way if some tax collectors charged large fees or used brutal ways to get the necessary tax payments.  Rome wanted its taxes and tributes, to not be bothered with collecting taxes, and to have no open rebellion.  It was sort of the equivalent to a modern nation known for having corrupt police.  The story goes in one country about a policeman complaining about his low wages.  The story goes like this:  “A policeman was recruited from a province far from the capital.  He was told how much he would get paid in the capital city and took the offer at once.  But then he discovered that the raise he had received in income was more than covered by the increase in expenses, as the nation’s capital was a notoriously expensive place to live.  So the policeman told his police commander that he couldn’t live on his income in the new city job.  The commander looked at him and said, “What is wrong with you?  We give you a badge and a gun and you can’t earn enough to live on?”  That is what one sort of thinks being a tax collector was like in the Roman Empire.  Corruption seemed written into the system, charging people lots of money for the taxes to be sent to Rome so Rome could rule over Judea was something few Judeans wished to see continue.  It was especially frustrating to see people willing to be tax collectors for the Roman government which continued to oppress Judea.  That was how a lot of Judeans saw it.  That was how the Pharisees saw it.  But Jesus saw them as people needing redemption.

            On the other hand as sinners and tax collectors and others who had little standing in Israel came to believe on Christ and seek him in order to receive God’s work of redemption, those like the Pharisees who rejected Jesus’ ministry out of hand then became oppressors of the people seeking God’s redemption in Christ.

            It seems to me that Christ is showing that he came to redeem sinners, whether they were sinners that everyone saw as sinners, or respectable people that people viewed less as sinners.  He came also to show that God’s desire for sinners was to show mercy to them and to bring them to a dynamic redemption in Jesus Christ.

            It is interesting how both groups distrusted the other and how in both groups were people who were oppressive against those whom Christ had come to save.  Jesus was speaking to tax collectors and teaching them to take only what was actually coming to them.  Zacchaeus was a rich tax collector described in Luke 19.  He demonstrated his understanding of redemption by repaying those he had wronged and throwing in a punitive damages award.  He had heard Jesus and had been moved to accept Christ’s redemption on Christ’s terms.  The Pharisees had to learn that when they objected to Jesus’ offer of mercy and redemption to someone, that they were more misunderstanding the ideas of God’s justice and mercy than they were serving them.  Our Lord wanted to show them mercy and was seeking to explain to men how they could receive mercy.  But because the Pharisees believed the tax collectors were oppressors outside the mercy of God, they were blinding themselves about God’s mercy.  Therefore they were failing to believe that God was desirous of forgiving sinners.  They viewed God as one who had to be convinced to forgive sinners.

            There was an element in Jesus’ teaching to the Pharisees about the brothers in the Prodigal son parable that must have gotten the Pharisees’ attention.  Jesus described the parable with an older brother and a younger brother.  The younger brother had wanted his inheritance, had taken it, and had wasted it in riotous living.  But when the younger brother came back to the homestead, their father raced out to meet him, killed the fatted calf and threw a party like the younger son had never done anything wrong.  The older brother, who had remained loyal grew upset at the younger brother and became angry with both God and his younger brother.

            Do you know of another story like this told in the Bible?  I suspect the mention of an older and younger brother might have reminded these men who knew their Bibles of an Old Testament story.  The older brother became upset when his younger brother’s sacrifice unto God was accepted and his was rejected.  God explained to the older brother was sin was trying to take control of him and to drive a wedge between him and his younger brother.  God told the older brother that he needed to master sin before it mastered him.  Instead the elder son just got angrier.  He went out and killed the younger brother and hid his body in a field.  Of course the older brother was Cain whose sacrifice was rejected for he did not gain control over his wrath and anger towards the younger brother, and so he killed Abel.  I suspect when Jesus finished telling his parable recorded in Luke 15, these Jewish leaders understood that he was telling them they could not use their place as elder brother to limit and minimize God’s mercy to others.  They could not let their enmity with the tax gatherers as oppressors keep them from seeing these tax gatherers as persons whom God loved and desired to know his mercy and grace.

            We are accustomed to thinking of the Prodigal son story as having two brothers.  But in reality there is a third brother who was speaking to the other two brothers.  He was the elder brother in all the ways that the elder brother of the story of the prodigal son was not.  He wanted to see his younger brothers redeemed, however much they were described when he came to them as sinner, oppressor, religious bigot, tax-collector, or Pharisee.  He wanted them to embrace the ministry of reconciliation he came to bring into the world.  He was willing to suffer and die on our behalf to accomplish this redemption.  It is said of this elder brother that he is not ashamed to call us his brethren.  (Hebrews 2:11)  This is why there is so much truth in what Christena Cleveland said for when we lose compassion for the oppressors, we oppress ourselves.”  Either we make our journey in Christ’s redemption on our behalf or we oppose him as he shows mercy to those we think do not deserve his mercy.