The following lectionary post is written by Maria Poggi Johnson, a professor of Theology at the University of Scranton. She is the author of Strangers and Neighbors: What I have learned about Christianity by living among Orthodox Jews and Making a Welcome: Christian Life and the Practice of Hospitality.
All the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Lent may be found here on the USCCB website.
The reading from Joshua and the reading from Luke move in very different directions. The first line from Joshua about God having removed “the reproach of the Egyptians” refers to what preceded; the Israelites crossed the Jordan with the Ark, stopped at Gilgal, made flint knives, and circumcised all the men who had not been circumcised in Egypt or in the wilderness, thus drawing a sharp line between the degradations of slavery and their new status as a free people, in covenant with God.
This circumcision also functions, in a way, rather like the bar mitzvah that their descendants will observe marking the transition from childhood to an adult relationship with and responsibility to the Torah. The first thing they do, after taking a couple of days to heal up, is to celebrate the Passover, commemorating how God freed them, and set them on the way to becoming the great nation that he had promised to make them. Immediately after the Passover, there is another change in their status, equally stark, but entirely practical. Since the first exhilarating, terrifying days of freedom, they had been fed by God. The daily provision of manna was central to the wilderness experience — a forty year boot camp in radical trust and obedience. Now that period of preparation is over, and they are ready to begin their mission of becoming a holy nation that makes God’s nature manifest to the world. And now the manna ceases. God has delivered the land of Canaan to them and now they have to eat from its yield – figure out how to plan, sow, cultivate, harvest, store, how to take responsibility for their own nourishment.
The story from the Gospel is on a very different scale – not a grand tale of national destiny and identity, but an intimate family story. And the direction of the narrative is entirely different. The younger son, evidently, has experienced his status in the family as oppressive, confining, holding him back from all the possibilities that life has to offer. He pushes and demands his way into adulthood, insisting that he is ready for freedom, self-determination. Of course it turns out he is no such thing. He follows every whim, makes no plans, takes no responsibility, blows through what his father gave him, until events overtake him and he finds himself helpless and destitute. Only then does he realize that the sonship that he thought was servitude, cramping his freedom, was in fact a stable, generous provision without which he cannot survive, let along flourish. He turns back to the dependence that, in his arrogance, he had despised and rejected, and finds not just what he needs to survive, but the full embrace of love, forgiveness and belonging.
So we have a story in which God withdraws the provision of food, and ushers his people into adult work, independence and responsibility, and a story in which God welcomes a child back into dependence with a banquet to which the child contributed nothing. What can we make of that? The Psalm gives one hint – once which we barely need – that what we rejoice to taste is not just food, but the goodness of God. Paul takes it further. The goodness of God – manifest in the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery, in the fulfillment of his promise of the land, in the father’s welcome and forgiveness of his prodigal son – is, finally, reconciliation, the healing of the relationship that was ruptured by sin. This reconciliation is not something we can accomplish – all the son could do by himself is to creep home and hope his father will give a job; it is the father who sees him and runs to him and embraces him and obliterates his shame and alienation in feasting and music and celebration. As Paul says, twice, it is God who, through Christ, reconciles us, who reconciles the world, to himself. This is the dynamic of Luke. But Paul also says, twice, that God gives us the ministry of reconciliation, entrusts to us the message of reconciliation. As with the Israelites in Joshua, he treats us as adults – dependent, yes, but not helplessly, childishly passively so – but rather as partners, with agency, capable of stepping into responsibility.
This is one of the great mysteries of salvation history – precisely that God, whose will it is to save us, chooses to do so through history – through covenant, through partnership. He persists in involving us, honoring our freedom in all its brokenness, giving us responsibilities, cooperating with us, trusting us to do our part in working out our salvation, even though he knows we are not to be trusted. It is as perplexing as the father’s welcome of the prodigal was to his older brother. And yet it is God’s way: to welcome us, to trust us and to give us a share in his work for our own reconciliation. Everything is God’s, and yet, as the father tells his elder son “everything I have is yours.”
