Reconciled with God and with Each Other

4 Lent  C  March 30, 2025  
Joshua 5:9-12          Ps.32           
2 Cor. 5:17-21     Luke 15:11-32   

Lectionary Link

Today we have read the well known parable about the Prodigal Son in Luke's Gospel.  Such a title perhaps give the wrong emphasis for the parable, since it is perhaps more fittingly about the Loving, Forgiving, and Reconciling Father.  The parable about the Loving Forgiving Father is a presentation of God as one who seeks reconciliation, and asks us to do the same.

Luke's Gospel came to be attributed to Luke within church tradition even though we do not know the author or the specific date of when it was written, edited, re-edited, redacted, and came to its first autograph.

Some of the assumption that we might make about the Gospel according to Luke is that it was written after the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, and after the authentic Pauline letters.  One might assume that the writer's environment included access to these preceding writings and the writer wanted to include facets of these preceding writings and add his expanded commentary with various literary tropes upon these traditions about Jesus Christ.

The writer of Luke's Gospel would be more likely to be one who had an experience of the Risen Christ, rather than an encounter with Jesus of Nazareth since the writing occurs forty-five to fifty years or more after Jesus lived.  The Gospel of Luke is usually coupled with the Acts of the Apostles because internal connecting referential phrases, and the Acts of the Apostles is dated at a somewhat later date.  One could say the Luke-Acts writings were written with goal of reconciliation, a goal to reconcile the ministry and witness of Peter and the Jerusalem followers of Jesus, with the ministry and witness of the Apostle Paul to the Gentiles followers of Jesus.

What were the conditions of the writer of Luke's Gospel?  The writer is writing in a form of the Greek language, the variety which became the lingua franca after Alexander the Great conquered the world and spread the Greek language and the Greek culture of poets, philosophers, and gods and goddesses through out the world.  The writer is likely contextually steeped with the results of hellenization within the Roman Empire in how the Roman writers and rhetoricians appropriated the Greek poetic and literary traditions into their Roman Empire settings.   The writer of Luke probably had access to the writings of Virgil, Cicero, and Ovid.  Diaspora Judaism was influenced by the hellenistic context, as instantiated in the works of Philo and perhaps chiefly illustrated by the fact that many Jews read the Hebrew Scriptures in the Greek translation of it known as the Septuagint rather than in the Hebrew language.  The writer of Luke was likely making reference to Hebrew Scriptures which he read in the Greek translation.  So, the writer of Luke's Gospel blended Hellenistic and Hebraic literary textual practices in bringing his version of the message about Jesus.

I would like to propose that the writing goal of the Luke-Acts texts was to present God in Christ as one who could best present a loving God who could reconcile the situation of Jews living in diaspora setting making peaceful fellowship with Gentiles who were adopted into the great family of God through the mediation of Christ.

The parable of the Prodigal Son, is perhaps a parable within parable of a presentation of Jesus who is often seen as someone like Socrates with his interlocutors.  The Pharisees and the scribes were often the proverbial interlocutors of Jesus, as presented by the Gospel writers.  From these presentation of the Pharisees and scribes one might rush to the wrong conclusion that all scribes and Pharisees were bad persons.  Paul, himself was a Pharisee, who continued to be a Pharisee after he followed Jesus.  Nicodemus was a Pharisee who followed Jesus.  A scribe was a person trained to read and write and to give advice on how to behave according to Torah.

The Gospel of Luke was written at a time when there was no Christianity or Judaism as separate religions; there were significant parties within Judaism who had disagreements about the nature of the Messiah and the impending messianic age.  There was also disagreement about whether Gentiles who were adopted by the God of Israel, had also to go through the specific rites that were required for proselytes who "converted" to Judaism.  It was of course, impossible for a Gentile adult male to be circumcised on the "eighth day" of his life.

The parable of Jesus telling the parable of the Prodigal Son, encapsulates the vision of reconciliation of the Gospel writer for the community.  The punchline of reconciliation is the response of the father to the angry and jealous older son: "Then the father said to him, 'Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.'"

God is the Father of all who through sin live unreconciled lives toward God.  This God began the process of reconciliation by entering a covenantal relationship with Israel, as a way of spreading reconciliation to the entire world.  The older son of the parable represents one who took for granted his status of having received this covenantal relationship.  The younger son represented Gentiles and non-practicing Jews who through their sins had lost the practice of their familial relationship with God.  The young son who came to the end of himself knew that he had rejected the original blessing of his heritage as a son of God, and so he determined to return even being willing to accept a secondary status within the family.  But the father celebrated his return and expressed his joy at the occasion of an estranged child's return.  The reconciling father then tried to convince the older son who was like the pouting prophet Jonah who was angry that the foreign Ninevites repented; the reconciling father asked that the older son also be one who was willing to be reconciled with his irresponsible brother.

This parable encapsulates the Gospel message of the writer of Luke, and the message of the Apostle Paul as well.  The Gospel is a message about the Christ-experience resulting in reconciliation of persons who had natural social and cultural differences.  The community of the Risen Christ was to be a community of Jews and Gentiles, Greeks, Romans, and everyone.

The message for us is that we should not be jealous pouters about the generous favor of God toward all.  Rather, we should be joyful reconcilers when the fellowship of loving mutual acceptance wins the day to be the expression of the fullness of the family of God.

Let us embrace the work of reconciliation as our Gospel mission today.  Amen.