Exodus 32:7-14 Psalm 51:1-11
1 Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-10
Lectionary Link
The Gospel writers present Jesus as one who represents God who is a heavenly parent who wants everyone to be valued as a member of this universal family.
In the teaching parables of Jesus, he uses the metaphor of being lost. What might be implied in this metaphor of being lost?
Something is lost because it is needed, valued, and useful to our lives. If a person is lost, it means that person is valued by those who have lost the person. One can note the panic that sets in when a young child is lost in a mall, a store, or a neighborhood. Why the panic? Because the lost child is a deeply valued member of the family.
One could expand this metaphor as a metaphor of insight for the entire human-divine situation.
If we propose that God is the heavenly parent and every human being is a valued child of God, something which our own Declaration of Independence asserts, we know that the actual human situation through history reveals that many, many, people have not and do not live in situations where they are valued and cared for. This means that many people are lost, but maybe they aren't even lost, because no one is looking for them. There are many people who are not valued enough in social situations even to attain the status of being lost.
The ministry and words of Jesus was to expose the situation of many people being uncared for, and especially by the religious leaders of his era.
Jesus came to raise the dignity of all people to state that many people were lost, that is, they had fallen through all the safety nets of any social care and were unrecognized and unworthy of dignity and value.
Along with the assertion by Jesus that many people were lost, and in being declared lost they were thus declared as valuable to God, Jesus came to be the supreme seeker of the lost. He came to represent God as a seeker who valued people to reveal their identity of being members of God's family.
One can apply this same metaphor to the record of the Hebrew Scriptures. God is the loving creator of all who made humans in the divine image. The giving of the law can be understood as rules of recommended behaviors for people to treat each other in dignified ways so as to value their lives, and such behaviors are those which flow from honoring the parent God of the human family.
A good portion of the Hebrew Scriptures are in fact a bemoaning of people who do not honor the rules which protect the acceptance and dignity of people. And by not honoring the best practices for human interaction, many, many people became lost to dignified treatment.
Jesus, in the train of the prophets of the Hebrew Scripture, came to declare the human situation of his time; many, many, people were alienated from the conditions of basic dignity and care.
Jesus came to be a seeker of the lost. And in so doing, he was also declaring the nature of God as a caring parent, who was seeking the graceful reconciliation of people within the divine family, the family of all humanity.
St. Paul, is presented in the writings attributed to his corpus, and the writings about him, to be one who in his pre-conversion life misunderstood the message of Jesus and his followers. When Paul was converted from his misunderstanding of God and Jesus, he became one who became an apostle to Gentiles, affirming that in Christ, there could not be "lost" Jews, Gentile, male, females, slave, or free; rather there was to be one family of God living under the beneficent care of God and this care was poignantly exemplified in the life of Jesus Christ.
For us today, we are to be in the ministry of Jesus, first by properly representing God as the parent of all who values all persons with dignity and the rights which indicate the dignity of being a loving and loved child of God. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment