In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Taking my theme from the gospel reading for today, beloved in the Lord, I have in mind to reflect with you on the human inheritance. The operative Greek word in today’s gospel is kleronomia, translated as “inheritance.” The word kleros is any kind of device, like the drawing of straws, the rolling of a die, something of that sort of thing, in order to determine an outcome. In other words, it’s a mechanism of chance, a kleros. A kleros is the equivalent in English, pretty much, to the word “die,” which is, at least my generation knew, the singular of “dice.” It’s an instrument of chance.

Kleros, then, which means a die, can also mean a portion or an allotment, an estate, a property, an inheritance. When the soldiers wanted to divide the garments of Jesus, they cast a kleros to see who got what. This is just an aside, but the word kleros is also the root of the word “clergy” and “clerical,” because the assignments given to a priest are determined by lot. Remember in the beginning of the Gospel of Luke? They rolled a die to figure out what Zachary would be doing that day in the Temple, and he got the incense. I don’t think we do it that way with the acolytes now, do we? No, I don’t think we have that; we have a different method. Who knows what the future brings? According to the scholars, such as Liddell and Scott, kleronomos also has the word noma in it, which is to go and to come. I am certainly not qualified to argue with the scholars, but I’ve always suspected that the root of that nomos at the end is the word for “law,” nomos; inheritance, law. But I can’t prove that, and scholars say I’m wrong.

Asking today, then, what is a human inheritance? Now I must come at this—I don’t see how to come at it through the front door, frankly. I’m going to come at it through a side window, and that will be my first point: history and revelation. This might seem to be a distraction from the theme, but it’s really not. God made human beings as historical beings, beings in movement, beings as becomings. As St. Gregory of Nyssa says, that man is not identified as an einai, a being, but as a genesthai, as a becoming.

A human being is someone with the experience of a before and an after. It’s someone whose consciousness contains memory. He’s not just now, but it’s now in movement, movement from the past and the past being carried on, has the experience of time. Indeed, the human being is one who thinks only in the experience of movement, and someone who speaks in a sequence of sounds. This expression of a flow is an essential component of the construction of a human being. I come from a different era, although I think a few of you may—and no one here is as old as I am, but a few of you may remember some things from your youth. I’m wondering how many of you in college read Hermann Hesse. Steve is sort of nodding yes. I think we’ve all recovered from it by now. A reading of Der Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game and things like that. I don’t often quote Hermann Hesse. I would not say I’m a recovering Hermann Hesse addict, but I did have an addiction at one time, as did all my students back in the ‘60s.

In his very simple little novel, Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse compares the human being to a river. A river remains the same by not remaining the same. See, a lake remains the same by remaining the same; a river remains the same by not remaining the same. Mom and I were raised on the banks of the mighty Ohio. In fact, not only could Mom look out her window and see the Ohio every day, but on several occasions it threatened those windows. Came right up in your backyard, didn’t it? And I did not live that close to the Ohio; I lived probably two miles to the south of the Ohio, but I looked north sometimes. In fact, sometimes I was so bold as to take the bridge over to Jeffersonville, Indiana, which was another universe.

But we looked out on the banks, looked out on the flow of the Ohio River. When I look out on the mighty Ohio, not one drop of that river was there the day before, and yet it is the same river. Now we have here a metaphor. If the Ohio River just stood there, it would not be a river any more. This is a metaphor of human life, human thought, human experience. Now if God had in mind to reveal himself to the human race, God was obliged—God was compelled!—to accommodate himself to that innate and irreducible character of human experience. When he decided to make human beings, he decided on that, that there would be such a thing as time. It was part of creation itself. Otherwise, the human being would have no capacity of receiving any revelation from God.

I choose this word, “accommodate,” on purpose. I don’t even choose the word, in a sense; the word is chosen for me. It’s not my word. The word “accommodate” was first used in this sense by a second-century bishop in the south of Gaul, an Asian Greek by the name of Irenaeus of Lyon, as essential theology for Irenaeus of Lyon. He understood the Bible in this way, that the Bible is a story not about timeless truth but about truth being incarnate in history. He saw that this was the major problem of Gnosticism, and even of Platonism, as the attempt to get at truth, which is timeless.

Two centuries later, this accommodation was taken up by the greatest of the Antiochian Fathers, John of Antioch. John of Antioch, always known at the time as John of Antioch. For centuries, he was known as John of Antioch, until some time later they decided to call him John the Golden-Mouth, Chrysostomos. The divine accommodation is a major theme of Antiochian theology. Indeed, it may be the most characteristic feature of Antiochian theology. I speculate—and I give this only as a speculation—that this Antiochian contribution, accommodation, may have been, humanly speaking, what preserved the Orthodox faith from the perils of Platonism. This is just a speculation.

This view of the divine accommodation to the human experience is the reason there has never been for the Church any problem with those dark features of the Bible which are so problematic for modern people. The Church has never had a problem with the slaying of the Canaanites. Modern people have a problem with the slaying of the Canaanites because we’re so much more righteous than Joshua was. The Church has never had a problem with the cursing psalms. The Church has always had sufficient room within her bosom to embrace, for heaven’s sakes, Sampson. If Sampson can be listed as one of the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11, there is hope for us all. I’m looking for somebody out here who is bold enough to say, “I’m better than Sampson!” [Laughter]

The Church has never been bothered by those parts of the Bible, because the Church knows that this is simply part of the history. As the sun rises over the Grand Canyon, there are shadows; there are shadows in the Grand Canyon that you don’t notice until the sun rises, and eventually those shadows will disappear, because the Grand Canyon doesn’t just sit there. The Grand Canyon is a spectacle. One of the reasons the Grand Canyon is so magnificent is because of the sun, and the various things the sun does for the Grand Canyon. Indeed, as far as we can tell, Jesus was not bothered by the stories in the book of Joshua, nor Judges. Jesus was not bothered with the likes of Joshua and Sampson. Why? Because Jesus is the defining and exemplar instance of the divine accommodation. Jesus is the essence of what it means for God to accommodate himself to the human experience.

The principle of the divine accommodation was enunciated at the beginning of the book of Hebrews. God spoke in sundry times and in different ways. In times past, God spoke in sundry times and in different ways. God did not give us in salvation history and inspired literature a simple and uncomplicated message; he gave us a message which is mixed, which has many tensions within it, contrasts, seeming contradictions, that are never adequately worked out in the Bible itself. He gave it to us as a living text which is reflective of human history, because that’s the only way God has to reveal himself to us. There are those and there have always been those who believe that the sum total of everything that God has said to us is found in the multiplication table, which as we know, at least until recent times, does not change. In recent times, I don’t know. I look at contemporary math, and I just… I will not try to wrap my head around it; it would drive me insane.

This revelation, beloved, took place within the contours and limitations of human history. This includes both Sampson and Job, both Abraham and Zephaniah. God did not give us the whole message all at once. No way we could have taken the whole message all at once. Consequently, the question I pose today, “What is the human inheritance?” almost does not appear in the Hebrew Scriptures. It seems to me we don’t even get the basis, the fundamental outline of this question, even the suspicion of this question, until after the Babylonian captivity. This question itself is barely posed, if at all, in the Old Testament. It is certainly not answered in the Old Testament.

That’s why the Old Testament, standing by itself, almost has no coherence. Robert Alter’s great three-volume commentary on the Old Testament came out just a few months ago, didn’t it? Just a few months ago; my copy arrived yesterday, and I started reading his introduction to the Wisdom books. He says the Wisdom books prove—he’s thinking about the Wisdom books in the Hebrew text: Proverbs, Job, and Qoheleth. He says the very existence of the Wisdom books proves the Bible is not a coherent text. It’s wonderful to hear a Jew say that. He says they not only differ from the rest of the Scriptures that differ among themselves. That’s something I always felt. I believe I wrote an article about this in Touchstone, some decades ago, that the Old Testament itself has no unifying center.

Point two. The event known as Jesus of Nazareth is crucial—hear the word “cross” in there: crux, crucial. The question, “What is the human inheritance?” was posed and answered in the event of Jesus of Nazareth, in the proclamation of the Gospel. The question, “Why did God make human beings?” seems never to have occurred to the first human being, nor to the second, nor to the third. What did God have in mind when he formed Adam and Eve in his own image and likeness? The book of Genesis does not address that question. That question was not posed on Mount Sinai. I think I detect a glimmer of it on the horizon, the distant horizon, in the mind of Jeremiah. I think I detect a glimmer of it, but it never became a defining question for Jeremiah, much less did he try to answer it. All he can say is that the human heart is complex and devious beyond examining.

Why did God make human beings? What is the human inheritance? This question could not be posed until God gave us the answer. In fact, it appears to be what happened. God gave us the answer before we realized what the question was. He revealed that answer as he poured out the Holy Spirit into our hearts, into the minds of that group of people, that group of Jews, who aligned themselves with Jesus of Nazareth. Now this I argue is the dominant motif advanced by St. Paul in the epistle to the Galatians. I don’t want to burden you with all my speculations about the epistle to the Galatians. Some of you have started reading—I hope some of you have started reading—my commentary on Romans. I deal with this a little bit in the introduction to the commentary on Romans, the significance of the epistle to the Galatians. I have in my heart the deep suspicion that so many problems in the contemporary world over the last half a millennium come from Luther’s reading of the epistle to the Galatians, which, it appears to me, was a fundamentally radically different reading of Galatians than the Church had ever done before.

Let me give you this text from Galatians, which I think is the heart of the matter. “When the fullness of time had come…” “Fullness of time”: do you hear that? “fullness of time,” history. To pleroma tou chronou. The fullness of time has come. It has to do, in other words, with the maturity of history.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the Torah, to redeem them that were under the Torah, that we might receive the huiothesian.

In so many translations, that’s translated as “adoption,” and that is not what it means. That is not what it means. The King James says, “adoption as sons.” Close, but we’re not playing horseshoes. Huiothesia means the Son’s relationship to the Father; his Sonship, who he is, his identity. That is what we receive. We receive what Jesus is, his huiothesia, his relationship to God. This is something incalculable. This is not a text about our adoption as children of God. I think of all the sermons about how we’ve been adopted in Christ. No, we have not been adopted; we’ve been reborn! It’s a new birth. It’s a second birth. It is not a legal term. There’s where Luther really missed it. It is not God’s declaration that we are his children. It’s God’s outpouring of the Holy Spirit that makes us his children. Paul continues.

God has sent forth the spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!”

It’s a question of a newness of heart, a heart renewed and restored in the Holy Spirit. The great prophesies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel about the new heart and the new covenant come to mind here. Now, this is why God made human beings: in order to make them his children. This is the human inheritance. It is the rebirth in the Holy Spirit, whereby God incorporates human beings into his own life. By the Holy Spirit we share in the Son’s relationship to the Father, his huiothesia. In Jesus of Nazareth, God has given us the answer to the question; for this reason, we now know what the question is, because he’s already given us the answer.

Point three is the father. Today’s parable is really about the father. It’s not about the prodigal son, I think. It’s about the father of the prodigal son. Everything has to do with the father: the father is the source of the inheritance. When the son repents, “I will arise and go” where? “I will go to my father.” Human history is about the return of the human race to the Father. What’s the culminating scene of the Odyssey? What’s the culminating scene? Where Odysseus goes back to the arms of his father. If today, in the 20th, 21st century, we were writing this story, that would not be the culminating scene. The culminating scene would be in the second-to-last book, where Odysseus goes back to the arms of Penelope. I won’t say that is not important, but that is not how Homer saw it. Homer had this suspicion that the human race must recover an inheritance in the home of a father.

Today’s story about the prodigal son is really the story about Adam. The Fathers of the Church overwhelmingly speak about this. They see the prodigal son in Adam. Adam lost his inheritance because he didn’t really know what his inheritance was. Somebody shows up one day, some snake. We don’t even know who the snake was until much later in biblical history. It’s not revealed in Genesis who the snake is; you only get that as you go on through the rest of biblical history and find out who that snake is. Adam had no idea why he was there, but somebody was offering him something better, he thought. “You will be like God.” See, what God had in mind all along was to make him like God! What God had in mind all along was to incorporate him into his own life.

St. Gregory the Theologian talks about this at great great length throughout all his catechesis. It’s a major theme in the writings of St. Gregory the Theologian, that Adam was supposed to be divinized, and he was not, because he got hasty and got misled. He got misled because there was an aspiration in him to be like God, and he got deceived. Adam decided on an early inheritance, and that’s the story of today’s gospel, isn’t it? A man decides on an early inheritance. Knowing almost nothing about God, he would be like God.

We contrast today’s son, this younger son, with Esau, don’t we? The Fathers of the Church talk about this at great length. In fact, I found sermons about this theme, the contrast of Esau and the prodigal son run all through Christian preaching: the parochial sermons of John Henry Newman, for example, the contrast of the prodigal son with Esau. Esau despised his inheritance because, says the epistle to the Hebrews, he was a profane man. He’s a man who lived for the moment. He gave up everything for a pot of soup, and after he had done that, he had the nerve to blame his brother for it.

This is the time, my beloved, as we come to the beginning of Lent, for us to renew our dedication to our inheritance, to that hope that is in us to be restored to full communion with God, a time to arise and go to our Father. Amen.