Father Stephen De Young: So I’ll do my usual introduction to Luke. It takes so long going through a book now. Remember, in the Old Testament we were moving relatively quickly so I’d only maybe once or twice say you can go back and listen to the first one. But now the new test are going so much slower, I have to say that over and over and over again and it feels repetitive.

But the first lecture, first Bible study on the Gospel according to St. Luke has the introduction. So you can listen to that to your heart’s content and get caught up at any point because we are taking our time and so you may very well have forgotten what was said on the first day we talked about St. Luke’s Gospel. I’m going to get started here in just a second. Like I said, we’re going to be in Luke chapter 14, verse 25.

Just to quickly get us caught up. We’ve come through sort of the first major sections of St. Luke’s Gospel. We saw, there was sort of the introductory material about the birth of St. John the Baptist, the birth of Christ. Then we moved on into Christ’s ministry in Galilee as he traveled and preached and healed in Galilee. Then he took his journey down through Samaria, down to Judea. And for the last few weeks we’ve been at a sort of a series of episodes. Now that he’s in Judea, in the area around Jerusalem, we’re sort of reminded periodically that we’re coming close to Jerusalem because we know that’s going to sort of initiate the last major portion of St. Luke’s Gospel.

But right now we’re in the area around sort of the suburbs, he said he was in Bethany, which is sort of what we would today call a suburban area. It’s an outlying village near Jerusalem. We’ve seen a series of sort of encounters that Jesus has had. Most recently, last week, we had a series of events that sort of took place at a dinner party that Jesus was invited to where he used the dinner party itself in a series of sort of parables or analogies to talk about the kingdom of God and to try to communicate to both his hosts who are somewhat misguided and to the other folks who are in attendance and to his disciples. So we got right to the end of that section at the dinner party and now we’re beginning a new section in chapter 14, verse 25.

So unless there are any lingering questions, debates, we’ll go ahead and get started in verse 25:

Now great multitudes went with Him. And He turned and said to them,

So now he’s sort of picked up. He’s traveling to Jerusalem again. He’s got big crowds from these surrounding villages following him. We saw this already. This happened to Galilee too, as you recall. People started following him as he traveled. That we have this multitude, so this large multitude is following behind him. He stops, turns around and begins to speak to them on the way.

“If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.”

Well, that’s kind of awkward and strange, right? We haven’t seen in the past Jesus talking a lot about hating people and this sort of covers everybody, right? Unless you hate everyone, you can’t be…  Normally we didn’t expect the opposite. Unless you love everyone, you can’t be Christ’s disciple. But the fact that we’re not speaking literally should come out from the “yes and his own life also”, right? So he isn’t literally meaning you should hate these people. And by the way, you should also hate yourself. What he’s saying is that there cannot be any allegiance that we hold that’s superior to our allegiance to Christ. He’s saying you need to be willing to give up any of these things.

Essentially, we could preface this by saying Jesus looked and saw that the crowd was a little too big. The crowd was a little too big. I know in this country when we talk about churches, we’ve got megachurches now. Everybody judges how good your church is and how well it’s doing by how big it is. The more people you got, the better you must be doing. Well, there are places in the world where, believe it or not, it’s the exact opposite. It’s the exact opposite. One of those is the Church of Scotland. I had a friend who is a minister of the Church of Scotland, and he said if you had a big church with lots of people in it, that was a sure sign that you’d watered down the gospel. That meant you were just trying to please people. That meant you’d sold out, if you had a big church. For them, the ideal church is if you had like seven or eight people and that was it. They’d say, “That guy’s telling it like it is, right. They couldn’t take it, so they took off and headed out.”

Well, there is a little of that going on here because we know from no other place that we’ve already read Matthew and Mark. We know that this big crowd that’s following him now isn’t going to be around here in a few chapters. They’re all going to take off. These are sort of fair-weather fans. Right now, Jesus is going around healing people. He’s preaching. We’re on our victory tour to Jerusalem. So now everybody wants in. We’re going to see when things get more difficult, all of a sudden, people back out.

And we’ve seen this sort of throughout church history, up until Constantine legalized Christianity, you didn’t have a lot of nominal Christians, because you could be killed, you could be thrown in prison, you could be tortured into denying Christ. So if you weren’t really committed, nobody called themselves a Christian. They’d call themselves something else, or they’d just leave. Once Christianity was legalized, especially once Theodosius made it the official religion of the Roman Empire, proclaimed a Christian Empire, then all of a sudden, a lot of people wanted to start going to church.

And we see that pattern throughout Christian history, when persecution comes, all of a sudden, things get whittled way down. What Christ is saying here is he’s asking these people who are following him whether they’re really following him. Are they really committed? Because notice he says, he cannot be my disciple? The word that’s used for following someone as a disciple in Greek is a different word than just to follow after. Like, “I’m going to the store, follow me over”. It’s not the same word. To follow someone and be their disciple is a different concept. It means being devoted to them. It means you’re going to follow them, not just in the sense of, “Oh, yeah, I’m curious to hear what they have to say,” but that you’re going to pattern your life after this person.

If you went and became a student at Plato’s Academy in Athens, you are now going to devote your life to academic study there at the Academy; it’s where we get the word “academic”. And you are going to be learning. You’re going to be following your teachers. You’re going to be… literally, in the case of Aristotle, his followers were called Peripatetics, from the Greek word for literally “wander around”, because he would walk around while he was lecturing, and his disciples would all follow behind him jotting down notes while he mused about whatever. So Christ is saying that if you really want to be his disciple, it doesn’t just mean following him around. “Oh, that’s interesting.” When he talks, “Oh, I’ll think about that. He says some neat things.” Or, “I got this foot problem. Can you heal this for me?” That’s not what it is to be Jesus’s disciple.

So he continues:

“And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.”

And we talk about crosses, and we see people wearing nice, pretty crosses so often we lose some of the flavor of this. We don’t understand just how horrific that death by crucifixion was and the connotations it had. The Greek words Stavros for a cross and stavro to crucify, the verb we’re considered curse words, they weren’t uttered in polite company. You didn’t even talk about crucifixion in polite company because it was seen as this horrific, cursed, torturous, humiliating death where people were hung on crosses and left there to die, and in a lot of cases with the Romans, left there for the animals to eat them after they died, and to decompose. This was pretty much the most horrible death the Romans could come up with. And they were pretty good with the ingenuity. As I’ve said before, the word excruciating in English, you can see the “cruc” there in the middle. They had to invent a new word to describe the type of pain involved in crucifixion

In English, even this doesn’t really have the same connotation, but this would be similar to whoever does not tie a noose around his neck, is not worthy to be my disciple because that was a means of public execution, but nowhere near as humiliating or painful or torturous as crucifixion.

This, and remember what happened to failed Messiahs. All these people who had shown up in the decades before, the decades after Jesus claiming to be the Messiah, tried to raise an army here or there or attack the Romans here or there. What happened to them is that they were crucified. That’s what ended up happening. The Romans caught up with them. The Romans tortured them to death by crucifixion. That’s the mark of a failed Messiah. So they’re all following him to Jerusalem, this big multitude. The last thing they’re thinking is going to happen or wanting to happen is that Jesus is going to march in there and get crucified, because in their minds, that would mean, “Oh, I guess this was another one of those failed, would-be Messiahs.”

So, Jesus is here telling them fairly plainly where the destination of the trip they’re on is, saying, “If you don’t want to go there, go ahead and turn back now. Go ahead and turn back now. We’re not that far from your village. Head back.”

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish itó lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’?”

You wouldn’t go and start building a house or building an addition on your house without checking your bank account first, right? You wouldn’t just go and start building and then be like, “Oh oops, out of money.” Then leave it sitting there half built because all your neighbors would look at you and say, you idiot, what are you doing?

“Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?”

If a king went to war without realizing, “Hey, wait a minute, I’ve got 10,000 troops and the guy I’m attacking has 20,000 troops, this might go badly,” You would again say, “What an idiot. This guy’s not too sharp.”

Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace.

So if he realizes, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m going to war, he’s got 20,000 guys, I’ve got 10,000. I better try and make a peace treaty here. Maybe we should talk this out because this isn’t going to go well for me.”

“So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.”

So he’s saying to them, “If you’re really serious about following me in the real sense. Not just wandering behind me. But actually following me. Actually being my disciple. If you really want to be part of what I’m doing.” Then just like any other course of action you’d set out on… you don’t go and enroll in a degree program at a school unless you have some idea of how you’re going to pay for it. You don’t go and put down a down payment on a car when you’re not going to have enough money to pay the… at least you shouldn’t. I would say you don’t buy a house that way, but lately a lot of people buy a house that way, right? You don’t do that. Same thing with following me, same thing with… this is not a casual thing. You need to sit down and think about the cost. They already gave us a list of what it might cost us, right? It might cost you your father, it might cost you your mother, it might cost you your wife, it might cost you your children, it might cost you your brothers, it might cost you your sisters. And you know what else it might cost you? Your life.

And if you’re going to turn back, if when your wife comes to you and says, “If you keep it up with this Christianity stuff, I’m divorcing you,” you’re going to say, “Okay, well, forget about the Christianity thing then.” Then don’t start off in the first place. Don’t start off in the first place. Or if when your kids or your parents disown you, or if when the Romans show up, or the Bolsheviks or whoever it is this time, show up and say, “Are you a Christian? Because if so, we’re going to kill you.” And you’re going to say, “Oh no, who me? No!” Then don’t set off in the first place. Why not? Just because you’re wasting your time. But remember what we talked about before in the last couple of chapters. Because we’re going to be held accountable for what we received and what we did.

So, as we’re going to see, especially when we get into the Book of Hebrews, you’re better off being a heathen than being an apostate. You’re better off being somebody who was never a Christian, who never knew anything about Christianity, who never saw a Bible, who never heard a sermon, than being somebody who heard the sermons, read the Bible, was baptized, came to church, and was still a heathen, because now you’re accountable for all that. So that’s why he’s saying, don’t even start off, don’t even start off. Go back to your village, live the rest of your life in the ignorance you started out with. Now, obviously that’s rhetorical. That’s rhetorical.

It’s one of those things like when they come to you and they say, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way,” they want you to lead or at least follow. They don’t really want you to get out of the way. That’s not really what they’re shooting for, right? Same thing here. Jesus doesn’t actually want all these people to turn around and go home. “Okay, you’re right. Jesus, we’re not really committed. We’re all going to go home.” That’s rhetorical. The point Jesus is making is he’s calling on them to actually commit. He’s calling on them to actually step up to the plate. He’s not really wanting them to say, “Oh, you’re right, I should stay ignorant.” So we have to remember that too, especially since I’ve said that a few times now and, again, I want people to keep coming to Bible study. So it’s rhetorical.

“Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?  It is neither fit for the land nor for the dunghill, but men throw it out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

So what’s his analogy here? What is the salt? Well, the salt literally is the people who are his actual disciples. His actual disciples. We saw this put another way back in St. Matthew’s Gospel. He said, “You are the salt of the earth,” right? What is that? Remember, we had several analogies in the last couple of chapters about the kingdom. Remember he talked about the mustard seed, it’s real small, grows into the big tree, little bit of yeast. You work it into the dough, fills the whole dough, goes into a big loaf of bread. We talk about the kingdom. Same thing here. Salt did a few things in the ancient world. We think of it now as just something that kills you with heart disease. But that’s clearly not their view here. But salt, in addition to just seasoning… it is seasoning. That is something it does. It also preserves. Remember, we don’t have refrigeration. The way you preserved meat at this time was to salt it and to dry it.

So, if his followers are salt, then that’s talking about the role that they’re going to have, especially if you’re talking about salt and the earth. But that’s the role there to have in society, in the world seen as the world of people. It’s both this preservative through their prayers, through their good deeds, but also in terms of seasoning. His point here is if you have salt and the savor goes out of the salt, it’s old, stale salt. What can you do with that, right? There’s no flavor to it. So it’s not going to season your food. It’s stale, so it’s not going to preserve food. He says it’s not fit for the land or the dung hill, because if you go throw salt even stale salt out on your farmland, nothing will grow. It’s got no savor or anything. So if you go and throw it in the waste, it’s not even going to cut the smell from it. It’s not even good for that. It’s not even good for throwing in the dung hill, the word that’s used here for dung hill. Who has a dung hill? Well, this is actually a specific Greek word. Again, we have to remember they don’t have indoor plumbing in these villages. So there’s a mound outside the village where everybody goes and dumps their chamber pots and their… that’s the dung hill he’s referring to. So he’s saying it’s not even good for that. It’s not even good for the sewer system in our modern sense.

It’s utterly useless. And you can’t get it back. It’s like you can recover. It’s not like you can make it salty again. And so it just gets thrown out. It’s useless. And so this is an analogy for what he was just saying. If you’re going to be my disciple, not only is it going to potentially cost you everything, he says all that he has, you have to be willing to be willing to forsake all that they have, but you’re also going to be called to do something. And so if you aren’t committed, you’re not going to be able to do it, so you’re going to be useless.

And so, as he said in the analogies, the Parables of the last chapter, most people end up shut out of the kingdom. They end up just thrown out, thrown out. And notice again this analogy, like those others, all involve people who are in some regard believers. I haven’t made this point in a while, I don’t think. So I’ll make it again. Pretty much nowhere in the Scriptures and literally nowhere, I have thrown this challenge out several times, no one has yet been able to give me an example, nowhere in the church fathers does it ever talk about people who are not Christians going to hell. That’s how we’re used to hearing it, sort of in modern American church talk. There’s the sheep and the goats. Sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell, sheep are good Christians who come to church, and goats are all those other people who aren’t Christians, right?

That’s not in the Bible, that’s not in the Fathers. Every time you find the Scriptures and the Fathers talking about hell, they’re threatening Christians with it. They’re talking to people who are Christians. Remember in the parables last time they come to him and say, “Lord, Lord,” those are the ones who end up outside.  Here, the salt that gets thrown out are people who claimed to be at least followers of Jesus. The dinner guests who got shut out of the wedding banquet were the first ones to receive invites. They didn’t not know the guy throwing the banquet.

So, we need to remember that we could kind of make ourselves comfortable with some of these parables and the edge that they have on them by saying, “Oh, well, this is talking about those other people over there, right? This is talking about Muslims and Hindus and stuff. Yeah, they’re all going to hell because they have the wrong religion. But I’m a Christian, so I’m good. This is talking about my no-good cousin. This is talking about my neighbor; he doesn’t come to church anymore.”

That’s not who any of these parables are directed at. That’s not who any of the condemnation we’ve seen from Jesus is directed. I remember the condemnation that we’ve seen from Jesus was all directed to Pharisees. Who were the religious people, who were the pious people, who were the ones saying their prayers multiple times a day, who were the ones going to the temple, who are the ones reading the scriptures all the time. Those are the ones who he aims the condemnation at, so make no mistakes. These warnings, these things that Christ is issuing, they’re directed at us. They’re directed at us.

And St. Luke wasn’t writing this to just people who had never heard of Jesus in their lives. These are documents that were written to be read just as we read them now in the church. So when Jesus is talking about counting the cost, this is something that I should read to people in the new members class and say, are you sure you guys all want to be here? It applies to them. It also applies to those of us who have been in the church for years and years and years and years, or our whole lives, to examine and say, are we really committed, especially Christians like us, who live in a society where being a Christian doesn’t cost us a whole lot, at least not yet, to try and be honest with ourselves and say, if tomorrow the guy showed up with a gun and said, are you a Christian? And pointed it at me, what would I say?

Would I really be willing to give up all that I have? Would I really be willing to end up homeless for being a Christian? Would I really be willing to go to prison for being a Christian? Would I really be willing to lose the people I love, have them disavow me because I’m a Christian? That’s what Jesus is calling on us to do here. It’s aimed at us. Not at some other group that we want to marginalize.

Interlocutor: So these non-Christians, they don’t go to hell?

Fr. Stephen: No, I’m saying they don’t talk about them.

Interlocutor: They were just irrelevant?

Fr. Stephen: We don’t know. That’s not our job to know. If you want ambiguity, if you want to not know it.

Interlocutor: I like to know everything.

Fr. Stephen: Right, exactly right. The point is, by following Christ, and following Christ doesn’t mean being perfect, following Christ means repenting of our sins and following Christ every day, including worshiping Him, including prayer, including the whole Christian way of life. By following Christ, we can know, as St. Paul is going to say that we have peace with God.

We can know that we don’t have to fear death anymore because we’re following Christ. A person who is not following Christ cannot have that sense of peace. They can never have that. That’s not because we know for sure that every single person who isn’t an Orthodox Christian is going to go to eternal condemnation. Right? That’s not why. It’s because we don’t know. We leave that up to Christ. He judges. I don’t judge. He judges. He’s going to judge me and he’s going to judge them.

And I know that what the Scriptures are saying here in the Gospels, what Jesus is telling us, is that because I’m a Christian, I’m going to be held to an even higher standard. I’m going to be held to an even higher standard. So my concern needs to be for myself and my own soul, and trust Christ to take care of everybody else. Christ will take care of everyone else. He will judge the world and he will judge me. And I need to primarily be concerned with what the judgment is going to be regarding me.

So, we’ll get more into this when we get into Romans, because this is a lot of what St. Paul is doing when he talks about the Law, because he’s interacting with his old views as a Pharisee. See, the Pharisees were very confident about their own righteousness and about the verdict where they stood before God’s judgment, but for the completely wrong reasons. Not because they were coming before God with repentance, but because they thought they were righteous, they thought they were the good people, and these were the bad people. And St. Paul’s going to say they’re misusing the law. That was not what the Law was for. The law was not so that you could justify yourself and condemn others. The Law was there so that you could honestly look at yourself and come to and find repentance, as we saw when we went through. We always talk about the Law, right? Remember the Law is the Torah. It’s the first five books of the Bible. That includes Genesis. That’s not just a list of laws. That includes Exodus, that includes the whole sacrificial system that’s there, why? Because everybody breaks the law and needs to repent. That’s all built into what we’re talking about.

But the Pharisees had extracted from that the commandments, the 300 odd commandments, and said, what you need to do is follow all of these. And they disambiguated, to use a nice Wiki term, they disambiguated all the commandments into very detailed rules. As long as you got all this squared away, you’re fine. You have nothing to worry about, as long as you make this checklist. And St. Paul is saying that’s not ever what the law was for. The Law was first and foremost to communicate to you the knowledge of God. And if you come to know God, then you’re not going to be real confident about how righteous you are, right? Quite the opposite. But we’ll get into that more especially when we get into Romans, where St. Paul talks about that.

But again, it’s important that we don’t lapse into that same thing. And we’re going to see in the next passage here, that’s exactly where this is going. We don’t lapse into that same thing of having our own little checklist. I got baptized, I got chrismated, came to church most Sundays, I came to confession. The minimum number of times I received the Eucharist, at least the minimum number of times, I gave the minimum pledge, right, okay, good, I’m squared away. All these other people who haven’t done that, they’re in trouble, they’re the ones in trouble. We can lapse into that same way of viewing things and that’s what we have to be careful of. So Christ issues a warning that there are going to be people who face final condemnation. If you think of anyone other than yourself, you’re reading it wrong. If you think, “Yeah, that person better watch out, or that person,” you’re reading it wrong. Anything other than, “I need to change, I need to reflect on this.”

Interlocutor: I think it’s very appropriate what you said, because I think of Dietrich Bonhoffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship, and he talks about us about being under what he called cheap grace, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that, because he’s writing from that time in Nazi Germany.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he was actually writing before that.

Interlocutor: Well, it was a very religious, Christian country, and we saw how it turned, under the political system.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he was actually issuing a warning. He actually wrote that book before the rise of the Nazis and that’s the cheap grace he was talking about was how easy it was to be a Christian in Germany. It’s sort of prophetic, saying, time may come where it’s not going to be so easy, where you maybe, and then… lo and behold, it did.

Interlocutor: He was executed in a concentration camp.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I know I’ve quoted him from that book before, but Dietrich Bonhoffer in that book said, “he who the Son of Man bids, he bids to come and die.” That’s exactly what Jesus is getting out here. If you’re going to follow him, you’re going to follow him to the cross and then through that to new life and the new heavens and the new earth. But you can’t sort of skip that middle part, right? You can’t just say, “Well, I’ll pass on the suffering and the struggle and all that and just go straight to glory.”

So chapter 15:

Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to Him to hear Him. And the Pharisees and scribes complained, saying, “This Man receives sinners and eats with them.”

So first of all, all the tax collectors and the sinners are coming near to Jesus. They’re not just following him around, they’re drawing near to him to hear him, to hear what he has to say. Now, keep in mind, this started with what? “Then”. So, it’s tied back to what we were just reading.

So these tax collectors, these other sinners, are here presented as those people who are making a commitment, as we saw with St. Matthew himself in St. Matthew’s Gospel, remember, Jesus came and called him. He got up and left his tax office. Gave it all up and went and followed Jesus. So these tax collectors and sinners are trying to leave their old lives behind and follow Jesus and repent, transform their lives. Pharisees and scribes see it a lot different, right? “Look at this. He’s hanging around with these ne’er-do-wells. He’s hanging around with these no-good rabble.” Because in the Pharisees’ minds, there are two types of people. There’s them who are righteous. There’s everybody else who’s a sinner. And God’s justice is not about those sinners being reconciled to God and cleansed. God’s justice is about them being wiped out and us being rewarded for being righteous. So that’s why this is a problem if Jesus is supposed to be the Messiah. Because in the Pharisees’ mind, the Messiah is supposed to get rid of these people. The Messiah should want nothing to do with these people. The Messiah’s supposed to take out the Romans and get rid of all this because they’re interpreting the prophecies… Remember, there are all those prophecies saying that God was going to cut off iniquity and sin from his people. Well, they’re interpreting that as God’s going to smite them all. He’s going to smite all these no-good sinners and get rid of them. Not he’s going to remove the impurity, he’s going to remove the unholiness, he’s going to remove the sin, which is what Christ is actually doing.

So He spoke this parable to them, saying: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’  I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance.”

So he gives them one example. A lot of herdsmen, right? We saw the Old Testament, lots of shepherd analogies, lots of herdsmen. If you own 100 sheep, those 100 sheep are your livelihood. Those 100 sheep are how you feed and clothe your family and yourself. Those 100 sheep, that’s everything. That’s what you’ve got. Well, if one of those wanders off, you’re counting them, at the end of the day, you come up 99 and one is wandered off somewhere, you’re not just going to shrug it off. “Eh you know, I still got most of them. I still got 99% of the sheep.” You’re going to go try and find that sheep.

And if you go out there and you do find the sheep and the sheep’s okay, you’re going to be happy. You’re going to be overjoyed. “Phew, that’s a close one, right? But I got all hundred back here.” You’re going to tell all your friends, “Man, I was out there one of the sheep wandered off. I thought for a minute I lost him, but I found him. Isn’t that great?”

So, He’s asking the Pharisees, “Okay, you’re all righteous. You’re all just men, right? But if I’ve gone and found one of your brothers who’s wandered off, brought him back, why aren’t you happy? There’s more rejoicing in heaven over this one sinner who repents than there is over a whole bunch of people who don’t need to repent.”

Now, is he saying that the Pharisees really don’t need to repent? No. Again, this is rhetorical, right? This is rhetorical. Because they need to repent, too, and then there’d be rejoicing over them as well, right?

“Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?  And when she has found it, she calls her friends and neighbors together, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I lost!’  Likewise, I say to you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

So he gives another analogy. We’ll put it into modern money terms. You’ve got ten hundred dollars bills. You just got $1,000 out of the bank. You walk over, you pick them up, you count them, there’s only nine. Okay? Is there anybody who’s going to say, “Oh, well, I still got nine out of ten, not going to worry about that other $100?” Maybe somebody, but not me. I’m going to go, “Whaaat?” I’m going to be looking in my pockets, I’m going to be looking at the floor, I’m going to be looking under the rug, everywhere. And then if you find that $100, it’s like you just got $100 and you’re going to tell everybody, “I was so scared today, I thought I lost $100, but I found it. Isn’t that great?” Again, He’s asking the Pharisees.

What’s the core of why the Pharisees don’t get this? Because they don’t see these sinners as valuable, right? Both examples just given. These are things that are valuable. They don’t think those no-good sinners and tax collectors are valuable. They don’t think they’re worth anything. They think they’re worth something because of who they are and what they do.

It’s important here in St. Luke’s Gospel that now this is where the Parable of the Prodigal Son comes. We tend to read it by itself, right? But here in St. Luke’s Gospel, it’s the third of three parallel parables. So we just had the lost sheep, then you have the lost coin. Now really what this should be called is “The Lost Son.”

Then He said: “A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood.”

That’s a very polite way of putting it. “Give me the money.” What he’s literally saying is, “Listen, old man, I’m tired of waiting for you to die. Give me the money now that you’re leaving me in your will and I’ll get out of here and not see you again.” So we lose some of that particular English translation, especially, we lose some of the disrespect involved. This isn’t just, “Hey, dad, can I have a few bucks? I want to get started and go off on my own.” This is, “Dad, I don’t want anything to do with you anymore, so just give me my inheritance now and I’m out of here and you’ll never see me again.”

But what does the father do? He says, “Okay”. He gives them the money. Notice, it says, “He divided to them his livelihood,” meaning both sons. Both sons. So the other son, who didn’t ask, he said, “Okay, I’ll just divide my money now.” Gave some to one, some to the other.

“And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living.”

This is something I’ve identified with greatly as someone who went off to college in another state and proceeded to waste a lot of money.

But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

Okay, so he runs out of money. Good times rolled for a little while and then they stopped rolling, and now there’s a famine to boot, so there’s not going to be anybody sharing with them. You got a lot of friends when you have money, a lot of them disappear when you don’t, right? And so now the only job he can get is to go out and herd swine. Now, keep in mind, I know we all love bacon, but this is within the Jewish community, right? So pigs are unclean animals, filthy animals. They don’t eat pig. They don’t use pigs for anything. The gentiles use pigs. Gentiles… the primary animal sacrificed by the Greeks to their gods were pigs.

So, if there’s people herding pigs, not only are these Gentiles, they’re pretty much pagans, right? These pigs serve no good purpose. So he’s out there with pigs. And now keep in mind, also, as with shepherds, right, you didn’t have a nice house and a little paddock with the pigs, right? You got up in the morning and took a shower and went out and fed the pigs and came back in and played some Solitaire, right? But it says the shepherd lived out there with the sheep. So if you’re the swineherd, you are living out there with the pigs.

So we have to understand, this is pretty low status here. He’s living out there with the pigs, gone from having all this money, have a good time, to living in a pigsty with the pigs.

And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.

He gets paid so little, he’s eyeballing the pig slop and going, “Maybe I should eat some of that myself.” No one takes any pity on him, so he’s in a miserable condition. He’s in a miserable condition. This is the analogy Jesus is using to describe the tax collectors and sinners. And it’s important to emphasize this, because the Pharisees were not right about Jesus, that he didn’t care about sin. That’s what they’re accusing him of. Either he doesn’t know or he doesn’t care, right? He’s just papering over the fact that tax collectors were fairly terrible people. There’s a reason why they were hated. It wasn’t just bigotry; they were thieves.

It’s probably been a while since I went over this, but the way tax collection worked was the Romans decided they wanted money for something, for some project they were doing. So they sent word to the tax collectors saying, “We need this much money, get it.” There were not brackets on income. There were no deductions, right? It was: the tax collector in your village has to raise X amount of money and hand it over to the governor. If he doesn’t, he’s going to end up getting executed. So he’s going to get it. If he has to have you whipped by the Romans, if he has to have you thrown off your land if he has to… whatever he has to do to get it from you, he’s going to get it from you.

They did not pay tax collectors. The way tax collectors made money was collecting more than they were required to collect, right? So to put it in modern money, I get told, I need to collect $5,000 this month. I go out, I collect $10,000, I pocket the other five. That’s how they got rich. So they were among the richest people in these villages. In these poor villages, and it was money they had essentially stolen, at sword point, at Roman sword point, from the people. They were Jewish people. They’re not Romans coming in oppressing the Jews. These are Jewish people who have joined up with the Romans to oppress their fellow Jews. These are despicable people, these are sinful people. Jesus is not saying, “Come on, you with your sin stuff and your commandments, right? Don’t worry about it. I’m here with grace for everybody.”

No, that’s not how he describes sin. If the Father is God, as we’re going to get to, if the Father is God, what did the sinner in this parable do at the very beginning of it came up? He thumbed his nose at God, he disrespected and slandered God, and then took what God had given him, took the blessings, the good things that God had given him, and went out and squandered them. Squandered them. And now has debased himself to the point that he’s living with animals. He’s living like an animal, worse than an animal.

So, Jesus here is taking sin very seriously, right? His problem with the Pharisees is not that they take sin seriously and Jesus doesn’t. We’re coming to the problem with the Pharisees, but so Jesus takes it very seriously. It’s rebellion against God and is a terrible thing and it leaves human beings lower than animals. By the time they’re done, they’ve immersed themselves in sin.

“But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my fatherís hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!  I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”’”

So one day he comes to his senses and he wakes up. He says, “You know what? I blew it with my dad. I’m not worthy to go back there. I wish I hadn’t. I regret what I’ve done. Maybe if I go and show remorse and ask his forgiveness, he’ll take me on as a hired servant. It would be better than living with these pigs, right? Maybe I could just be a slave. Maybe I could just be a field worker. That’d be better than this.”

And so this here, this is the image of repentance that Christ is giving us. When we repent, we come to our senses. We become aware of how we’ve been living and that we don’t need to keep living this way. There is something better. And we’ve talked before about especially when we were going through the Old Testament, because as I’ve said before, the Old Testament tells the same story over and over again in several different ways. This cycle repeats itself.

The position of the Scriptures is not that we’re born bad and we sort of work our way up and become good people and earn our way to heaven. The perspective of the Scriptures, starting with Genesis 1-3, is God gave us everything and we blew it. We had it all and we lost it. And here’s the road that takes us back. It’s the same image here. The Son had it all, with his father, and he blew it. But now here’s the road back. The road back involves admitting that he blew it, admitting that he treated his father horribly and he doesn’t deserve any better than what he’s getting, but that maybe if he pleads for his Father’s mercy, he’ll be allowed to be the least in his father’s household.

“And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.”

So notice here the Father doesn’t wait. The father doesn’t wait. The Father doesn’t tell him to grovel, “I told you so. See, that’s what you get. You know good punk, coming here telling me you want your inheritance.” Quite the opposite. He runs out to meet him. He runs out to meet him and grabs him, right? Hugs and kisses him.

So here in the parable, God doesn’t wait for us to decide to come back to him. God comes to us, first and foremost through Christ. Christ didn’t wait to come as the Messiah until everything was great. “Oh, they finally deserve the Messiah!” They didn’t deserve the Messiah. Quite the opposite. Things were pretty steadily getting worse when he came. This flies right in the face, of course, of the Pharisees’ way of looking at things, because the Pharisees way of looking at things was, the Messiah will come and free us from the Romans once we’re all righteous and once we get rid of these no good sinners. They were going to earn the Messiah coming, they were going to achieve it, they were going to return to God, they were going to create the kingdom on earth, and then the Messiah would come to rule over it, and he’s saying, “No, no, no”. 

While you’re still lost in your sins, Paul’s going to say, at just the right time, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, didn’t wait for us to straighten up our act. First, God comes out, father comes out and meets him, meets him on the way.

“And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

“But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet.’”

So notice again here, the Son doesn’t say, “Oh, my dad seems happy to see me. Well, I guess I was forgiven.”

Because he’s learned repentance. He’s learned repentance. But the Father said to his servants, bring out the best robe and put it on him and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. These are symbols, not just the best row, but the ring on his hand. That’s a symbol of authority. So the idea is, even though, as he’s just said, notice he doesn’t correct him and say, “Oh, yeah, you’re worthy to be my son.” He receives him back as his son anyways.

But the fact that he’s still repentant here is again important, because there are some, of our friends, mostly but not entirely in churches other than the Orthodox Church, who don’t feel that Christians need to repent, who feel that once you’re a Christian, when you were baptized, when you came to the church, Jesus says, “You’re forgiven of all your sins past, present and future, so now you’re good.” Well, that’s clearly not the way Christ is telling the story. Again that’s that view that you’re bad before and then you’ve achieved… “I’ve now achieved salvation, now achieved Christianity, and so now we’re set”. Not, “I had it and I lost it, and now I’m on the journey back.”

He says to the servants:

“‘And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.”

So this is parallel to the other two parables we read. Remember, you tell all your friends, “Hey, I found the sheep. Hey, I found the coin.” The father says, “Hey, my son who was dead, is alive again.”

There’s an echo there from the end of Genesis. Remember when Jacob is reunited with Joseph, who he thought was dead, but it turns out was in Egypt? “My son was dead, but he’s alive again. He’s been restored to me.” So he celebrates.

Now, remember sort of the unspoken question at the end of the last two parables was why aren’t the Pharisees rejoicing at these lost sheep and lost coins and lost sons who have been found? Now that gets developed a little more.

“Now his older son was in the field. And as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant.”

The other son was there the whole time. “Well, hey, there’s a party going on. Somebody’s birthday I forgot? What’s going on?

“And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and because he has received him safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf.’”

So what’s the expectation? His brother should be happy, right? “My brother who wandered off all those years ago, he’s back.” He should be happy.

Now remember, the father divided the money between both sons. Nothing the prodigal son has done has hurt the other brother. He doesn’t spend any of his money. Didn’t waste any of his money, didn’t waste any his time. He was really disrespectful to his father, didn’t say anything to his brother. Hasn’t wronged his brother in any way.

“But he was angry and would not go in.”

Won’t go into the party. Forget it.

“Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him.”

What has Jesus been doing at the dinner party? Before that, at the Pharisee’s house? Remember the point I made? It sounds like a diatribe, like he’s really ribbing him. But the fact that he’s talking to them, the fact that he’s doing it, it’s a call to repentance. He’s pleading with them. It’s not too late for you. Come on in, celebrate. Be happy, right? Rejoice with me. The father still cares about that son too.

“So he answered and said to his father, ‘Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends.’”

“I’ve been here this whole time and I’ve been being the good kid. I’ve done everything you ever asked me to. I’ve never done anything you told me not to do. Where’s my party? Where’s my party?”

“‘But as soon as this son of yours came,’”

Not “my brother”, “this son of yours”, he’s nothing to me.

“‘But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.’”

You throw the party for him. What gives? What gives? He’s the bad son, I’m the good son. Looks like you like him better.

“And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours.’”

That gets read over too quickly sometimes. That son hasn’t had to go through any of the stuff that the other son went through. Hasn’t been living with pigs, hasn’t been starving to death, right? He’s been living with his father this whole time, right? With his full share of the inheritance to have and do as he pleases with, right?

That’s the reward.

“‘It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.’”

So what’s Jesus saying to the Pharisees again? He’s pleading with them. He’s not saying, “Buzz off,” right? He’s not saying, “No, you’re the sinners.” He’s pleading with them, saying, “Look, you’ve been following the law as best you know how, and you’ve lived a life with all the blessings God has given you that any of these tax collectors and sinners hanging out would have loved to have led.”

Why? Because sin is destructive. Sin has consequences. There may be a myth, but it’s a myth, that there are people out there just sinning wildly, right? And having a great time, maybe in the short term, the Prodigal Son had fun in the short term. But I for one have not met a ton of super happy greedy people, or super happy sexually immoral people, or super happy addicts, or super happy idolators. We can run down the list. Super happy adulterers, super happy covetous people, right? They’re not out there.

So, the Pharisees have two problems. One, they clearly like this son, right? “Why don’t you give me a young goat so I could have a party?” They clearly don’t understand all the blessings they’ve received from God. And because they don’t understand what they themselves have received, they’re not able to be happy for someone else who receives something. All there is, is jealousy. All there is, is envy.

We sometimes maybe fall into this line of thinking. Plato’s Republic is basically an extended dialogue about what justice is. And not just what justice is, but whether you should try to live a just life, whether you should try to be a righteous and just person. And it’s very brass tacks, because one of the proposals is, “Well, no, you should try to appear like a just and righteous person, so you get the benefits of a good reputation but then actually be completely unjust and unrighteous in your personal life. So you get all the benefits of being rotten on one side, but all the benefits of good reputation on the other.”

And there’s sort of a Christian version of that, where we kind of think that sin must be fun or God wouldn’t want us not to do it. We think, “Wow, what we really want to do is we really go out and sit and do all this stuff because we think it’s going to be fun. And then if we could just get like a five-minute warning on when we’re going to die so we could repent of everything real quick, and still quote, unquote, go to heaven anyway, that’d be perfect, right?” That’s the way we want to go.

But first of all, that’s not the teachings of Scripture. Remember when we read the law, there was nothing in the Torah, there’s nothing in the first five books of the Bible about going to heaven or going to hell when you die. Remember? Nothing about it. What it promises you is if you live by these commandments, you will live, you will have blessings. If you don’t, you will die, you will experience curses. And we have this skewed reading of that, “Well, what that means is if you do this bad stuff that God doesn’t want you to do, he’s going to smite you, right? If you do the good stuff that he wants you to do, he is going to reward you.” But that’s not what it was saying. That’s not what’s actually written. Read Deuteronomy 28 to 30 where God says, “I set before you today life and death, blessings and curses, and you choose.”

Because God created the world good. God is good. Everything God has created is good, and evil has no part in it. Evil is just a corruption and a destruction of what God has created. So if you choose to do evil, if you choose sin, if you choose wickedness, you are choosing destruction and corruption and degradation, because that’s what it is that you’re choosing.

And what God does in his law is make that crystal clear so that you can make your choice and then you’re going to have to live with the consequences. And then graciously, he gives us repentance. He gives us his grace and his mercy through repentance to turn that around once we’ve gone the wrong way. And if you remember also at Deuteronomy 28 to 30, he doesn’t say “If you sinned,” right? Remember, he says “When you have sinned and transgressed all of My commandments and I send you into exile.”

That wasn’t a surprise that happened later on. God knew that was coming. When all this happens, then you need to return back to me in repentance and I will bring you back and I will restore you. So what he says to Israel on the macrocosm, is said to us on the microcosm. God says to us, when you’ve sinned, when you’ve gone astray when, like the Prodigal Son, you’ve disrespected me and rebelled against me and turned your back on me and spit my face, and you’ve gone off and you end up wandering around with a swine and you come to your senses, then you need to return to me. And I will come out and meet you, and I will bring you back and I will restore you. Far beyond not just what you deserve, but what you can imagine. And when you see that happen for someone else, you should rejoice, because that is the most beautiful and wonderful thing that can happen with sinful human beings. And so that’s what he’s calling the Pharisees to do.