• Joshua 5:9-12

The journey with God through the wilderness began with a story of miraculous generosity (Exodus 16) and concludes forty years later with another display of God’s generosity.  This time, God’s people will feast off “the land,” which had been promised and they now occupied.  Joshua was leading the annual observance of Passover for the first time in the “Promised Land” and the “manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land… they ate the crop of the land of Canaan that year.”

• Psalm 32

This psalm describes the burden when confession is deferred, which feels like a weight that saps the body of its strength.  Immediate release only occurs with the decision to confess to the Lord.  Forgiveness is immediate and total.  The wise person confesses regularly to lessen the pressure of unconfessed sins.  Do not be stubborn like a mule or a horse.  Trust in the Lord’s forgiveness.  And then “Sing!”

• II Corinthians 5:16-21

Paul testifies to the complete reversal in his perspective caused by his new status “in Christ.”  He now sees the accomplishments of Christ through the lens of “reconciliation.”  Through Christ, God was reconciling the world to God and now entrusts “the message of reconciliation to us.”  Be reconciled yourself, Paul writes, so you can reconcile others with God.

• Luke 15:1-3,11b-32

Jesus responds with a parable to his critics in the religious establishment, “the Pharisees and the scribes,” who are disgusted that he “welcomes sinners and eats with them.”  In a brilliant piece of story writing, Luke tells of two brothers/sons and a father’s love.  The younger son/brother asked for and received his inheritance early, left home and squandered “his property in dissolute living.”  He finally ended up eating with the pigs.  But, “he came to himself…..”  He made the decision to return home, admit that he had lost his status as a son and asked for a job as a worker from his father.  His father saw him in the distance, was “filled with compassion,” and rushed out to greet him with a hug and a  kiss.  The son made his carefully composed confession.  The father’s only response was to order preparations for a party.  The older brother/son returned to the house, heard the partying and was resentful.  He argued with his father, pointing out that he was never irresponsible, and always worked “like a slave” for his father.  The father assured the older brother/son he will receive all that is due to him, but now is the occasion to celebrate, “because this brother of yours was dead and now has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”

The psalmist seems to be describing first-hand the impact of refusing to ask for forgiveness.  Living with his guilt is affecting his health.  Today we might call these results he describes psychosomatic, rather like a weight pushing down with a gradual loss of energy and strength.

The profound impact of Luke’s parable about two sons and a loving father on the human imagination is attested to by Shakespeare’s allusions to it in no less than twelve of his plays.  It first grips us because of the foolishness of the youth, compounded by his not knowing how to get out of the mess into which he has gotten himself.  The American poet, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), depicts in vivid detail his time spent with the pigs in her poem, “The Prodigal,” as these few excerpts show:

“The brown enormous odor he lived by

was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,

for him to judge.  The floor was rotten; the sky

was plastered half-way up with glass-smooth

dung //

But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts

(he hid the flask beneath a two-by-four),

the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red;

the burning puddles seemed to reassure.

And when he thought he almost might endure

his exile yet another year or more.//

Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,

he felt the bat’s uncertain staggering flight,

his shuddering insights, beyond his control,

touching him.”

Most of the poem she devotes to describing the squalor into which he had sunk and his resignation to his fate when, suddenly, in the very last line, she leaves open the possibility of a different ending:

“But it took him a long time

finally to make up his mind to go home.”

The psalmist discovered that as soon as he made the decision to ask for forgiveness and did it, the relief was immediate and complete; Luke’s magnificent story pivots on the decision by the younger son/brother to return home and ask for forgiveness.  Luke writes “he came to himself….”

In his famous essay, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift,” (which can be found in The Visible and the Revealed), Jean-Luc Marion writes of the decision one must make to accept something before the act of giving can be completed:

“the gift fulfills itself perfectly when as the recipient I make up my mind to receive it.  The performance of the gift is linked more to my decision to accept it than to its own availability.  Moreover, it is often my decision that decides that something finds itself accepted.”  “If we reflect upon the business of love, it often happens that acceptance provokes the availability of the gift….”  “…I alone and more than another, affirm the capacity to let myself be seduced and freely consent to the possibility of a gift….” (p.93)

The younger son/brother made the decision to go home that put him in the proximity of the father’s initiative to offer forgiveness.  The decision to return home put him close enough for the father to rush our and embrace him