TWO FACES?

I’ve been summoned for Jury Duty a few times in my adult life, and the most recent time was about 15 years ago.  The case involved felony robbery, and the defense was going to argue that it was a matter of mistaken identity from the eyewitnesses.  So, as the attorney for the defense was polling the group of potential jurors, she had a couple of questions for all of us to see if we could be trusted to be fair.  One by one, we were all asked the same question, specifically: “Have you ever been in a situation where you were sure that you’d met a person before, but it turned out later that you were wrong?” And if we answered yes – which all of us did – then we were given a follow-up question, namely: “Why do you think that happens?”  For me, I said that it was owing to the sheer number of people that I encounter every day in my parish, and I can’t always keep them straight.  That seemed to be a satisfactory response, so she went on to the next potential juror; “Why do you think that happens?”  After a few seconds of thinking about it the man answered, “Well, I guess there are only so many faces to go around, and sometimes God has to use one twice.”

It was priceless, and also sufficient to get him appointed to the jury.  And of course, it was completely wrong.  God doesn’t run out of faces, or people to love very personally.  Despite my story a few weeks ago about identical twin brothers, there is no cap to the number of faces and people in this world, which means that when God decides to create and love one more person, he doesn’t thereby love someone else less.  Creation is not a zero-sum game in which one person can only be loved at the expense of someone else who must have love reduced or taken away – not with God, anyway.  Which brings us to this gospel of Luke today, to the parable told by Jesus, and to the audience who would have heard it. 

Turning first to the audience, which was pretty much anybody who cared to stop and hear.  It was tax collectors and known sinners who were passing by and who were curious to listen.  They knew that they weren’t worthy of Jesus’s care and hospitality, but they also knew that Jesus didn’t particularly care about that.  There was always room for one more at his table.  But there were others present with Jesus that day, too – the Pharisees and the Scribes and other self-appointed religious authority figures and holy men who knew themselves to be worthy, especially when compared with the great unclean crowd that dared to stand there next to them.  Those religious leaders, though they may not have said it in exactly this way, were convinced that there was indeed only so much grace to go around, only so many faces to be recognized or welcomed, those who were Jesus’s inner circle, and there was only so much of God’s love to be shared – such that when some people were able to partake in it, others could not.  If God’s affection, after all, is so real and so precious, they thought, then it must also be scarce.  Somehow God certainly must run out of faces, but here there’s no room for doubles.

And that’s how we got to Jesus having to utter this parable in the first place, the story of the so-called “prodigal son.”  What was so wrong to begin with, was that the son was so angry, the second son.  About what?  And what made him think that he needed to begin to treat his father as dead, to take his inheritance, and to leave home?  There’s no indication here that that son was being mistreated by his unjust father or that he wasn’t being loved enough.  In fact, the problem seems to have been that he wasn’t the only one who was subject to his father’s affection and had access to his father’s earthly goods.  The problem, as far as that son seems to have imagined it, wasn’t that there was too little love being shared; it was that there was too much of it.  Which meant that if he was going to be sure to get his share of it, he needed to pack up and get out while he could.  There were too many faces all trying to get around the trough to feed on it.  The love was going to run out. He believed that. 

It was the same story with the older son, when his brother eventually returned home.  As the father pointed out, nobody in that family was loved any less when another was loved more.  Nobody had any less share in all of the father’s goods when somebody else was given more.  And nobody ran out of what was needed to live while they were all together at home as a community of care.  It was only when the younger son wandered away that his situation became dire.  There were never too many faces so as to become a problem for God.  “Everything I have is yours,” the father says, “and that means no running out, and you are with me always.”  The father is made most happy when a couple of impetuous sons finally figure that out – happier then, in fact, than when he is among those who never knew it all along.  It wasn’t just that these sons knew how much they were cared for; it’s that there once was a time when they didn’t know that, and acted as if that weren’t true.  They had been dead and now they were alive; they had been lost and now were found.  To come back from death is better than never having to die in the first place.

In these hard days for us, when it has become difficult for us truly to trust that God’s love hasn’t been all used up in this world and that it’s time for us simply to give up and get away, to treat God as dead, let us, instead, double down in our resolve to stay with him by welcoming every other person who has been invited to the same banquet that we have.  There aren’t too many faces; there isn’t too little mercy to be shared.  There is only the need to awaken fully to all that we already have and to our responsibility to share it.  One of the ways we share that responsibility is by inviting one another to roles of leadership in our community, and we begin the process of doing that here this afternoon at Pax Christi. I invite you, and this is a little change of gears, to take note of our video which is about to be shown here and to consider whether it is speaking to you or to somebody you know, somebody with whom to share the riches that the Lord himself gives us.