Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 11, 2022 – Exodus 32:7-11, 13-14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-32

This parable is probably Jesus’ masterpiece. Certainly it’s Luke’s. And it doesn’t need any help from me. It stands on its own. But there are some things we need to talk about.

First of all, we know why Jesus told this story. Luke tells us at the very beginning. It’s because the righteous people, the Scribes and the Pharisees, complained that Jesus spent too much time and gave too much attention to the tax collectors and sinners, those people on the margins who were not respectable and who were not accepted in Jewish society.

Luke writes this Gospel about forty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. And so, Luke is telling Jesus’ story to an entirely different crowd. Who are they?

We’ve spoken many times about the difficulty of Jewish Christians versus Gentile Christians. By the time Luke wrote, the number of Jewish Christians was dwindling because most Jewish people had made their choice. Either Jesus was the Messiah or He wasn’t. And it split families right down the middle.

But now we are talking two generations past. The people who saw Jesus in his lifetime, are now the grandmas and grandpas. And very few new Jewish people are joining the Christian group. But, in that intervening forty years, Paul and Peter and those following him had preached the Gospel to anyone they could. And vast numbers of Gentiles, people who Jews considered to be unclean, people who worshipped idols, people who lived what Jewish people considered to be very sinful lives, were entering the Church in great numbers and there was friction between the two groups.

The Jewish Christians, dwindling in number, felt that they had the high road because they had preserved the tradition of the Prophets and the stories of old and it was from their people that Jesus came, and so, they had the inside track. The Gentile Christians would say, “Hey, we all have the same Baptism. We all are supposed to be breaking the same bread of Eucharist. You need to accept us. We need to be acceptable to you in order to be true to the teaching of Jesus.” We’ve talked about that several times.  But there is something else percolating beneath this story that we may not be aware of.

In the mid-60s, Peter and Paul were executed under the orders of the Emperor Nero, during a persecution of Christians. But that started a series of persecutions. Each of the persecutions were terrible. Christians died horrible deaths. But they didn’t last very long and not too many people were executed. However, when a persecution began, some Christians were so afraid of what might happen to them that they renounced their faith and went back to worshipping idols in public. Other Christians decided that they would save their own skins by ratting out their neighbors and telling the authorities who the Christians were. When the persecution was over, those people wanted back in, which caused the first great controversy in Christianity. 

One group of Christians said, “No, all of your sins were forgiven when you were baptized. You’re expected not to sin again. They’re not allowed back in.” The other group said, “Wait a second. If we are to be true to the teaching of Jesus, then God’s mercy is available all the time to everyone.” And it’s to address this controversy, at least in part, that St. Luke told his Gospel. 

That is why I asked you to place close attention to the action that takes place four times in the story. It goes by different names but is the same action. In the parable of the lost sheep, the sheep owner goes out from the sheepfold in search of the lost one. The father sees the son coming and goes out. The translation says he ran, but in order to run he had to go out of the house. He ran, he went out. He went out to his son. A couple of lines later he goes out of the house again to the older brother. And in the story of the lost coin, although the woman doesn’t leave her house, she does the same basic thing as in all the other three stories, she searches. The shepherd searches, the woman searches, the father searches. God goes out in search of those on the margins.

So, we are left with the question. Who am I in this story? Am I the righteous one, the upholder of tradition, the one on the inside track? Am I on the margins? Have I put myself there or have other people put me there? Do I deserve to be there or do I deserve to be in the center? Do I deserve my privileged position or am I using it in the wrong way?

To all of us, the Father goes out. To ALL of us.