Joshua 5:9-12
Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32
This is the second time this Lent that he hear the parable of the Lost Son. I find it helpful to read the three parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Lost Son together. Luke’s narrative skill invites us into each scene, and we almost have no choice but to respond. With each parable the invitation goes deeper. We know these stories so well.
If you are preaching today or listening to a sermon there’s sure to be something said about repentance, mercy and God. We need this message more than ever in our world today. But there’s something else which links these parables: each scene ends in an invitation to rejoice and celebrate. Each parable encapsulates that special joy you feel when you find something which you thought you had lost. To feel that joy you need first to have noticed that something was missing. Then you need to go in search of it. In Luke’s parables this joy finds communal expression. I have always loved the phrase ‘we are going to have feast, a celebration’. Joy is almost always doubled when you invite others to share it.
These parables all speak to me of the centrality of celebration in the story of our salvation. The quality of our love and mercy are mirrored in our capacity to rejoice and to celebrate. I’ve come to value the people in my life who naturally rejoice or who make the simplest of gatherings a celebration. It’s worth quoting Amy J Levine a second time here:
‘Do whatever it takes to find the lost and then celebrate with others, both so that you can share the joy and so that the others will help prevent the recovered from ever being lost again. Don’t wait until you receive an apology; you may never get one. Don’t wait until you can muster the ability to forgive; you may never find it. Don’t stew in your sense of being ignored, for there is nothing that can be done to retrieve the past.
Instead, go have lunch. Go celebrate, and invite others to join you. If the repenting and the forgiving come later, so much the better. And if not, you still will have done what is necessary. You will have begun a process that might lead to reconciliation. You will have opened a second chance for wholeness. Take advantage of resurrection—it is unlikely to happen twice.’
— Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi by Amy-Jill Levine
Are things in this past week for which you can say ‘we are going to have feast, a celebration’?