Friday, October 9, 2009

Lost and Found, Part 28 of 78

TEXT: "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. And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. 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. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything" (Luke 15:11-16).

IDEA: The question we face is whether we want to be the child of the Father or the slave to something or someone else.

PURPOSE: To persuade listeners that real freedom comes when God masters us.

When you think of some of the people you have known for a long time, could you have predicted what they would become or where they would end up?

Did some take you by surprise? Why?

Do you think some people live their lives are surprised by the way they turned out?
Why?

Listen to a famous story Jesus told. If you didn’t know the ending, what predictions might have been made about one young man’s future?

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. And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country... (Luke 15:11-1 3a)

At this point in the story, how might different people have finished the story?

One of his buddies in the neighborhood?

A teacher at school?

His father?

Himself?

Listen to how Jesus finished out the description of the trip the younger brother made to a city in some distant country:

And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. 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. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.

At first, he lived a lavish lifestyle. Then he ran out of funds.

THEN

A famine arose. Jeremias has traced a series often famines that took place in and around Jerusalem from 169 BC to 70 AD. Famine would have been a powerful image for any first-century Palestinian audience. This was not an economic recession; it was a gut-wrenching famine.

THEN

He (an emphatic pronoun in v. 14), HE, more than others, was in need.

He was a lone Jew in a far country without money or friends. (Aliens have a particularly difficult time in an economic decline.)

He “glued” himself to a citizen of that country. He forced himself on an employer. He didn’t answer a “Help Wanted” sign. Since he had arrived with money, he was expected to have some self-respect left. The polite way a Middle Easterner gets rid of unwanted “hangers-on” is to assign them a task he knows they will refuse. (Bailey, Poet and Peasant, p. 170).

To everyone’s surprise, he takes the job as a pig feeder. This was as low as a Jew could get. The pig was unclean (Lev 11:7). A Rabbinical saying was, “Cursed be the man who would breed swine.”

He “wanted to fill his stomach with the carob pods which the pigs ate. But no one gave him anything.”

What is implied is that he could only eat scraps that the pigs left. In a famine pigs are more valuable than people. Pigs bring money, poor people bring nothing. No one would waste pig food on a starving Jewish boy in a famine.

He is not free. He is under a master who has no interest in him. He is a slave to his hungers. Luther spoke of our human life as a battlefield between two masters. The question is, “Do we want to be a child of the Father or a slave to the other?”