Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
Too Much Grace?
Isaiah 55:8
September 21, 2014
John Buchanan

There is a famous painting by Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal, of the moment the younger song meets his father and throws himself at his feet. Dutch priest, the late Henri Nouwen, wrote a wonderful book – The Return of the Prodigal – a personal memoir and reflection on Rembrandt’s masterpiece, which hangs in the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the painting the son is kneeling in front of his father, and elderly, dignified man. The father’s hands are placed on his son’s shoulders. Nouwen noticed that one hand is masculine, but the tapered fingers of the other hand are decidedly female – a mother’s hands. Nouwen concluded that, if there were ever any doubt, that the father in the story is a symbol of God and God’s love, both maternal and paternal, a love every one of us desperately needs.
Nouwen received permission to sit in front of the painting, meditating, for several days and wrote that “it brought me into touch with something that lies beyond the ups and downs of a busy life, something that represents the ongoing yearning of the human spirit…for a final return, a sense of safety, a lasting home.”
Ever since I read that book and pondered the illustration I wanted to see that painting, stand in front of it and see if I could see what Nouwen saw. Finally, through the generosity of our five children – who sent us to Russia for a big anniversary, I did it. We stood with our tour group that was trying to see as much of the vast Hermitage collection in two hours – and before being hurried along, had chills up and down my spine. Later we left the tour and returned and this time lingered and pondered gratefully.
If I could know only one thing about Jesus, other than that he gave his life for me, it would be a story he told one day about God and the human condition, and what God does about it. The popular name of the story is the Parable of the Prodigal Son and he – the prodigal – gets all the press. But there are two sons in the story: each is important. And there is the father who is the true Prodigal. His part of the story is not only powerful but, if we’re honest, a little disconcerting. What he does, or does not do, may just be the whole point.
If that’s God: if that’s the way God relates to us, it is very different both from what most of us learned and from conventional wisdom. In fact, it is one of several stories Jesus told that, when we dig into them, are disconcerting; stories about grace: maybe too much grace.
Another Prodigal character is the landowner who needs day laborers to harvest his grapes. First thing in the morning he hires a group and puts them to work. At 9:00 a.m. he hires another group, another group of laborers at noon, another at 3:00 and one hour before the end of the working day, 5:00 p.m., hires a final group. At quitting time the landowner pays wages – starting with the last laborers hired, gives them a full day’s wage, repeats the process with the others, even those who haven’t put in an entire day’s work, pays them all the same amount. The ones who worked a full day are surprised, angry. We worked all day – they worked one hour – and you’re paying us all the same? You are treating us all equally?” The landowner responds: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” It is, quite simply, too much grace.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the most beloved stories ever. Religious legalists, the fundamentalists of the day, have been criticizing Jesus for associating and eating with the wrong people: sinners, tax collectors, social and religious outcasts. Jesus doesn’t agree. Instead he tells a brilliant story about a man and two sons. The characters are unforgettable. The younger son does the unthinkable: essentially says to his father, “Old man, I’m tired of waiting for you to die. Give me my part of your estate – now.” And the father does the unthinkable – gives this brash, disrespectful, spoiled upstart his share of the estate. No questions asked. The young man takes the money and runs, and spends it all on what Jesus delicately called “dissolute living.” When the money runs out, and he is broke, the boy takes the only job he can find, feeding hogs, an abhorrent job for a Jew. And then he “comes to himself.” This is no great moral breakthrough. This is a hungry, exhausted, essentially homeless boy who remembers where there are clean sheets and three meals a day. He composes a speech, rehearses and refines it – “I’m no longer worthy to be your son: just treat me like a hired hand, but let me come home.” He heads toward home and as he walks goes over and over the speech until he comes within eyesight of his home.
His father sees him coming. Actually, the old man is out there every day, morning, midday, and evening, scanning the horizon, watching, waiting, hoping. And then he sees the unmistakable figure (I can recognize my sons from a hundred yards just by the way they stand) – the familiar gait, the carriage he knows so well, his child, coming home. He does the most extraordinary thing, something his neighbors would think is embarrassing. In a culture where mature men value and protect their dignity and, therefore, don’t run anywhere, he hikes up his robes and runs down the road. This father is so overcome, so overjoyed, he runs. His son sees him coming, starts to stammer his well-rehearsed speech, but he can’t get it out because now his father’s arms are around him and his father’s kisses and tears of joy are on his cheeks. Finally, he says it, “I’m not worthy…” The old man doesn’t even hear it because he’s busy now, planning the celebration, best robes, ring, new sandals, fatted calf. “My son was lost and is found.”
I appreciate and sympathize with the third character in the story, the older brother. I’m one. We’re the ones new parents practice on. We’re the ones who get to watch our younger siblings reap the benefit from the patience and generosity and freedom our parents had not yet learned when we showed up and which we taught them. Most of our presidents were oldest sons. Many ministers are too. Maybe it’s because we think we have to fix everything our younger brothers and sisters break and mess up. In any event, he is a classic: hard working, diligent, responsible to a T. When he saw his little brother return and the dramatic reunion on the road, he does what older brothers do, he keeps on working. But he hears the music and the laughter and it is too much for him. He can’t put down the hoe and go in and join the celebration and enjoy the party. It’s too much grace.
The best part of this story, I think, is what comes next. In the midst of the party, while all the guests and neighbors are having a great time enjoying the music and delicious food and wine, the father leaves his house a second time to find a lost child: the one lost in his own self-righteousness and wounded pride. “All these years I’ve been loyal and steadfast, and you never gave me a goat. But ‘this son’” – notice the sarcasm, the deep pain and anger – he can’t say his name, or “my brother,” but “this son of yours” who “wasted money with prostitutes.” He’s the one who brings up the subject of sex. The father ignores his speech as well. “Son, you are always with me: all that I have is yours. But we have to celebrate. Your brother was dead and is alive, was lost and is found.”
That is startling, a very different concept of God from the conventional one, the one many of us were taught – God is holy, righteous, and just. Popular author Anne Lamott says most of us have a mental picture, God like our High School Principal who is rifling through our files and not liking what he finds there. For many of us God is so holy, pure, perfect and remote that we cannot conceive that we might, in any way, be acceptable to God, not to mention restored, forgiven, loved. But, Jesus taught, here is God who comes after the lost, waits patiently, watching, until we “come to our self” for whatever reason, even if we’re just hungry and cold and exhausted and tired of being lost, a God who, at the first opportunity, runs down the road to welcome the lost home again, leaves the party to find and recover the ones in self-imposed exile. It is a radical theology, one that is so graceful it makes us uneasy. Karl Barth said once that we do not like the idea of grace, that God loves us in spite of our failures and foibles, our sin. We far prefer to believe that we deserve God’s love because of our goodness, our righteousness.
It’s a radical theology and it is at the heart of what we believe as Reformed Christians, but it is not new. It’s as old as the Psalter, Israel’s hymnbook. Jesus knew the Psalms, memorized them as a child, recited and sang them. He knew these amazing words:
Where can I go from your spirit?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there,
If I make my bed in hell, you are there. (Psalm 139)
We sometimes oversimplify the God of the Old Testament as a God of angry righteousness and wrath, a stern judge. But at the heart of Israel’s faith, as well as ours, is the radical trust that God’s love is the most powerful, enduring reality in the world, that it is unconditional, that it comes to us, seeks us out, pursues us until it – until God – finally finds us, recovers us, welcomes us home.
Notice how the love comes before the repentance and confession. Augustine called it “Prevenient Grace”: grace that comes before anything else. The son never really gets his confession out before the father forgives and redeems. Another radical idea – God’s love and forgiveness come ever before we say we’re sorry. That’s hard for us. We can get our mind around forgiveness after there is proper penitence and remorse and a proper apology. But this is different. This is a love that doesn’t wait for an apology: a love so profound that it inspires profound repentance. We confess in confidence because we know forgiving love is there for us to embrace: repentance – not in order to receive forgiveness, but a repentance that comes out of the very depths of your soul because forgiving love has already been given.
Kathleen Norris, bestselling author – and good Presbyterian by the way – hadn’t been to church for years and hadn’t thought much about it, started attending her grandparents’ Presbyterian Church in Lemon, South Dakota. She remembers, “I came to understand that God hadn’t lost me, even if for years I seemed to have misplaced God.” Older, wise church members kept gently nudging her. One said, “If you don’t feel as close to God as you used to, who do you suppose moved?” (Amazing Grace, p. 3)
I have never forgotten my first experience of grace. As offenses go, it was pretty small potatoes. I’ve done far worse, but at the time it seemed pretty shameful. The people who lived across the street from us put in a stretch of new concrete sidewalk. I watched every day as the old crumbling walk was broken and dug out, new forms built, cement mixed in a wheel barrow, poured into the form, smoothed and edged expertly. It was a thing of beauty, that sidewalk was. And it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to put my initials in that fresh cement. So that is what I did, after dark, small letters, pressed into the cement with a popsicle stick, not too conspicuous, JB, in a corner of the drying concrete.
Mr. Steele was not amused. It didn’t take him long to conclude who JB was, and so he confronted my father angrily. My father assured him that I would never do such a thing, but that he would talk to me and get back to Mr. Steele. The day of reckoning came and I remember it as if it were yesterday. Did you do it? Put your initials in Mr. Steels’ new sidewalk? (Now, a mitigating factor here, corollary evidence, is that he had allowed my little brother and me – showed us how to do it in fact – to put our initials in our new sidewalk earlier – so I knew how to do it and how impressive it was – my initials in cement.) Well, I was caught – I was guilty. I didn’t know what would happen. So I lied. I told him I didn’t do it. It must have been someone else – maybe my own cousin Jimmy Buchanan – who was at the time a more accomplished criminal than I was. My father did the most amazing thing. He believed me. He trusted me. He went to Mr. Steele and said I didn’t do it. I had told him I didn’t do it, so I didn’t do it and that was that.
Why he did that I’ll never know. He surely knew that I was guilty twice: I did it and I lied to him about it. Had he punished me, I would almost have welcomed it, and I would have forgotten the entire incident. But the fact that he trusted me, forgave me, in some way shouldered my guilt himself, took it on himself – I’m thinking about sixty years later.
Forgiveness is stunning when it happens. Grace – which is another word for it – is amazing always, and powerful and transforming.
No wonder so many of us are deeply moved by words written two and half centuries ago by a British slave ship captain, John Newton. He had no particular interest in religion, but caught in violent storm at sea, fearing for his life, he suddenly saw, in a new light, what he was doing: transporting human beings who had been caught like wild animals, ripped away from their homes and families, sold as slaves at enormous profit – which he would share. Finally he saw clearly. He was blind – but now he could see.
He returned safely – but now understood the enormity of the evil he was part of, started to feel guilt and the crushing weight of his sin. He started to go to church and then came upon a new idea: there is a God of love, who forgives and lifts the burdens of guilt and gives new life. John Newton, slave ship captain, became a follower of Jesus, a Christian, and a minister in the Church of England and somewhere around 1770 wrote a little poem about what had happened to him.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
Through many dangers, toils, and snares
I have already come.
‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home.
It’s for you and me, for two lost sons, the slave trader. It’s for all of us.
Amazing Grace.