March 14 Lent IV
Apparently, in today’s world of online shopping, it is possible to sell your soul. Well, if not your own soul, then at least the souls of others. This has been tried in various ways, most recently by a woman in Christ Church, New Zealand. She discovered one day that the house she recently purchased came with two unexpected occupants. As best she could tell, one was the ghost of an old man, a grandfatherly type, and the other of a noisy, temperamental little girl. Not wanting to live in a haunted house, and being the inventive businesswoman that she is, she somehow managed to catch the ghosts in glass vials, using liberal amounts of holy water, of course. She then put them up for sale on eBay. The two souls auctioned for $2000. The woman says that she will donate the money to charity, minus her exorcist’s fee.
What a great story. So great, in fact, that after hearing this brief, thirty-second piece of news the other day during my commute to work, I continued to mull it over for a good several minutes after parking the car. Who was this woman and did she really believe she had ghosts in her house, much less the ability to capture them with holy water and bottles? And what gullible shopper spent their hard-earned $2000 to buy these little otherworldly treasures? Most of all I wondered, is there something to be learned from this story? eBay, that great teacher of modern wisdom, tells us that everything has a price. But perhaps the story reveals something deeper.
As religious people, we would be the first to say that even if you could capture and bottle a soul, you can’t put a price on something so sacred. Or, would we? Perhaps this story of selling souls is so striking because there is more truth to it than we would care to admit. And while we may not sell them on eBay, we are in the business of sizing up the worth of souls, of people, all the time.
Our world is not that different than that of the Pharisees, who once again are unhappy with Jesus. This time it’s for hanging out with sinners and tax collectors, souls not worth very much. In the moral economy of the day, the pricing system was based on righteous living and proper piety. Those who committed offences were inherently worth less than those who lived by the rules. “Birds of a feather flock together,” they say. If Jesus spends his time with the lowly, then Jesus is probably up to no good himself. Yet the story that he tells the Pharisees shakes their understanding of worthiness to the core. Jesus’ parable of the loving father and his two sons reveals a very different economy.
The parable of the prodigal son is deeply familiar to most of us. “There was a man who had two sons,” Jesus begins. The younger son, having recently come into his inheritance, takes his father’s generous gift, leaves the country, and squanders it in loose living. He ends up living in poverty and shame. The elder son, on the other hand, lives responsibly and fairly. He is the upright one. He continues to live and work hard with his father, following all the rules.
According to the social standards of the day, there is a clear winner and a clear loser in the story. The younger son is like the tax collectors and sinners – selfish, irresponsible and worth very little in this life. The elder son is the exemplar citizen – law abiding and faithful, perhaps like the Pharisees themselves.
As Jesus continues it’s easy to imagine his listeners becoming more and more confused and offended. Why is it that the prodigal son, the son who disgraces his father by lavishly squandering his inheritance, has a homecoming fit for a king, while the elder son is left to look on in angry confusion? Clearly, in talking about the worth of the lost son, Jesus is pointing not to a human economy, but a divine one.
The elder brother witnesses his father’s forgiveness, freely given to his younger sibling – and he finds it offensive. Such grace, such love and forgiveness fly in the face of all of our systems of worthiness and righteousness. God’s grace is offensive.
We tend to believe that if we live our lives well, behave better, stay clear from vices and sins, all of these things will make us more worthy somehow, more deserving of God’s love and favor. And when we do make mistakes and fall into sin, confession and repentance will put us back on track. This is all very important in the life of faith, but the idea that we earn God’s grace through these transactions is assuming that God works according to human rules. Jesus tells us that it doesn’t work this way. Notice that when the father sees his beloved, lost son coming down the road, he runs out to greet him. The son who had seen the error of his ways and realized how lost he was, had planned to grovel and bargain with his father. But the father’s love and forgiveness are offered even before the son can say he’s sorry. The lost has been found. God rejoices in this. Period. Grace comes first, before anything we might say or do. No matter what.
The parable of the prodigal son is unfinished. The elder brother in the story has a choice to make, and it’s the same choice we face. He can either continue living in his world where there is a limited amount of grace to be offered only to the righteous. Or he can open his heart to the often offensive, over-the-top grace of God that defies all such human-made limits. Will he decide to live his life stuck in his own narrowness, insisting on his own respectability and goodness and his ability to judge the worth of another? Or will he decide to live in a world infused with a grace beyond measure?
And what about us? What will we decide? What if we opened our hearts to the radical notion that there is no limit to God’s love for us and for those around us, no limit to the amount of grace that comes into our lives? What if we really believed that no matter how well we do or how many mistakes we make, forgiveness is a given, and God will meet us on the road with open arms, even before we can say, “I’m sorry?”
The choice is ours to make. And although choosing to live by God’s economy is appealing, it won’t be easy. Like the elder brother, we are steeped in the limited, human way of sizing up the worth of the soul. When we begin to see the world as God would have us see it, prepare to be offended by grace, for it will defy human calculations. Prepare to discover that the souls of those around you, the lost and the found, are worth far more than you could imagine. Prepare to discover that your own soul has value beyond measure – for the grace of God knows no limits.
In this world, the going rate for souls may be around $2000. But in God’s economy, all souls, even the lost ones, even our own, are priceless. Amen.