Some of you might be aware of SNL’s Really!?! With Seth and Amy in which they express their incredulity with the fantastic, incredible and implausible nature of current events.  Let’s imagine for a moment that there was an ancient Jewish version of this, given in the town square of, oh, let’s say, Capernaum. We could call it Really!?! With Seth and Miriam (sorry Amy). And let us say that a man, some sort of religious teacher, perhaps a Messianic claimant, but generally considered to be a wise man, we can call him Jesus, told some parables about a lost sheep,  a lost coin and a lost son. Seth and Miriam have heard these parables and respond to the sheer implausibility of them. “Really, Jesus, really? A man has 100 sheep and he leaves 99 of them in the desert to find the lost one? Really? Have you never heard of wolves Jesus? Thieves? Really?” Miriam chimes in: “Really, Jesus, really? A woman loses one coin, one coin, spends all day looking for it, then throws a party which probably costs at least two coins to celebrate? Really, Jesus, have you never heard of cost-benefit analysis?” Really, Jesus, really,” says Seth, “ a son takes his inheritance, blows it in Las Tiberias at the Sands Hotel and Casino, lives with pigs when he runs out of money and his Dad takes him back and throws a party? Really Jesus!?”

Yeah, really. 

There has been so much written on Luke 15:1-32, the Gospel reading for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, which includes the “Prodigal Son,” perhaps the best known of all of Jesus’ parables, that the sheer implausibility of these parables from a human perspective is sometimes lost on us. All of these “lost and found” parables propose that the one seeking what is lost drops everything to find the treasure, whether a sheep, a coin or a person, no matter how much seems to be risked in seeking out out that which is lost. And whether the person in the parable who is seeking is a shepherd, a woman, or a father, it is clearly God who is seeking the sinner who is lost. Jesus’ parables make it clear how dear we are to him, especially when we are lost to him.  The word “repent” appears in the first two parables and in the third parable the act of repentance takes place when the Son who had blown his inheritance in party town turns back to the father who had always loved him and yearned for him to come home. In each case, though, when Jesus speaks of or describes repentance, he also describes the God who is actively seeking, looking for, waiting for, the return of the one who was lost. Repentance is not just the act of the sinner, but the constant act of the merciful God who will not stop looking for the ones he loves. Who does he love? The 99 and the one that is lost. The 9 and the one that is lost. The one that left and the one that stayed. At various times, the lost will include all of us and we are assured that God will drop everything and start looking for us and will not stop seeking us out until he brings us home.  Really, Jesus, really?

Really.

John W. Martens

P.S. If you have never read Henri Nouwen’s powerful examination of the Prodigal Son, please check out his book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.