Here’s my message from this weeks Lectionary reading. As always, you can also listen to it on Metro Christian Centre’s YouTube page, just click here.
READING: LUKE 15:1-2, 11-32
FACE OFF
One of my earliest memories of school involves a book. Like most primary school classrooms, one corner of our classroom was a reading corner. And whenever we were allowed to play and read during class, I would go to this corner and always pick up the same book.
I can’t remember the title of the book, and I have no idea what it was about because I never read it. All I would do is open the book and look at the images that were printed on the inside of the book’s cover and the first page. I was only five (I think), but I can still remember those pages vividly; both sheets had this deep, navy blue background, and drawn on top of that background, using simple white-outlines, was a series of different human faces.
My teacher came to me once and asked me what I was reading. I didn’t answer her. I just looked at her, looked back at the book, pointed at a particular face in the midst of this book—a face that always caught my attention—and then, with my finger still on the face, I looked back at the teacher and said, ‘Miss, that’s what God looks like!’
Now before anyone runs away with silly ideas, let’s stop, use some discernment, and not make too much out of this. It may sound cute, it may even sound ‘spiritual’, but it was—I assure you—just naivety and ignorance.
I had no idea what God looked like. The truth is, I liked that particular face more than the others. Something about this face—it looked wise, strong, it was male, and it had a beard—aligned with the ideas of God that I already had in my head, which involved God being male and having a beard.
God’s not male, by the way. And as for the beard, well God’s not human either. You see, I wasn’t receiving a revelation—I was projecting my ideas of God onto these pictures.
I find this memory disturbing, because, although I wasn’t religious, those ideas were still very sacred to me. So, when my teacher, who was slightly taken aback by my response, asked how I knew that was what God looked like, I replied with an answer that isn’t unique to five-year-olds, but is something that adults spit out as well: ‘I just know!’
There’s a theory that suggests that the more emotion there is in an experience, the more likely you are to remember it. That could be true; I’ve remembered this, I think, because I was emotional. And the strongest emotion I had (if this could be called an emotion) was my sense of being right. I had conviction. I—a snotty-nosed, five-year-old—was convinced that this face, this drawing, was the face of God, and you could not have persuaded me otherwise. And when my teacher pointed to a picture of a bald-headed man and suggested that God could possibly look like that, well, that, for me, was heresy!
ABOUT FACE
It sounds comical—but wars have been waged over such things! People have been ex-communicated over such things. People have suffered prejudice, and have been demonized, enslaved or slaughtered as a result, all because they don’t agree with, or don’t align with, another peoples’ idea about God’s face.
In some circumstances, that idea of God’s face has been a very physical thing about features; and so skin colour, eye colour, or hair colour have all been wrongly used as ways of deciding who God’s people are and who they’re not, with horrible consequences
But the Scriptures don’t carry that physical sense of the Face of God. When they use language that describes God showing his face, or hiding his face, it’s not about literal facial features (like a pointy nose, or beady-eyes), and nor is it describing the direction of God’s gaze (as if Gods turns physically away from people when he hides his face). Like our modern ideas of someone having a ‘public face’ or being ‘two-faced’, the ancient Middle-Eastern sense of face is to do with character. What we’re really talking about is God’s nature.
To bear God’s face means to reflect God’s likeness; to bear God’s image. And so, closely tied to this conversation of what God looks like is also the conversation about what it means to mirror that face; what does it mean to be loyal to God’s nature? How do we demonstrate that we have given allegiance to this face/image of God?
By the way, the Greek word for allegiance/loyalty is the word pistis—it’s a word that turns up all over the New Testament, and it’s often translated as the word faith.
It’s no understatement to say this, but the difference between one person’s definition of a saint and their definition a sinner is all to do with how faithful we feel those people have been to the face of God as we conceive it.
What’s this got to do with the reading from Luke 15—everything.
The Pharisees and teachers of religious law are not happy with Jesus. We have a habit of treating the Pharisee’s like bad guys, but they’re not bad guys; they’re good, devout people who care about God’s face. Seriously; most of us would love them! It’s also worth stating that Jesus, despite his debates with them and occasional rebukes, is always respectful of them—and throughout this scene, he is sensitive and sympathetic towards them. Jesus wants them in on what he’s doing.
But Jesus troubles them, and they’re complaining about him. They don’t dislike Jesus because he teaches good morals. They clash because they’ve been loyal to God’s face, as they understand it, but then Jesus has shown up, and he, in their opinion, is behaving in ways that aren’t loyal. Jesus’ expression of God is presenting to the world an image of God’s character that is disturbing them.
What really irritates them, is that instead of being committed to those they feel have been loyal to God, Jesus seems to be committed to those, who in their opinion, have been disloyal to God’s image. Jesus seems to spend too much time with ‘sinners’ (people who don’t look like God’s people), and they’re grossed out by this. To make matter worse, he even eats with them, and celebrates with them; which spits on all their sacred ideas of how being loyal and faithful to God is meant to look.
They’re looking at Jesus and thinking, ‘that doesn’t reflect God, and that doesn’t reflect God’s Kingdom.’ (It’s like my repulsion at my teacher’s suggestion of God being bald, but multiplied by a hundred).
And so Jesus decides to tell them a story. Well, he begins by telling two stories, and then, to make his point clearer, he tells a third. All these stories share the same theme: this is what God looks like, and by implication, this is what it means to be loyal to God.
Jesus’ third story goes like this:
POOR REFLECTIONS
The younger brother of two boys turns up one day and asks for his inheritance. His dad’s not dead, but he literally can’t wait until he is. In effect, he’s saying, ‘Dad, I wish you would die.’ He’s obviously not too keen on daddy, and in his culture, he’s is seriously disgracing his father’s public face by asking for his inheritance pre-mortem.
But instead of defending his image, and chastising his son—as would be expected—the Father foolishly relents; he rolls over and legally dies, allowing his sons to inherit.[I]
Then the younger son does something scandalous; a few days later, he takes off to a distant land and wastes all his money. Which is telling, as he didn’t inherit money; he inherited land, servants, and livestock. The only way that he could possibly have any money is if, after inheriting, he’s then gone and sold what he’s inherited. So he disgraces his father twice: he doesn’t care about his relationship to the Father and wishes him dead, and he also doesn’t care about his father’s inheritance and sells it for a quick profit.
Again, the Father does the culturally unexpected and takes no course of action against his son. The father, in a manner of speaking, allows his son to crucify him. The son leaves his father for dead.
But within this foreign land, things take a turn for the worse—a famine strikes. The young brother (a Jewish lad) finds himself being a servant for a gentile (non-Jewish) master, and having to feed pigs (which were seen as unclean), and even tempted to eat the pig’s food. In other words, everything this lad becomes would be seen as repulsive to a Jewish idea of keeping pure and loyal to God’s face.
Eventually, he comes to his senses and decides to return home. But there’s no remorse fuelling this return. He’s not sorry about how he has reflected the father: he’s just trying to survive. So he schemes together a tale to tell his Dad, hoping that he can be a servant because that life would be better than starving and feeding pigs. With his plan formed, he sets off home.
And while he was a long way off, the father sees him, and, as Jesus tells it, his heart bursts with love and compassion. These are not new feelings for this Dad—everything he’s done so far in this story has been fuelled by love and compassion. Despite the shame and disgrace that this young lad has inflicted on the father’s face, this doesn’t stop this loving father from doing something that his culture would have seen as scandalous and foolish: He begins running towards his son.
The father’s a dignified man, a senior figure within the community, and within that culture, dignified people didn’t run, they walked (it’s the same today). But he doesn’t care about keeping up appearances, he cares about his child—so he hurtles towards him, and embraces his boy, and begins to weep over him and shower him with kisses. And whilst his son is trying to spit out his fake apology, the Father calls for robes, a signet ring, and shoes, and reinstates this lad as his legitimate son before everyone who’s gathered.
This young lad looks nothing like his father—he bears no resemblance to his father’s face/nature; there’s nothing in his nature to commend him to his father, his father’s servants, or the surrounding community. But that doesn’t stop the Father from declaring, ‘this is my son! He was dead, but now he’s alive!’ He then kills the best meat he owns and throws a welcome home party.
It’s a powerfully, moving scene. This is outstanding love. The father keeps on dying, he keeps on emptying himself, he keeps on laying his life down—that’s the father’s face, the father’s nature.
The younger son doesn’t have this nature yet, but if he keeps being exposed to it, maybe he’ll eventually get it.
In the very next scene, we meet the older brother, and he thinks his father is a fool! (We know this story so well, and we know that the older brother’s in the wrong, and yet, if we’re honest with ourselves, I suspect that we would be on his side).
The older brother has been devoted to his dad all his life; he’s kept his dad’s laws and looked after his lands. Like the Pharisees that Jesus is addressing, he’s lived a pious life—there are no moral faults. But his devotion masks an ugly, hard heart and a distorted view of the father. He may behave like a son (he may have honoured his father by keeping the rules) but the problem is that he doesn’t have the father’s face: he refuses to reflect his father’s character and he refuses to join the feast. This refusal is a huge cultural slap across the face of his Dad: it’s a sharp, public insult.[ii]
But, like he does with the younger son, the Father doesn’t do what’s expected: he doesn’t chastise this son, use his authority, and command him to join the party. The father could command, and the older brother would likely obey (because he’s good at that), but all the father would be gaining is a servant, and what he really desires is a son. So instead of using his status and demanding his rights, the father humbly lays down his rights, appears before his son like a servant, and appeals to him (sound familiar?); not just inviting this lad into a party, but into participating in his expression: inviting him to die to self.
You see, both sons are a poor reflection of their father. The one thing the father wants them to have is the one thing they cannot inherit; his heart. They can only be exposed to it, experience it, receive and then reflect it. And so again and again, the father keeps modelling who he is to his boys—the father models compassionate, co-suffering, self-emptying love. The father dies to self.
This is the face of God. This is what Jesus, as he runs towards and celebrates with the ‘younger brothers’ of his day, wants these older brother-like Pharisees to witness. Jesus perfectly displays the face of God, and he wants them to reflect it also.
THE FACE OF GOD
Actually, all God has ever wanted from his children is for them to look like him; to bear his nature. So there’s a bigger story hinted at here within this parable: humanity’s story. But Israel’s story is also seen here.
Israel, within the story of the Bible, is known as God’s ‘firstborn son’.[iii] They inherited rules and land, but they never caught hold of the heart of God.
The prophet Micah would tell them that God doesn’t want loyalty in the sense of merely keeping rules or sacrifices, the loyalty (the faith) God wants is about reflecting his face: ‘This is what’s required: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.’[iv] Why are we to do these things, because God does: God does justice, God loves mercy, God walks humbly. The prophet Hosea would tell Israel, ‘I want you to be merciful; I don’t want your sacrifices. I want you to know God; that’s more important than burnt offerings’—a sentiment that Jesus would also echo during his own ministry.[v] All the prophets talked about the importance of obedience, but it wasn’t about an empty observance to rules, it was an observance to God’s heart; that they would know God and bear God’s face to the world.
So this story isn’t fiction—it’s a retelling of history: a story in which God keeps giving himself to his people, over and over, again and again, hoping that they’d see his self-emptying, compassion and imitate it.
But, I feel, there’s an echo of another story here too…
Before being a nation, Israel was a person—aka, Jacob. Jacob was a younger brother who stole his brother’s inheritance and blessing and fled to a foreign land. After many years, Jacob decides to return home, but he suspects his big brother, Esau, isn’t going to be happy. Like the young son in Jesus’s parable, Jacob attempts to scheme a way of pacifying the rage he feels his brother will want to vent, and he begins to send gifts of livestock and servants to his brother as he gets closer to home.
But when Jacob eventually draws nears to home, and he spies Esau in the distance, something unthinkable, outrageous and extravagant happens. Esau, the older brother, starts to go into a brisk walk, and then a jog, and then he starts sprinting towards the one who cheated him and disgraced him all those years ago–and who also cheated his father too. And when he finally gets close to Jacob, to use the text, ‘Esau embraces [Jacob] affectionately and kisses him. Both of them were in tears’ (Gen 33:4).[vi]
Esau also refuses all of Jacobs’s gifts, telling him to keep them!
When Jacob (who is certainly not the hero of his story) experiences this compassionate welcome, he says something startling to Esau, ‘Seeing you is like seeing the face of God.’[vii]
He’s not saying that Esau has God’s nose. But his character reflects the face, the image of God. Esau’s running, Esau’s tears, Esau’s all-encompassing embrace, Esau not demanding his rights: for Jacob, experiencing all this is like experiencing God. Just like the father in Jesus’ parable, Esau expresses the face of God.
I don’t think Jesus is a careless storyteller—I suspect that he knows that his audience will see the biblical story that he’s hinting at. Jesus wants these Pharisees, these older brothers, these descendants of Jacob, to actually start being more like Esau.
I won’t go into how controversial that must have been, but it’s the running to others, it’s the self-emptying, it’s the love, tears and welcome that expresses God.
CONCLUSION
I don’t care how pious you are; if we really want to look like God, we better start running towards others in love and compassion, we better start humbling ourselves, we better start learning what it means to empty ourselves and to die to self. Because God doesn’t shun people, God doesn’t write people off, God doesn’t dominate others, or humiliate others, or give them what they deserve! God never stops loving people—even when they are far off![viii]
We all have our ideas about God’s face. Like me and that book, we all hold to pictures that are sacred to us, and when someone comes and suggests that we’re wrong, we can get quite upset and defensive. But if we take the time to look at Jesus, then like the Pharisees, we’re going to find our ideas getting messed with and we’re going find ourselves asking some deep questions about what face we’re presenting of God to each other and to the world.
After all, we are all pointing and directing people’s attentions to some sort of face.
SCRIPTURE VERSE FOR FURTHER REFLECTION:
‘I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me.
He freed me from all my fears.
Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces. In my desperation I prayed, and the Lord listened; he saved me from all my troubles.
For the angel of the Lord is a guard; he surrounds and defends all who fear him.
Taste and see that the Lord is good.
Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!’
ENDNOTES:
[i] It is because of this ‘legal suicide’, and the other “deaths” within this parable, that leads Robert Farrar Capon to nickname this parable a ‘festival of death’. See Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgement: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, The Parables of Grace, The Party Parables (Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), p.294.
[ii] Kenneth Bailey suggests that the son’s refusal (and public argument with the Father) would have been seen as extremely insulting. Using a comparison with the story of Esther, Bailey reminds us of King Ahasuerus’ (Xerxes’) response when Queen Vashti refused to attend his feast: she was deposed. ‘However,’ Bailey writes, ‘for the second time in one day, the father goes down and out of the house offering, in humiliation, a demonstration of unexpected love’ (See Bailey, Poet and Peasant, Exegesis of Luke 15 (Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), p.195-196.
[iii] For examples, see Exodus 5:22, Hosea 11:1.
[iv] Micah 6:8
[v] Hosea 6:6 (NLT) Italics mine. Jesus quotes this particular verse in Matthew 9:13. This same sentiment is echoed in Psalm 50:8-14.
[vi] You can read this story in Genesis 32—33.
[vii] Genesis 33:10
[viii] I also touched on this a few weeks back, when I looked at Jesus’ words in Luke 6:27-38: if you want to be known as the children of the most high, if you want to be known as those who bear the father’s face, then love your enemies, be compassionate, because God is like that (See my blog: Choking on Horses).
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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