Acceptance

Rob Scala - March 30, 2025

Luke 15:1-7,11-31

This is a familiar story about repentance and restoration. The prodigal son screws up and the good father forgives him. We’ve looked at the three characters in this parable in previous lessons. I want to step back and look at the interaction between Jesus and the Pharisees.

Pharisees are members of an ancient Jewish sect. They were known for their precision in interpreting Jewish laws, and for their strictness in keeping the laws. They were respected and liked by most Jewish people. There were about 6,000 Pharisees in Jesus’ time.

When the Pharisees saw that tax collectors and sinners were flocking to Jesus to hear his message, they grumbled. “This man receives sinners and eats with them”.

They were challenging Jesus’ authority, and trying to smear his name by associating him with “sinners”. Jesus responded to them with three parables – to explain his unorthodox way, and to give them something to think about.

The first parable was about the man who lost one of his 100 sheep.

The second parable was about a woman who lost a coin.

The third parable was about the prodigal son.

The thrust of the first two parables is that it is natural to give extra effort to recover what once belonged to you. The third parable had a similar message but had more emotional power. It wasn’t just about lost property, but about a broken relationship that was mended.

I wonder if Jesus won over the Pharisees to his way of thinking. They may have had trouble considering “sinners” as people worth saving.

I did some checking to see what the term “sinners” meant to the Pharisees. According to E.P. Sanders, a New Testament scholar, “’Sinners’ in the Hebrew Bible, when used generically to refer to a class of people, refers not to those who occasionally transgress, but to those who are outside the law in some fundamental way.”

Sinners could be Gentiles who don’t follow Jewish law at all. They could be tax collectors, who make a business of cheating their neighbors – without fear of being caught. They could be Jews who systematically or flagrantly violate the law.

This sounds a bit like what we have today. People belong to social groups. We have our families, our work associates, our church friends. These groups offer us connection, support and a sense of self. They make us feel capable. Broader social groups – like educators or military people, or conservatives or liberals - provide us similar benefits; connection, support and a sense of self.

Belonging to a social group, to some degree, separates us from people who don’t belong to the group. It is human nature to stick with like-minded people and to give less energy to outsiders. People not in our group, the “out” group, also serve to define our sense of self by how they differ from us.

----------------

I grew up in western Pennsylvania in a suburb of Pittsburgh called Murrysville.

My father was born in Rome to a middle-class family. When he was an adolescent, his father got a better job and moved the family to Bologna. My father found himself in a better school with more affluent classmates. That was difficult for him. The other kids looked down on him and ridiculed him. He responded by diving into his studies and becoming an A student. He went to the university of Bologna and earned a doctorate in Chemistry.

My mother was born in Boston. Here family placed a high value on education. Her father was a school principal. My mother was a top student at her catholic school, and felt empowered to achieve success in her career. She went to MIT, and graduated with a degree in Chemical engineering. She was one of six women in her class – the first class to have any women at all. She graduated on her 20th birthday.

I grew up in a family that valued educational achievement – especially in the sciences. This was a social group for us. We felt pride, and a bit of superiority in our group membership. Other groups were less valuable to society, especially sales people.

When I was in graduate school, I got off the bandwagon. I went off to Connecticut to become a sailmaker. I got the sailing bug as a teenager and wanted to be part of that social group. I spent 10 years as a sailmaker, then another 10 years as a designer of racing yachts.

The sport of sailboat racing tends to attract a certain type of people. My sailmaking customers tend to have lots of disposable income. They tend to take their sailing achievements very seriously, and they seem to need to keep up with the Joneses – to have a better boat, nicer homes, preferably on the water, and better sailing exploits to crow about.

I met some wonderful people in the “yachting” social group, but after a while, I realized that it wasn’t me. The things that made them happy weren’t making me happy.

One particularly disconcerting moment came when I was driving through Pennsylvania with a friend to a regatta. My friend observed that those people in rural Pennsylvania were sad cases. They were unenlightened compared to us.

These are two examples of social groups that I am familiar with. There are many more. There are the academics – like college professors. Financial and business people. Lawyers and politically-connected people. Farmers and people closely tied to the land. Groups based on a common culture. Technologists. Religious-based groups. Salespeople.

All these groups serve a valuable purpose, and all of them are somewhat separate from each other. They have limited knowledge about the others – what they believe and what is important to them - and they can have a skewed opinion of the out groups.

Do modern social groups act in the same way as social groups in Jesus’ time? I think there are a lot of similarities. But I am concerned about recent trends. People are moving to communities dominated by one social group. The news media is separating into liberal and conservative channels – each side offering its audience what they want to hear. More concerning to me is social media. The platforms are profiting by steering us into like-minded groups, and using shock and outrage to harden the boundaries between these groups. How can we reverse the trend toward separateness?

We can look to Jesus. He had a remarkable ability to avoid the influence of social groups of his time. In some quarters, he was reviled. But it didn’t slow down his mission at all. He could connect with all kinds of people and offer them a way to a better life. Jews and Gentiles. Rich and poor. Pharisees and prostitutes.

We can try to turn down the volume on outrage and judgment. We can be curious about what the “out” group thinks. We can find a little bit of common ground. We can lighten up.

We are all flawed creatures.

We all need the grace of God.

We all need the unshakable acceptance that the prodigal son received from his father.