Pastor Dan Mangler's Sunday Sermon

Freedom, Goodness and Love

Luke 15: 11-32

March 18, 2007

Freedom, Goodness and Love

I find it fascinating the number of times and the variety of ways we group things in threes. Most jokes have either three persons, three parts, or someone doing something three times. Fairytales, like Goldilocks and the three bears, depend on that number. You don't worry over a swimmer until he goes down for the third time. Christianity is heavily dependent on three: the Trinity, third day resurrection, spiritual growth resting on the three-legged stool of worship, learning, and service. Politicians know that their safest speeches will be on motherhood, the flag, and apple pie. The Preamble of our Constitution lifts up as most basic to human rights life: liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Even Superman has his truth, justice, and the American way.

It should come, then, as no surprise, that the parable of Jesus, which has been called the greatest short story ever written, should also rest on a grouping of threes. There are, in fact, three main characters: the father, the younger son, and the older son. That comes as no surprise; we know the story well.

But there is a grouping of three in this parable that may need to be identified. Each character exhibits one of three virtues - freedom, goodness, and suffering love. In isolation each represents something honorable, noble, and wholesome. Who, in fact, can say anything bad about freedom, or goodness, or suffering love? They stand right up there, don’t they, with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and truth, justice, and the American way.

But in this parable, freedom, goodness, and suffering love come into conflict, either within themselves, or as they bump into one of the others. It is, of course, a parable illustrating God's forgiveness. But on a different level it challenges us to make a decision about what is most important in life. The question it poses is this: If forced to choose, which will you choose: freedom, goodness, or suffering love?

The younger son chose freedom and he worked it to its extreme. American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote: "What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for yourself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing."

But what is freedom when it comes into conflict with goodness? Freedom without goodness is sexual license and abuse. Freedom without goodness is to pass beyond the provision for our own needs to the impulse to hoard. Freedom without goodness is citizenship without patriotism. Freedom without goodness is "Give me what belongs to me and you are on your own." Freedom without goodness is self-actualization at the expense of everyone else. Freedom without goodness goes beyond religion, beyond worship, and beyond piety to a violence that imposes one’s own beliefs on another. As the younger son in the parable discovered freedom without goodness has terrible consequences.

In the far country of pure freedom, beyond the Sabbath the younger son finds himself wallowing in the swine's filth. The solitude turns into loneliness. The free impulse turns into burnt-out passion. The lawlessness turns into namelessness. The marijuana dream turns into the heroin nightmare. The freedom that he sought at all costs begins to devour his life. The boundlessness of his freedom, which he thought had promised him a higher form of life, now reveals itself as death. No, freedom is not the ultimate, unadulterable virtue.

If the highest goal in life is not freedom, perhaps it is goodness. The older son chose goodness as the highest virtue. Sixteen centuries later Sir Francis Bacon would agree. Bacon wrote, "Of all virtues and dignities of the mind goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing."

If that is so, why is the "good" older brother not treated with greater respect in Jesus' parable than he is? Why, in fact, are the "good" people of Jesus day, the Pharisees, the recipients of so much of our Lord's verbal abuse? Why does Jesus draw back when addressed as "Good teacher"? Is not goodness a Christian virtue, perhaps even the greatest?

No it is not, at least not on its own. Just as freedom without the guidance of goodness is ripe for abuse, so also goodness with no guiding influence can become self-serving, cold-hearted, and mean.

Goodness without love was self-serving for the older son. The older son's attitude in the parable shows that his years of obedience to his father had been years of grim duty and not of loving service. He stayed and obeyed for a greater share in his inheritance. Goodness without love is more often than not a selfish act looking for reward. It did not seem right to the older son that the younger, out of his wickedness, should receive what he, the older brother, could not receive in his goodness. Goodness without love turned the older son’s heart to stone. He was so wrapped up in his self-righteousness that he could not share his father's joy.

It wasn't only that he couldn't be happy that his wandering brother was home, he couldn't even be happy for his father. Goodness without love is joyless. Goodness without love opens the door to a mean spirit. No, neither is goodness the ultimate, unadulterable virtue.

Our son, Joshua, played for some time with the idea of becoming a pastor. He had a serious and thoughtful side that sometimes made him wiser than his years would presume. I remember him bringing me a small stone that had a quartz inclusion the shape of a cross and him wanting me to use it for a children’s sermon. I wish I still had that stone. It would be a great prop to use on Palm Sunday. When the religious leaders told Jesus to silence the crowd that was shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David” he replied, “If they were silent these very stones would cry out.” That stone would have made a great object lesson.

Sometimes on a Saturday Josh would walk over to my church office to visit. On one of these occasions when he was 7 years old we discussed my sermon idea. I told him I was working on a theme of freedom, goodness, and love and I asked him which was most important. He thought for a moment, and then answered, "I think the most important is either freedom or love". After a couple more minutes of talking he added, "I don't know which is more important, but I do know which is more powerful - love." True story. And that certainly is one of the messages of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

The conflict in the story is the conflict between the younger son's life in the field of freedom, the older son's life in the field of goodness, and the father's life in the field of suffering love. Freedom, goodness, and love come into conflict. Evidently for Jesus all three are necessary for human life.

But human life does not become life abundant until suffering love is given supremacy and until freedom and goodness are guided and transformed by suffering love. Goodness, alone, has no power; it is paralyzed. Freedom unguided has the power to devour life as much as to enrich it. Only suffering love, the only true love, the love that puts the others needs above our own, has the power to transform human life into abundant life.

Suffering love is the love of submission, a love that sacrifices for the benefit of another, a love that gives up what one is due so that another is given what he/she needs.