The prodigal's Mum!

A few years back I sat in on a service where the sermon was all about the prodigal Son's Mum. It was about how she felt when he took his inheritance and left for the big city. It talked of her concern as the communications from the sons slowed and then ceased and how she feared for her boy. The sermon outlined the pressures on the family over a son that Mum couldn't mention without sneering from the other brother and anger from the Dad. "He's dead, and that's the way it's going to be," cried the Father. It was a real Eastenders episode of a sermon.

Then suddenly the prodigal appears on the horizon and the Father rushes out to greet him. The Mother is overjoyed and although she wants to rush out too, is constrained by the fact that she's a woman. She can't rush out and show her joy at the boy she bore returning from the dead. All she can do is stay in the kitchen and cook the fatted calf - chained by her gender (and role) to the kitchen.

For me there were many problems with this sermon. The first was that those who didn't actually know the story left thinking that this was a story from the Bible rather than a party-political broadcast on behalf of the terminally confused and hurting party! There was nothing of the Bible in this story other than the mention of a few characters from the story. Just as mentioning Jesus and God doesn't make Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons Christian, neither did it confer any degree of rightness to the words that had been spoken.

The story told the listeners nothing of what the prodigal story is all about but enabled the speaker to air their pain and bring wrongly-placed offences against women into the consciousness of the listeners and somehow link the two into what appeared to be a biblical story and yet was indeed a very secular and skewed story.

Discussing the prodigal recently, one of those gathered asked what the mother must have felt and extrapolated this into something about the mother having deeper feelings for her boy and the like. The closing shot being a foray into the world of skewed etymology to accompany the skewed theology in that they could see why it was called 'history' as it was all about men!

Well of course history has nothing to do with the sex of the historical consideration and the reason that neither the mother, nor the sister and especially not the aunt (who I understand was visiting from Seleucia Pereira where she ran a boarding house for sailors!) ;) are mentioned is because Jesus didn't include them in the story. They just aren't there and just as we might wonder what would have happened to the atomic bomb and Paulo Alto if Oppenheimer's tap dance teacher had been more successful, it isn't part of the story!

That said, why is there no story about the man with an issue of blood? Perhaps it was because they didn't blog in them days ;)

Pax