Created To Lead: Relationships of Impact - 4
Created To Lead: Relationships of Impact - 4
THE IMAGO DEI AND HUMAN FULFILLMENT - Part Three
Story Four
The After-Dinner Untold Story
There is one more story that incorporates this paradigm of humanity. It is the story of the prodigal son. It is a well-known story about a child who leaves home in rebellion against the family. He is the younger of two sons. He demands his father to pay him his inheritance. In effect, he is telling his father that you are dead to me. The father divides the inheritance between both sons as is the traditions of society dictate. He leaves to live a life of debauchery. His brother remains at home to work beside his father.
This is a very common story. What is uncommon is the return of the son and the father’s response. Listen to the story as recorded in Luke 15:11-32.
The story is traditionally told as a comparison between the two sons. The older son is the good son because he does not abandon his father and family. His brother is the bad son because he takes his family’s wealth and squanders it. We have here a simple story of broken family dynamics.
The more important aspect is the father's story. Consider what he did. When asked, he gave the younger son his inheritance. Was this a sign of weakness? Or was he the wise father who knew that this son needed to learn how to be a responsible person?
The older brother did not need this lesson. He was already a responsible adult. Instead, he needed to learn to be grateful and appreciate his father’s love. Both boys, in their own ways, had a selfish streak.
We see the real character of the father when the younger son returns.
How many days, months, or years had the father looked down the road that led up to their house, hoping that someday his son would appear? That day comes, and the father sees him coming. He rushes out to meet him. He embraces the son that he feared was dead. The father has a robe wrapped around the son and a ring placed on his hand to signal to all who were present that the father welcomed him home. He orders a feast to be prepared, and the welcome home party begins.
When the older son returns from working in the fields, he finds a party celebrating his younger brother's homecoming. Feeling unappreciated, he refuses to attend. The father comes out and tells him that he has always loved him.
As modern people, we read this story through the lens of modern relationships. Professor Kenneth Bailey, who spent his entire teaching career in the Middle East, shows us how the culture of Jesus’ time would interpret this story. Watch this five-minute explanation by Kenneth Bailey.
This parable of Jesus provides an image of God as the loving, forgiving father. As we are created imago Dei, this kind of forgiveness is also ours to give. For we are to live, imago Christi, as Christ lived. The parable is a story-picture of love and forgiveness. If we only had the younger son's story to guide us, we would understand the power of forgiveness. But there is the story of the older son that must be accounted for in the parable.
The older son should remind us of the conflicts that Paul addressed in his first letter to the Corinthian church. In that passage, he speaks to the importance of unity being accomplished by welcoming the weaker, less honorable, and less respectable as equal members. We can see how this human desire to establish hierarchies of privilege and power is present in every human situation. The older son had established a hierarchy of privilege based on loyalty to the family. He felt that he was the good son because of his loyalty. He deserves favorable treatment that his brother, the prodigal son, did not. To him his father’s love was earned by obedience and loyalty. In other words, his love was an early form of modern transactional economic relationships. Our place in every relationship is earned by doing that which gains approval and reward. This isn’t a modern human tendency. Just a universal human tendency.
After the Feast
Recently, I moved back to my hometown, where I had not lived permanently in over 50 years. During the first weeks here, I returned to the church where I grew up. In many ways, it is the same as it was when I was a child. Some of the adults I knew as a child are still here, well into their 90s.
One Sunday, I visited a Bible study class at the invitation of a person who had introduced me to me. The subject of the morning was this passage about the prodigal son. As the teacher led the discussion, I realized that in some respects, I am the prodigal son returning home. As I shared this observation with the class, I began to think about why I had been led home. I asked, “What happened the day after the feast?”
The parable is part of a larger untold story, just as my return home is part of a much larger, still unfolding one. It is important that we see the forgiving father welcoming his son home and celebrating a great feast. My family, my sisters, and my father’s widow are very pleased by my return. The feast in the parable symbolizes the restoration of the prodigal’s family's wholeness.
What do you think happened the next day? Did the brothers go out to the fields to work together? Did the younger son follow through on his intention of repaying his father? Did the older son learn to embrace his brother with compassion as he told stories of the trauma of his life?
We do not know because the story is not really about the prodigal son or the older brother, but about the forgiving father. This was the image that Jesus wanted to convey to his listeners.
The Paradigm of Humanity
The paradigm of humanity is a vehicle for discovering where love can be found in the world.
Imago Dei - Dignity Leading to Transformed Identity
Imago Christi - Ethical Character Leading to Peace and Unity in Society
Gloria Dei est homo - Living a Life of Honor and Respect to the Creator
Let’s imagine what the post-feast family life may have been like.
Imago Dei - Dignity Leading to Transformed Identity
The younger son regained his dignity and self-respect by his father's love. The older son discovered that his father loved him, too. Quite possibly, the breaking of the family with the departure of the younger son could have only be healed through the forgiveness of the father to his sons.
Think about your own families where conflict and division exists. You may be prepared to offer forgiveness, but the family may not be ready to receive it, as was the situation with the older son.
Imago Christi - Ethical Character Leading to Peace and Unity in Society
The parable is told so that listeners would gain an understanding of the nature of God’s love. The image of the father in his relationships is also an image of what the image of a Christ-like life is. There is an ethical imperative that is not based my rights. Instead, we are called to love, forgive, restore, and believe in one another. As Paul showed, those who are weaker, less honorable, and less respectable are worthy of our love.
Gloria Dei est homo - Living a Life of Honor and Respect to the Creator
I think about the years that followed the return of the prodigal son.
Did he marry and have children? Did he tell his children of his early life and of their grandfather’s forgiveness? What was the relationship with his brother like? Did they respect and trust one another? Were they able to take care of the family business after their father passed easy? Did the feast become a family ritual to celebrate the father’s forgiveness and the restoration of the family?
Created To Lead
Leadership is not a respecter of persons. People are. As a result, people get shunned, exploited, and treated poorly. Leadership, on the other hand, is open to the potential of each person, regardless of the labels that are applied to them or chosen by them. Leadership is a product of human initiative to create change.
The stories in the Bible show us how people take initiative that creates an impact. It is born out of the belief that each person is of divine creation. You can be an outcast drawing water from an ancient well. You can be an itinerant minister traveling across the ancient world, helping to plant churches. You can be someone others see as weak, lacking in honor and respect, and yet find a tiny call upon your life that makes a difference that matters in a small, out-of-the-way place. It is still leadership. Or you may be a father or mother whose love and forgiveness heal the brokenness of the family. This, too, is leadership because all leadership creates an impact that makes a difference that matters.
This perspective is not primarily a religious expression. Rather, it is a human expression rising from the ideas that human beings have. Now, the meaning of these acts of leadership impact may take on greater meaning because there is a belief that God is at the center of this world. Not everyone believes their actions have this type of meaning. It may mean that the transcendent character of some of the things we do never get recognized as a result.
My own faith has shown me that deep meaning and peace can come when we see ourselves as Imago Dei, called to live as Imago Christi, and our lives are representative of the ancient belief of Gloria Dei est Homo.
The challenge is not to treat them as labels that treat us as some religious abstraction. We already have too much of that in the sociological and political sphere. We need to see that these ideas resonate because we see their reality in action. A genuine difference is being made.
If we begin with terms like dignity, respect, openness, and purpose, we can see how we gain meaning in life. Meaning comes from treating people this way. The relationship comes first. Together we discover meaning in life, in our relationships, and how together we bring reconciliation and unity to a world that longs for it to be restored.
CREATED TO LEAD:
THE IMAGO DEI AND HUMAN FULFILLMENT
Part Two: Paradigm of Humanity
Part Three: Relationships of Impact
1 - Jesus Meets a Woman at a Well