The deep truth of forgiveness revealed in the prodigal son myth can be proclaimed to people in many other ways than reflections on this particular myth. The way such truth comes to us and is spread widely among humanity, I am going to call “proclamation.”
Proclamation is a religious practice. Proclamation is not only sermons and teachings, it is also poetry and songs, dramas and sacraments, like the eucharist.
The Proclamations of Jesus
Jesus was remembered as a proclaimer of good news, a teacher of healing truth, a new kind of rabbi with a new kind of authority. The core of Jesus’ proclamation ministry centered around the proclamation of the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God.
In his time and place, what did this proclamation of the coming Kingdom mean? It was a happening in the lives of real people, but we are missing much of the meaning of this happening if we view this Kingdom only with our psychological imagery. This was a sociological happening, first of all. This Kingdom of God was understood to be an alternative to the Kingdom of Rome. It was also understood to be an alternative to the first century state of the captive nation of Israel. It was understood as a restoration of the essence of being the “People of God”—a calling that had been lost during the period in which these people were so harshly enslaved within the Roman “Peace.”
“The People of God” was understood at that time as both a specific peoplehood already in history and also as a coming peoplehood in which not only Israel reaches its perfection, but also the entire world of nations are called to manifest this Kingdom. This passionate hope for a positive future was grounded in the understanding that this new sociological reign is being established by an all-powerful Profound Reality. Any revolts against this all-powerful “Reign of Reality” cannot last, because Reality always wins in the end. That is what Reality IS—what wins in the end, because Reality is Power without limit. Any losing to humanity on the part of Reality is being allowed by Reality.
The revolt from Reality by “Satan’s Reign” includes not just persons, but organizations of whole human kingdoms of estrangements from Reality—constructions that are doomed to collapse. This is so because that is what Profound Reality is—the undoing of all unreality, the defeat of Satan, the burning to ash of all estrangements from the Real.
Jesus’ proclamation was that this end-of-time expectation of rightness was now arriving in human life on Earth. Jesus was asking humans to look and see what is happening to the hearers of his proclamation. The sick of spirit are being healed, the poor are being lifted up from their despised status, the hypocrites are being put down, those who were blind to realism are seeing, the hungry for meaning are being fed, the outcasts are included, the crippled souls are walking their lives, and people with dead lives are living again.
“But,” complained the complainers, “nothing like this is happening to everybody, and for many what is happening to them does not last long.” So Jesus tells a parable about the casting of seeds. Here is what the Kingdom of God is like: a sower went out casting seeds, some seed fell on the rocks and did not sprout, some seed fell on weak soil and came up quick but died soon, other seed fell among weeds that soon choked it out, but some seed fell on good soil and produced a hundred fold or more.
According to this parable the proclamation of Jesus was working, but Jesus himself was not in control of the outcome. What would happen to each seed falling upon each person was dependent upon the choices of that person and upon the actions of God going on in that person’s life.
Similarly, any proclamations of religious truth that you or I might make will also face this same circumstance. As proclaimer of good news, we will not be in control of the outcome. We can participate in fashioning good seed to spread, but even the best of seed do not always grow or last long when they do. But the overall harvest from good seed falling on good soil can be the making of a huge movement in obedience to Profound Reality— that is, obedience to the Reign of Reality, our appropriate God-devotion.
Another parable of Jesus says that the Kingdom of God can start as a very small seed that can grow into a huge tree, in which birds come and build their nests. There is also a parable claiming that the Kingdom of God is alike a woman making bread—a tiny bit of yeast can levin the whole loaf.
So what in contemporary life we are talking about here? What bold proclamations of good news about the restoration of realism might catch fire among enough people to be a social movement that will make headway against the strong winds of delusion? Let’s warm up to that question with two more example from the past.
The Proclamation of Martin Luther
Luther’s Reformation of Christianity strongly emphasized the religious method of preaching. The homilies and preaching being done by the established Christianity of Luther’s time was not starting any fires. Luther’s revival of relevant preaching was good seed falling on some well-plowed soil aided by aware predecessors like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. So what was the basic characteristic that made Luther’s proclamation good seed?
“Healing by grace through faith alone” is one way of summarizing Luther’s basic proclamation. Here is another way to say this: “The healing of human estrangement comes about through the gift of trusting the trustworthiness of Profound Reality’s complete forgiveness.” The Lutheran version of this proclamation was crafted from the letters of the apostle Paul, and crafted to speak to a 16th century time swamped in the anxiety of guilt. Luther attacked outright the core axioms of the then common message of the church that stated or implied that religious works and moral works were the thing that prepared the way for an Eternity-supported destiny. Luther’s contention was that we humans contribute nothing to our healing except trust in God’s gift of forgiveness and that even that trust is a gift that we are privileged to receive, but not in any way to deserve. Luther did not actually deny that we have to actively choose or intend that trust or faith. Also, Luther was clear that better behaviors did grow from the good tree of living that faith. But this good tree is made present to us by the grace of that Profound Realty that we confront every day in every event of our lives. A person of faith lives in an absolute dependence on Profound Reality for both their life and their deliverance to the realistic living of their life.
Luther translated the whole Bible into German and emphasized Bible reading and Bible preaching on both Old and New Testaments. He wrote hymns and emphasized singing. He reshaped sacraments and worship practices. He thought through overall guidelines for a fresh ethics of practical living in church life, everyday life, and states-craft. Yet in all these quite revolutionary actions, his main concern was maintaining a religious movement that countered the spirit-level corruptions of the current religious culture’s immense tyranny over human lives. Luther’s changes in all these practical areas derived from his core concern to protect and spread further his healing proclamation.
The Proclamation of John Wesley
Wesley also gave some fresh emphasis to the proclamation of the good news. He rode horseback all over England preaching a set of existentially hot sermons over and over and over to masses of people who were neglected and estranged from the current Church of England and its rigid intellectualism and determinism. In order to meet this situation, Wesley claimed that our healing comes 100% from the grace of God, but also 100% from each person’s intentional leap of faith. His sermons called for some right-now choices for an actively disciplined life of practicing good religious practices that made God’s gifts more likely. Such were his “methods” that gave Methodism its name.
His emphasis on the acts of faith and on including the masses of humanity in this needed movement of spirit undergirded a more democratic religion and a more democratic secular governance. The Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield era of Great Awakenings in the Americas were influenced by Wesley’s pioneering of these core proclamations of good news. The American political revolution had other sources as well, but these religious awakenings were certainly one of them.
Our Best Case Proclamation in 2020 North America
These brief historical dips into the proclamations of Jesus, Luther, and Wesley raise the question about what proclamation contains the appropriate emphasis for the culture of North America in 2020. Today, the very idea of “proclamation” has some resistances to overcome. Our culture has become adverse to being emotionally manipulated, or charismatically led, or even rationally convinced, much less being simply told outright good news about the nature of Profound Reality for everyone. In such a context of reflection, “proclamation” has become for many a negative word.
So first of all, I want to say outright that the Christian proclamation for any time is not a dogma or a moral teaching or any sort of advise, and it needs no manipulation or convincing. It is presented as an option for the consideration and decision by a fully participating listener. The Christian proclamation for some specific period of time in some particular place has to meet people where they are actually living. The Christian proclamation must also deal with people’s specific sensibilities to Reality and their lack of sensibilities to Reality. The Christian proclamation must expose the specific delusions that are limiting awareness of what is real. This could include a wake up call from some common sleepiness, a light shown on some common blindness, a way out of some common dead end, a counter to some common addiction. In fact, an appropriate Christian proclamation may cut in several of these directions at once.
The proclamation will also include specific forgiveness for some specific unrealism and thereby illuminate specific fresh starts in realism. And the proclamation will include a call for decision that presupposes an essential freedom in each person—a freedom that can be called forth into action, a freedom that is able and willing to make radical changes for which no precedent exists and no past reasoning can justify.
The Christian proclamation may clear out excuses people have to an acceptance of the proclamation; nevertheless, the proclamation must not be a manipulation or the draw of the proclaimer’s charisma or station or power or rational prowess. The motivation for the acceptance of the proclamation must come from the inner being of the person who is hearing the proclamation. Healing requires that the truth of the proclamation be personally “heard” “seen” “felt” “taken in” and personally obeyed in personal action by the person hearing the proclamation.
Tailored for the Times
The Christian proclamation will need to be tailored for the times, but this will not be a compromise with the times. This proclamation is a proclamation of the Word of Profound Reality that is true for any time. Yet the proclamation is a proclamation for the people of a given time. This means that the specifics of the proclamation do change. Following is one example of a specific element that needs to characterize the Christian proclamation of the Word of God for the 2020 period of time in North America:
Both Luther and Wesley emphasized freeing the individual person from the tyranny of an established religious culture. The choice for personal faith by the solitary person was the main emphasis during the whole Protestant Era. Politics was thought about and innovations were made, but the proclamation itself during the Protestant Era had little of the sociological character that the Christian proclamation requires today.
How shall I illustrate this? While the individual person is not to be neglected or ignored or manipulated, the individual person needs to be shown that he or she is humanity on planet Earth—each person is an able-to-respond representative of the whole human species, and therefore responsible for the whole response of humanity—responsible for both the glorious and the wicked responses of humanity.
Such a sociological perspective means that each of us is guilty for every estrangement and horror preformed by human beings in our entire human history. These estrangements are not only those of someone else—all these estrangements live within each of us. The proportions may be different in different persons, but our participation in the “Hitlers” is just as real as our participations in the so-called “saints.” Each human is humanity, and this makes the guilt burden so deep in each of us that we cannot allow full conscious of that guilt without the companion conscious of our forgiveness by Profound Reality. Choosing forgiveness in your or my here-and-now living means choosing a pro-offered fresh start in realism on behalf of a guilty humanity.
And this forgiveness is not received for “me alone.” This forgiveness is received for the entire human species. I may be among the few who receive this forgiveness, but if I do receive it, I receive it for all of us. “Have mercy on us all” may be the core healing prayer for our era.
If I accept this forgiveness on behalf of all, this means that I then relate to everyone as forgiven. That forgiving posture will be a crucial aspect of our fresh start in faith. In faith, I trust in the trustworthiness of Profound Reality as a fresh start toward realism on behalf of the totality of humanity.
“Forgiveness by Profound Reality” needs some commentary. We err in imaging “Profound Reality” as a Supreme Being in some mystic Un-place who has a viewpoint understandable to the human mind that invented this Supreme Being fiction. The forgiving Supremeness that was being told about in the old mythic talk was and is nothing more nor less than the Background Wholeness of Reality that we are encountering in every event that happens to us. Every heart beat is an act of the Profound Reality that is always being encountered by us.
It matters not that we commonly insist on being blind to this perpetual encounter with Profound Reality. This Reality is present in every sunrise, earth turn, wind blow, water fall, baby birth—as well as in the beginnings and endings of each and every thing that we can conceptualize with our limited minds. This Profound Reality symbolized as a Supreme Being who forgives us is none other than that Irresistible Power that makes the past past, the present here, and the future coming. It is this Absolute Power that counts humanity’s deeds of estrangement from realism over and done, their karma broken, and a fresh start in realism set before us. The new reality that is set before us includes our own freedom—our response-ability, our gift from Absolute Power to choose options and thereby bend—not control, but bend the course of history.
Accepting such realism includes acknowledging the unrealism of our past deeds and the self-deserved despair that accompanied our having confusing the unreal with the real. If we humans accept forgiveness for all our horrific, wretched living, we find that our wretchedness is no longer a grueling guilt, but simply instructive lessons of what not to do with our one potentially realistic life. Accepting a call to realistic living includes accepting the freedom that is being given to us for living realistically our next steps of living.
This sociologically framed proclamation of Good News can be proclaimed relevantly to each culture, each generation, each society, and each human life in today’s world. Nevertheless, it remains true that each human being must opt all alone for this offered freedom from the past and this offered freedom for the future. This forgiveness, announced in a contemporary-style-Christian proclamation, is signaled by the proclaimers proclamation; yet this forgiveness is given by Profound Reality. Healing forgiveness is given to us only when you or I can hear thus forgiveness “spoken” from the “mouth of God” (that is, when this forgiveness is found in our experience of Profound Reality when treasured by us as our God-devotion). Accepting this forgiveness, restores us to our virgin-born relation with the Eternal (that is, with our relation of commitment to the realistic living of our lives as our best-case scenario.)
So, let us clearly affirm that the Profound Reality Presence of this Good News can be occasioned by a Christian-language-worded proclamation. And as Christians it is our assignment (our calling) to craft that 21st Century proclamation and proclaim it.
It must also be said that because this Good News is a universal verity, it can also be proclaimed, and is being proclaimed, elsewhere and else-wise than with a Christian vocabulary. Let this bit of awareness not worry us as Christians, for as Jesus himself is said to have said “whoever is for us is not against us.”