Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; March 3, 2024
Readings: Genesis 44:1-13; Secrets of Heaven §5747.2; Luke 15:11-24
In this portion of today’s service we’re going to continue to reflect on the gifts that we receive from God. As we saw during the children’s talk, if we have even a little bit of an inclination to be grateful to God, then it’s pretty easy to come up with a long list of things that He has given us. And it’s wonderful that children can do that. We all know how much gratitude opens up our hearts. Gratitude to God really does open up our hearts towards heaven.
But we also know that it’s easy to be grateful when you know you’re supposed to be grateful (or when the pastor is asking you what you’re grateful for). It’s a lot harder to make gratitude your baseline; to be grateful when no one is looking; to let gratitude shape the way you see yourself and your place in the world. We’re going to be talking about this second, or deeper, kind of gratitude. We’re going to be looking at what it takes to make the shift from occasionally agreeing that we’ve been blessed to actually believing what the Lord says in our recitation from John—that without Him we can do nothing (15:5). If that’s true, then every good thing that we do is a gift from God. “Without Me you can do nothing” can feel like a bitter pill to swallow. But what I hope you’ll see, in the teaching that we’ll look at next, is that when we acknowledge that we need what God gives us, we usually find that that acknowledgement is nowhere near as bitter as we expected it to be.
To begin with, we’re going to revisit the story of Joseph and the silver cup. As I said to the children, in the internal or spiritual sense of the Word, Joseph stands for the Lord, and his brothers stand for people who are trying and sometimes failing to learn and apply the Lord’s teachings. And the silver cup symbolizes truth from the Lord; specifically it symbolizes interior truth (AC §§5736, 5747)—a purer and clearer kind of truth that holds a real taste of heaven within it.
When we learn something, our instinct is to assume that we figured it out. We tend to treat knowledge, or truth, like a kind of currency—“the truths I know are my spiritual riches.” This story is about the process by which we learn that it isn’t so. Every insight that we have is a gift from God. The silver cup isn’t ours: it is the Lord’s.
If Joseph represents the Lord, that does make it a little confusing that he plants the cup on Benjamin and then accuses him of stealing it (Gen. 44:2, 4, 5), because this doesn’t seem very just. But this was done for the sake of the internal sense. What’s represented here, in the internal sense of the Word, is that the Lord is constantly giving us gifts, like that silver cup, without our realizing it. He shows us true things, and we don’t even realize that we’ve seen them, let alone realize that He’s the one who showed them to us. So, like Joseph’s brothers, we assert that we have no silver cup. There’s no gift from God in our minds. Our knowledge is our own.
Here’s how the inner meaning of this story is explained in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, in a book called Secrets of Heaven: [read AC §5747.2].
Even though Joseph’s brothers, in the literal sense of the story, didn’t steal anything, this story in its internal sense is about spiritual theft. To commit spiritual theft is to lay claim to something that actually belongs to the Lord. And everyone commits spiritual theft at some point or another, because the truth is that every good thing in creation actually belongs to the Lord (see AC §§1614, 2016). But for the most part we don’t realize this. We’re content to assume that the truth we know is ours, and that the good we do is ours.
When we learn that it’s not so—that we ought to give thanks to God for every good and true thing that we possess—that feels like a bitter pill to swallow. Because it seems to us that if that’s true, then our existence must be meaningless. We think to ourselves that if it’s true that without Him we can do nothing (John 15:5), then we might as well be nothing. If all good belongs to God, then we must be no good at all.
This is how everybody initially reacts when they learn just how much they owe to the Lord. Gratitude is really hard, because there’s a big part of everyone that thinks that we should be able to do it all on our own. That part of us believes that needing God is basically the same thing as being a slave to God (see AC §§892, 5763). And that’s why Joseph’s brothers, in the story, tell Joseph’s servant that if the cup is found with them, they should all be made into slaves. “With whomever of your servants it is found, let him die, and we also will be my lord’s slaves” (44:9). And when the cup is found in Benjamin’s bag they tear their clothes (v. 13). When we realize that we have nothing good without God, often our initial reaction is to grieve. There is a part of us that believes that if we have to admit that we need God, then we might as well have no freedom at all.
So far we’ve been talking about two distinct phases in our spiritual development. The first phase is the one in which we imagine that the good we do and the truth we know are ours. We imagine that there’s no silver cup, no gift from God, hidden away in our spirits. The second phase is the one in which we start to recognize that we can’t take credit for anything good—because the more we try to do it all on our own, without any help, the emptier we feel. Because the truth is that everything good comes from God. This second phase is not a happy phase. In this phase we struggle with the feeling that God is asking us to become a slave—that God is asking us to have nothing, and to be nothing, at all.
But there is a third phase. If you know what comes next in the Joseph story, you know that Joseph doesn’t make any of his brothers into slaves. Far from it. But instead of continuing with the Joseph story, we’re going to shift to looking at a story from the gospel of Luke, because this story illustrates all three phases clearly and concisely. This story is a parable that the Lord tells; it’s usually called the parable of the prodigal son. “Prodigal” just means “wasteful.” We read: [15:17-24].
The father in this story clearly stands for the Lord. The prodigal son stands for us—he stands for an aspect of the human condition. At the start of the story, this man claims his inheritance from his father, and goes out into the world and lives large, and wastes everything that he has (v. 12, 13). This is “phase one” of the spiritual process that we’ve been talking about—the phase in which we take all of God’s gifts for granted, in which we assume that the life that’s been given to us is ours, and we spend it however we want to spend it, without giving any thought to the Father who gives us that gift in the first place.
Then the land is gripped by a famine, and the prodigal son realizes that he has nothing. And that’s phase two. The detail that I want to call your attention to is that this man realizes that if he’s to have any food he needs to go back home—but he believes that if he goes back, he has to go back as a servant. He has to say to his father, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son” (v. 18). That’s how we tend to think! We tend to believe that if all good belongs to God—if we can do nothing good apart from God—then we must be unworthy. Often people even end up believing that if God is good, and we are not, that must mean that He looks down on us, that He has contempt for us, that He won’t even let us be His servants unless we beg Him.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In the story the father runs to his son (v. 20). And he gives him new gifts: he gives him the best robe and a ring for his hand (v. 22). He has no interest in discussing his son’s worthiness or unworthiness (v. 21). He is overjoyed, because his son has come home (v. 24).
The Lord has no interest in holding His goodness above our heads, out of reach. He has no desire to make us feel small so that He can feel bigger. He just gives. He loves to give good things to His children (cf. Matt. 7:11). Whether or not we deserve His gifts isn’t part of the conversation. What matters is whether or not we’re willing to receive His gifts. The father in the story of the prodigal son didn’t withhold his love because his son was unworthy; he loved his son every moment of that story. But the son didn’t know it, because he chose to go away from his father. When he chose to go home and ask for what He needed, He discovered the truth.
It seems to us that if we admit that we have nothing good without God, then we’re admitting that there is nothing good in us or about us. But it isn’t so. Because the Lord is constantly giving us His compassion and His wisdom. He puts them into our hands and tells us to use them as though they were our own. In the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we’re told: “Divine love is such that it wills what it has to be another’s” (DP §43). And we’re told, “Love consists in this, that its own should be another’s; to feel another’s joy as joy in oneself, that is loving” (DLW §47). And the Lord is love itself. His joy is to give what He has to us.
Now if He is so willing to give us His love and His wisdom, we might start to wonder why it’s so important that we acknowledge that those gifts are His. If the Lord is willing to give us the things represented by Joseph’s silver cup, then why weren’t Joseph’s brothers allowed to leave Egypt with the silver cup? Why did they have to go back, and humble themselves before Joseph? Why did the prodigal son have to go home and humble himself before his father? If the Lord is willing to give us good things whether we’re grateful or not, then why is it important to be grateful? Can’t we just stay at phase one? Can’t we just politely ignore God, and enjoy our power to learn and to love?
The answer is simple: we need the Lord. And to know that we need Him makes all the difference. If we don’t know that we need Him, we wander away from Him—away from the source of our blessings—and our blessings run out. Surely every human being knows what it’s like to try to go it alone—to try to be enough, without emotional or spiritual help from anyone or anything. It’s exhausting. It leads to disappointment and failure. The world is simply too big for us. Trying to be enough on our own is like trying to make a single meal last for a week, or a month. We end up feeling empty. Like the prodigal son, we take the wealth that our Father has given us, and we use it up.
But if we’re willing to admit that we need something from God—that we need more than we can create on our own—our hearts open up. Humility and gratitude bring us back to God with open spirits. That’s why He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you” (Matt. 7:7). To know that you need a gift from God makes all the difference in the world.
Amen.