The younger son in Luke 15 had a speech ready. Starving in a pig field, he worked it out line by line: admit he’d sinned, admit he wasn’t worthy, then ask to be hired on as a servant. Pure damage control. Then he walks up the road, and his father, who has apparently been watching that road for a while, runs. A grown man, sprinting. He hugs his son before the kid can get a word out.
The son starts the speech anyway. “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” That’s as far as he gets, because his father turns to the servants and starts calling for the best robe. The hired-hand line never gets said. Verse 19 has the plan. Verse 21 has the cut-off.
That’s the heart of this week’s Bible Lesson, which is funny, because it’s titled “Everlasting Punishment.”
Plenty of us grew up with a God who keeps receipts. You mess up, the meter starts running, and somewhere a celestial accountant adds interest. Mary Baker Eddy looked at that setup and asked the question I wish someone had asked me at twelve: “Does divine Love commit a fraud on humanity by making man inclined to sin, and then punishing him for it?” Build a creature to fail and then bill it for failing? Any parent would get reported for that.
She doesn’t pretend suffering away, though. Her line is surgical: “the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts.” That’s an expiration date. The pain runs exactly as long as the belief, and the famine in the story wasn’t the father’s doing. It was just what the far country was like. The son’s misery came from where he was standing, and it started lifting the moment he “came to himself.”
So why spend a whole lesson on the Ten Commandments? Because of how they’re framed. The Golden Text puts the law “within my heart.” First John says the commandments “are not burdensome.” Eddy calls the First Commandment her favorite text, since one God means one Mind, and one Mind leaves no rival power around to keep score. She also says, “Fear of punishment never made man truly honest.” Every speed trap in America backs her up. People tap the brakes for the cop and floor it a mile later.
Then there’s the woman dragged into the temple. A crowd holding rocks, a legal trap set for Jesus, and he bends down and writes in the dirt. Nobody knows what he wrote. I love that we don’t know. When he finally speaks, the crowd leaves one by one, oldest first, and he tells her, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” Condemnation off the table, change still expected. Eddy puts it in eight words: “The design of Love is to reform the sinner.”
Here’s what does the healing. Eddy writes that Jesus saw “the perfect man” right where everyone else saw a sinner, “and this correct view of man healed the sick.” The father saw his son “a great way off.” He had been looking for that face the whole time.
So if you’re carrying a speech around, the one where you list everything you’ve wrecked and ask for a lesser seat at the table, go ahead and start it. You probably won’t get to finish. Somebody’s already coming down the road with a robe.
