Preaching the Prodigal Son in Turkey

from an article I wrote recently:

The Parable of the Prodigal Son has come to have new meaning for me since I preached from this passage last Sunday and reflected on how it was received. I am an American living in Turkey and I minister at a small Turkish church to a congregation made up mostly of believers and seekers from a Muslim background. The congregation is one of many relatively new fellowships in this country that embrace a profoundly Christian faith in Jesus and express it in genuinely Turkish ways.

More than 99% of the population of Turkey is Muslim, and living a life devoted to following Jesus in this place offers unique challenges. There is also unique privilege, however, in seeing the gospel lived out in this context and experiencing the good news through the lives of my Turkish brothers and sisters.

The congregation was able to relate to the parable in ways that I could not have imagined apart from my experience in this country. The Turks seemed to be able to feel so much of what I imagine to be the impact of the parable on its original first century audience. At the same time, there were unique Turkish points of connection with the parable that neither the original crowd of “sinners and tax-collectors” nor the on-looking Pharisees could have imagined.

Even from the first verses my Turkish friends could identify with the significance of an older and a younger son. In Turkish families birthright still carries meaning. Older sons are called “abi” (big brother) by their younger siblings and the oldest son has unique privileges and responsibilities. The fact that it is the younger son who demands his inheritance even before his father has died adds to the offense. They could also relate to the shame and stigma that such a situation would create. They could imagine the way the neighbors would talk, wondering what really happened at that house.

There is also a deep significance to the very idea that a younger son would leave home while his father and brother carried on the family responsibilities. Turkish sons typically leave home only to marry, and even then they don’t usually go very far. The sense of responsibility and connection to family as a source of identity is too strong to be abandoned for selfish pursuits.

They could read meaning into the famine that the younger son experienced in his adopted country after having spent his entire inheritance frivolously. Our own city in Turkey is in the throes of a serious water shortage, and we have gone without running water for days at a time. The reaction of the Turkish mayor was to call for public prayers for rain in the traditional Muslim fashion. Thousands gathered to petition God for deliverance. Turkish churches followed suit by praying for rain in their own services. It is a similar shortage that drives the boy to desperation, creating an occasion for repentance.

His desperation reaches a low point as he is reduced to accepting a job feeding pigs. In the Turkish imagination, no animal is more repugnant than a pig. A Turk might even apologize for bringing them up in conversation. So, to be responsible for caring for pigs is, for most Turks, absolutely unthinkable. As I described the boy’s plight, the instinctive cringes and expressions of disgust revealed a depth of connection that I could only have speculated about before.

And here is the turning point. The boy decides to set out on the road toward home. The congregation could sense the uncertainty about how this reckless, shameful son would be received. So, they were all the more impacted by the strength of love that motivated the father to receive the prodigal back into his household. Borrowing some of Henri Nouwen’s observations from his book The Return of the Prodigal Son, I described how the father must have waited every day for his son’s return, looking down the road for his lost boy. I sensed that my Turkish brothers and sisters could feel the anticipation, the tension, the paradox, of waiting for such a one.

The embrace between the Father and son was particularly poignant for many of the people in my audience. From the pulpit I could read the reactions and expressions of my brothers and sisters, many of whose families have rejected them as a result of their decision to set out on the Jesus road: the man whose wife won’t allow him to bring their son to church; the wife whose husband brings her to church every week at her insistence and then sits outside to smoke alone; the son who secretly attends church meetings, knowing that there would be serious consequences if his family knew he was associating with us. There is something powerful about the wholeness of the family depicted in the parable. It is a family held together not by obedience to law or tradition, but by the powerful love of the father. Many of my Turkish brothers and sisters dream about that kind of wholeness in their own families.

The father’s ceremony of receiving the younger son back into the family also has unique points of connection for a Turkish audience. The father commands the servants to “bring the best robe,” and as an American reader I have to conjure up a sense of significance which is foreign to my culture. There are still robes of this kind in Turkey, however. While most Turks don’t where a kaftan (as it is expressed in Turkish) on the street, there is still a place for it in Turkish culture. The robe is still worn for special ceremonies, particularly religious ones. It is a reminder of Turkish heritage and the royal Ottoman household. Tourists can buy replicas of antique Turkish kaftan in the bazaar. “Bring the kaftan and put it on my son,” the father says, implying a royal garment, a robe of status and distinction with spiritual significance. It takes less effort for a Turkish hearer to imagine an elderly father tucking his robe into his belt and running down the road to collect his wayward son.

The ring that the servant is commanded to put on this boy’s finger also resonates with a Turkish audience. Silver shops all over our city in Turkey sell signet rings with the mark of the Ottoman Empire, a souvenir of a time when they were used to seal important documents, conferring a sense of official importance. Other kinds of rings still carry political and religious significance. This ring apparently carried the symbol of the father’s household.

Turkish hearers can even identify powerfully with the idea of killing a fattened calf. Perhaps the most immediate example in Turkish minds is the annual Islamic tradition of sacrificing an animal, such as a calf, during the festival of Kurban Bayram. Families slaughter an animal as an expression of devotion and thankfulness to God. The annual ceremony is intended to emulate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. According to Islam, it is by providing a ram that God ransomed the life of Isaac. But many families also sacrifice an animal as a way to express thankfulness to God after a particular request is granted. All of my Turkish hearers have seen the sacrifice performed and joined in celebrations that included an animal slaughtered as an offering of thanks; and some of them have even held the knife in their own hand as it cut through the throat of the goat or bull. The father, in commanding that an animal be cut on this occasion, is expressing his gratitude to God for bringing his son back, just as he had been praying for so long.

At least one woman in the service that day was hearing this parable for the first time. She was moved to tears to hear that the Father looks down the road waiting to embrace all of us in the same way. And the whole congregation could relate to the reality that we have brought shame on his household by our rebellion, squandering the Father’s wealth in wild living, and yet there is still a robe, and ring, and fattened calf waiting for us. The Father still embraces us. He still insists on vesting us with the family name, and welcomes us into his house as sons and daughters.

My Turkish brothers and sisters understand the meaning of the passage, and they bring to it a unique Turkish significance. In preaching the Parable of the Prodigal Son and considering it through Turkish eyes I was able to hear it again as good news.