“Our Forgiving Father”—Luke 15:11-32
Note: The following is the opening illustration for my Sunday sermon on Our Forgiving Father from Luke 15:11-32. Who do you have to forgive you?
The Big Idea: Put your ear to the chest of Christ to hear the heartbeat of God—the heartbeat of our FORGIVING FATHER.
The Big Picture: “Unforgiven”
The 1992 Western, Unforgiven, directed, produced, and starring Clint Eastwood, is a dark parable of the driven,
unforgiven mood of our fearful age. This grim and gritty film accurately portrays the despair and emptiness of the human heart in need of grace.
Eastwood plays the aging gunslinger, Will Munny. In his younger, wilder days, Munny had killed many men. But, as the film opens, we meet a Will Munny who is no longer a gunslinger. He has been reformed by the love of a good woman, his wife, Claudia. She helped him give up whiskey and hang up his guns, but now Claudia is dead, killed by smallpox. Grieving, poor, and debt-ridden, Munny tries to eke out a living for himself and his two children as a pig farmer on the Kansas plains.
Then one day, a brash young gunslinger calling himself, “the Schofield Kid” rides into town to remind Will Munny of his ugly past.
“I hear tell you’ve killed a lot of men,” the Kid tells him. “Well, up in Wyoming, there’s $1,000 to be had for killing two cowboys. Seems one of ‘em got mad at a woman and slashed up her face. The other ladies in that establishment have posted bounty on the heads of those two cowboys. If you come with me, we can kill those boys and split the reward.”
“No,” Munny replies, honoring the wishes of his dead wife. “No more killin’ for me. I ain’t like that anymore, Kid.” The Kid rides off alone. But then Munny begins to think. “How are my children going to live? How will I pay off this debt? My split of that money sure would go a long way.”
So he straps on his gun, and he and his friend, Ned, ride off to catch up with the Schofield Kid. As they ride together, the Kid, who is fascinated by Munny’s reputation as a killer, pumps him for stories of his past. But Munny doesn’t want to remember his past sins. “I ain’t like that anymore,” he keeps repeating to Ned, the Kid, and to himself, denying the obvious question, “If he ‘ain’t like that anymore,’ then why is he riding off to Wyoming to kill a couple of cowboys?”
Together, they track down the two cowboys. Munny shoots one of them, a fresh-faced boy named Davey. It’s a grisly scene. Later, the Kid shoots the other cowboy—Quick Mike. It’s a cold-blooded killing of an unarmed man.
Later, the killings accomplished, Munny and the Kid sit under a tree outside of town waiting for their reward money. While they wait; they talk. The Kid is full of remorse and in tears. His earlier fascination with killing has evaporated now that he has actually killed a man.
Munny, whose soul is stained with the blood of countless men, says, “Terrible thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna’ have.” “Yeah,” says the Kid, his voice choking. “Well I guess they had it comin’.” Munny looks back at him coldly, and then says, “We all have it comin’, Kid.”
It’s a dark moment in a dark film. Munny’s terse comment—“We all have it comin’”—is the statement of a man who can’t escape his past, his sin, or his guilt. It’s the statement of a damned soul. The title is fitting: Unforgiven. For this film is about guilt and retribution. Everyone in the film is guilty: the two dead cowboys, the sheriff played by Gene Hackman, Ned, the Schofield Kid, Will Munny. In the end, everyone is guilty, but no one is forgiven.
Unforgiven won four Academy Awards, including best picture. Why? The answer is simple. It touches the very nerve center of our soul. We’re all guilty. And we all need to hear the story of our Father’s forgiveness. We all long to experience the thrill of our forgiving Father’s welcoming embrace. Each of us, in our unique way, is a prodigal wandering far from home. Each of us longs for our homecoming.
Jesus addresses our longing in Luke 15. As a master artist, He paints a beautiful portrait of our forgiving Father. As we listen to Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, we learn to put our ear to the chest of Christ to hear the heartbeat of God—the heartbeat of our FORGIVING FATHER.
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Are you living an unforgiven or a forgiven life?
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