Patrick Mason Wonder of Scripture Lecture
Transcript
Thanks. JB, Thanks, Christian. Thank you all for being here again, for coming back. You know, when one comes down from Logan, not only, of course, is it a different time zone. I mean, it's very far away, but you have to fight wolves, and I mean, you're coming from the great white north, it's very complicated to get down here from Logan, but thank you for being here. Today is Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day to everybody who's here. You know, I really can't think of anything more romantic for Valentine's Day than coming to hear a modestly overweight, middle-aged Professor give a lecture about scriptures. I mean, I really hope you all have something better planned for later today, but maybe you don't, maybe you share the opinion that I had when I was a freshman here, exactly 30 years ago. I wrote in my journal on February 14, 1995, “Talk about your basic, overrated holiday. They ought to change the name to national cheesiness day since I about puke when I see all the little love birds.” It may shock you to know that I did not have a girlfriend that year or for quite a long time, but I'm very glad that my Valentine is here, Melissa. I had to go all the way to Notre Dame to find her, and we've been married more than 20 years now.
Whether you're a Valentine's Day lover or hater, I thought it only appropriate for us to talk today about love. As I was thinking, you know what, what scriptural text? This is The Wonder of Scripture Lecture, what scriptural text could we think about to really dive in and think about love. So we're going to spend the next half hour or so, if it's okay with you, talking about the Song of Solomon. Some of you laughed nervously. A couple of you got really interested here. No, we're not going to do that, I'm not quite that brave. I'm not sure you want me to hear me reading those verses but, but we are going to talk about love. In the English language, we just have one word for it, we have love, but in Greek, I'm told, and I don't speak Greek, but I'm told that there are three different words that are oftentimes used in Greek, both in biblical texts and other Greek texts, to talk about love. These are eros, philia, and agape. Now, Eros, which, of course, is the root of our English word erotic, is the Song of Solomon type love. This is the feeling of romance, passion, and longing shared by lovers. Eros is beautiful, it's potent, it's a powerful transmitter and reflection of the divine power of creation. Disappointingly, for some of you, but gratefully for most of you, that's all I'm going to say about eros today. Philia is brotherly love, the kind of which the Eagles from the City of Brotherly Love decidedly did not show to brother Reed this past Sunday. The Philia is the love between friends, loyal, generous and reciprocal. On that Valentine's Day as a freshman, 30 years ago, when Eros was a distant fantasy for me, I went with a bunch of friends to a rock concert, which for me is like the perfect description and ideal form of philia. Today I don't want to talk about eros, nor do I want to talk about philia. Today I want to talk about the third type of love, agape.
Martin Luther King often spoke of this type of love. “Agape,” said King, “means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate. It means understanding redeeming goodwill for all people. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of all people.” Now, there are lots of wondrous places in scripture that speak of agape love. There are lots of wondrous places in Scripture that speak of agape love, we could turn to Isaiah: “I'll mention the loving kindnesses of the Lord, the Praises of the Lord, according to all that the Lord hath bestowed on us, and the great goodness towards the house of Israel, which he's bestowed on them according to His mercies and according to the multitude of his loving kindnesses.” Or we could turn to John, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. God's love was revealed among us in this way that God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. We love because he first loved us.” We could turn to the Book of Mormon to Nephi, “And the angel said unto me, Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father, Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw? And I answered him, saying, yea, it is the love of God which shutteth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men, wherefore it is the most desirable above all things. And he spake unto me, saying, yea, and the most joyous to the soul.” Jesus is the perfect revelation of God's love in the flesh. The son came to reveal and embody the love of the Father. Now, there are many wondrous passages in Scripture that speak to this overflowing love.
Today, I want to dwell on what I believe is the single greatest and most important chapter in all of Scripture. That's a bold claim, I know, I make that claim only because the Sermon on the Mount is three chapters long, so I'm not going to talk about it. In one of the last of his sermons, Joseph Smith mused that there are, there are, but very few beings in the world who understand rightly the character of God. This matters, the Prophet taught, because if we don't comprehend the character of God, then we cannot properly comprehend either ourselves or our relationship to God. One of my favorite contemporary American preachers, the Reverend Otis Moss, the third, says it this way: “When you have no theology, then you have a messed up psychology, and you can't have the right sociology, and you'll have a skewed anthropology.” I believe this one chapter that I'm going to talk about today goes further in helping us understand the true character of God and our relationship to him with savingly positive effects for our psychology, sociology, and anthropology than any other, and this chapter is Luke 15. “Then all the tax collectors and sinners drew near to him to listen, and both the Pharisees and scribes complain, saying, This man [accepts, welcomes or receives],” depending on the translation, “sinners and eats with them.” Like much in the gospels, this historical setting seems particular with these groups. It also invites generalization; the gathering of tax collectors, sinners, Pharisees, and scribes stands in for all humanity, both immoral outsiders and moral insiders alike, as Timothy Keller notes. Though we often read the parables in this chapter in sentimental terms, Keller argues, rightly I think, that Jesus' purpose is not to warm our hearts, but to shatter our categories. Through these parables, Jesus challenges what nearly everyone has ever thought about God, sin, and salvation. Jesus sees not only his immediate audience of tax collectors, sinners, Pharisees, and scribes, but through them, he sees you and me, and he has three stories to tell.
“Which one of you, having 100 sheep and losing one of them doesn't leave the 99 in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it. When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices when he comes home. He calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I've found my sheep that is lost.’” Now, this has always been a tender story for me. My maternal grandmother died when I was 18, and I remember when we gathered together as a family to close this casket and offer a prayer, my father, who was her son, offered the prayer. I vividly remember him talking about the Savior, carrying my grandmother tenderly in his arms. I think it's sweet to think that as each of us passes from this life into the next, Jesus, the Good Shepherd, carries us in his arms, calls together our family and friends on the other side, and says, “Rejoice.” As we think further about the story, when the shepherd finds the lost sheep in the wilderness, no doubt that the sheep was not in good shape. It was scared, anxious, perhaps cut and bleeding, smelly. The shepherd knows the sheep didn't necessarily choose its predicament. It just wandered off, as sheep will do. The Good Shepherd doesn't mind getting blood and muck on his robe as he carries the sheep on his shoulders. It's an unpleasant job, but one he rejoices in, because he loves the sheep. Our youngest daughter was born at 29 weeks. Her survival, and especially that of my wife, is literally nothing short of a miracle. As a result, as a result of her severe prematurity, our daughter has cerebral palsy. CP presents in lots of different ways for different people. In our daughter's case, it means that she can't walk, has limited use of her hands, and has very little core body strength. She can't sit on her own for very long. She often slumps in her chair or falls over, and she can't roll over in bed, which means that one of us has to help her do that at night. She's intellectually bright and socially engaging, but has lots of medical issues. Her physical needs require almost around-the-clock care. For the past several months, she's been dealing with constant severe pain, mostly in her legs and feet. While working with her doctors, we literally just got off the phone with her doctor as we pulled into the parking lot today. We've tried all kinds of things to alleviate the pain, but so far, nothing is working. It's a terrible thing to watch your eight-year-old daughter suffer excruciating, shooting pain almost all hours of the day and night. A few weeks ago, we were in sacrament meeting, and she was having a particularly bad morning. She asked me to hold her so I put her in my lap. I told her to hold my hand and squeeze every time she felt some kind of shooting pain, she squeezed it tightly about every 10 seconds for the rest of the meeting. In that moment, while I was holding her, I felt both overwhelming love and complete helplessness. The image of the shepherd carrying a sheep popped into my head. Most of my adult life, I have spent my days trying to get the 99 things on my list done. Each of those things matters, they tug at me constantly, but right now, at this moment in my life, amidst the 99 other things I'm called to do each day in my family, at my job, at church in the world, God has given me this one little sheep to rescue and care for. I don't know how to bind her wounds and make her feel better, I'm not that skilled of a shepherd. What I can do is put her on my shoulders, sometimes literally, and carry her to a place of safety and relative comfort, surrounded by family and friends who love her and rejoice over her. Now I want to be clear, me rescuing and carrying this one sheep is not heroic. It's what any halfway decent shepherd would do, it's in the job description. And this is Jesus's point. By definition, however compassionate, caring, or loving you or I or any other human being can possibly be, God is even more compassionate, more caring, more loving. If I am capable of carrying this one sheep right now, and if you can carry whatever one sheep God has put on your shoulders right now, then Jesus wants me to understand that God will go to any length, search through any wilderness, carry me as long as it takes, no matter how lost and anxious and stinky and bloody I may get. As Elder Patrick Kieran puts it, “God is in relentless pursuit of you. He wants all of his children to choose to return to Him, and He employs every possible measure to bring you back.”
“What woman who has 10 silver coins, if she loses one, doesn't light a lamp and sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she finds it, she says to her friends and neighbors, Rejoice with me, because I found the coin that was lost.” If anyone was inclined to question why a shepherd would leave 99 sheep to go look for one, everyone can relate to losing a coin or some other object of value and then going in relentless pursuit of it. The coin that Jesus refers to here is equivalent to a laborer's day wages, so we're talking about real money. Now, when I've lost something valuable, there's a creeping sense of panic, followed by a search that becomes increasingly frantic the longer it goes, especially if I've lost something at home. I start blaming other people at my loss, this is why you have kids, so you can blame them for things. I even get angry at the thing that I lost, as if it had some kind of malevolent agency. I get irritable, narrow-minded, and obsessive when I finally find it inevitably right where I left it, I feel a sense of relief, but not exactly joy. Contrast my attitude to that of the woman in Jesus' story. Her relentless pursuit of that which is lost reminds us of the shepherd, but her reaction on finding the lost coin is actually rather strange. I mean, it's just a coin. Yes, it's a relief when it turns up, but is it really an occasion for a neighborhood party? The woman's Joy seems excessive. If I were one of her friends that she breathlessly gathered with this exciting news, and then she exclaimed, I lost a coin, and then I found it, I would say, “Okay, and then?” There's a little-used word in the English language for someone who is extravagant, reckless, or overly lavish; that word is prodigal. The woman is prodigal in her joy, prodigal in her celebration. A responsible reaction to finding a lost coin would be to quietly tuck it back in her purse and then move on with her day. This is Jesus' point that I so easily miss. God's love is revealed in the woman's prodically, joyful celebration. God's love is not responsible, at least not in the buttoned-up, sober way we tell our kids to grow up and act responsibly. It's not responsible to throw a party after you find one lost coin, but God does in my pinched view of the world, finding the coin is not an occasion for joy, because the coin is mine. Finding it is simply getting what I'm entitled to, the universe is giving me back what it owes me. Things change, however, if I begin to see the coin less as an entitlement and more as a gift, it represents a day's labor, but what about that day can I truly say that I'm entitled to? The sunshine, the air I breathe, the energy I borrow from the created world, the minerals used to mint the coin? When I see the coin as a gift rather than an entitlement, I begin to see a world dripping with grace. My joylessness comes from grasping a world of possessions, status, people, and relationships that I think are mine. The woman's surprise and joy, on the other hand, speak to a world constantly unfolding as a gift. Perhaps, this is partly what Jesus meant when he said that we should become like little children to them, the whole world is a delight in the mental and emotional world of adult responsibility that I spend most of my time in, however, the coin I regularly lose is the ability to rejoice over small everyday things. “Rejoice with me,” the shepherd God exclaims, “Rejoice with me,” the woman God proclaims. Will I join the party?
There was a man with two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father, let me have the share of the estate that will come to me.” The father divided the property between them, a few days later, the younger son got everything together he had and left for a distant country where he squandered his money on a life of debauchery. The younger son is a punk. He's a trust fund baby who can't wait to get what he's earned, what he hasn't earned, but thinks he's entitled to. Now, lots of commentators have written insightfully about this story. In demanding his chair of the inherent inheritance, the Catholic author Henry Newman writes, “The son's manner of leaving is tantamount, tantamount to wishing his father dead. It is a heartless rejection of the home in which the son was born and nurtured.” Now, this is one of our oldest stories that we tell ourselves, going back to the Tower of Babel, humans ungratefully wanting to supplant God and take his wealth for ourselves. But just as the Babel of languages that proceeds from the tower is inverted by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, here Jesus inverts Babel's depiction of God. In the tower story, God is righteously angry at the humans' presumptuousness and punishes them. In Jesus' story, the father says, yes. He knows his younger son makes an unjust, selfish request. He knows his son prizes possessions over relationships. He knows the Son will squander his inheritance. The father gives it anyway. He withholds nothing. Any parent knows that loving your child often means saying “no.” This younger son, however, is not a toddler wanting to eat all the candy or a teenager wanting to stay up all night. This is an adult son wanting to find himself. Now the irony, of course, is that he already had everything that he could ever want or need, but he couldn't see that, the Father loves him enough to let him go. Some might say this is bad parenting, that the father should put his son in his place, refuse to let him out of the house, scold him for his pride, his selfishness, his disrespect, perhaps, but not this father. This is how Henry Newman puts it: “The father couldn't compel his son to stay home. He couldn't force his love on the beloved. It was love itself that allowed him to let his son find his own life, even with the risk of losing it, and here is the real lesson, I am loved so much that I am left free to leave home. The blessing is there from the beginning I've left it and keep on leaving it, but the father is always looking for me with outstretched arms to receive me back and whisper again in my ear, you are my beloved. On you my favor rests. The father knows I will squander my inheritance. He's given it to me anyway. He's extravagantly even recklessly, generous. The Father is prodigal with His love, because He knows what will happen next. He squandered his money on a life of debauchery when he had spent it all that country experienced a severe famine, and now he began to feel the pinch, so he hired himself out to one of the local inhabitants who put him on his farm to feed the pigs. He would willingly have filled himself with the husks the pigs were eating, but no one would let him have them. Then he came to his senses and said, “How many of my father's hired men have all the food they want and more, and here I am dying of hunger. I'll leave this place and go to my father and say, ‘father, I've sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired men,’” so he left the place and went back to his father. The father is patient and wise. He knows I'll find pleasure, but not real happiness away from home. He finds no joy in my departure or my absence. He knows I'm suffering and will suffer. He knows the things I chase will eventually slip from my grasp. He also knows who I really am more than I do, because he knows the home I was raised in and the love he has given me, so he will wait and watch sorrowfully but expectantly. In the meantime, I play, I pursue the ego, find it, and realize how little joy it brings me. But now I'm a long way from home. This is the fall from grace and departure from the living God that the scriptures speak of. I can sustain myself, but I find myself asking, Is this all? It turns out, what I really want is what the father offered all along: relationship, love, security, home. Finding the limits of the ego, I come to my senses. This is maybe my favorite definition in all of scripture of repentance, to come to my senses. I already have it within me, because I am my father's son.”
Two things are worth noting about the son's decision to return home. First, he knows the amount of his father's wealth that he has squandered. He feels himself a debtor. Coming to his senses, he feels it's only just that he should pay off that debt. He plans to become one of his father's hired men, or wage laborers. If he works long enough and hard enough, he may scrape together enough money to pay back his debt and call things even. He wants to make things right, and this seems like a fair solution. Second, on his long walk home, the son prepares a speech. He has offended His father's honor and rightly recognizes how offensive his behavior has been. More than that, he knows his father's character. Realizes now how Father, how far he has deviated from it, and therefore surmises that he is nothing like his father. He will abase himself, plead for clemency, and hope for some shred of mercy in the form of menial work. He deserves nothing more. He is, in his own eyes, unworthy. While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with pity. He ran to the boy, clasped him in his arms and kissed him fervently. Then his son said, “Father, I've sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son,” but the father said to his servants, “Quick, bring out the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet, bring the calf we've been fattening and kill it. We will celebrate by having a feast, because this son of mine was dead and has come back to life. He is lost and is found,” and they began to celebrate.
Listen to the soundtrack of this story. What do you hear? The sound of the Father running. His long, energetic strides, his breathlessness. At the very first sign of his son, he breaks into a dead sprint and doesn't slow down until he reaches him. See the father crash into his shuffling, shrunken son. You've never seen such a bear hug. It's a shower of kisses that would be embarrassing, if not so beautiful. The father refuses to let go. Dazed by his father's embrace, the son doesn't know how to react to such extravagant love; all he can do is begin to recite his carefully prepared speech. He thinks his father wants his shame. The father hears but doesn't even dignify his son's well-meaning speech with a response, the sin has passed, the son has come to his senses. Heaven demands nothing. What is needed, what is just, what is right, is not punishment, but restoration. There is nothing the son can do to earn the father's love, because there is nothing the son could do to lose it. What is needed at this moment is not a grand display of penance, but recognition. The son needs to see himself the way the father sees him, as a son, a child, an heir. The father summons every possible token of sonship to be brought the best robe, no doubt his own, the ring signifying his authority, the wagyu rib-eye steaks for the barbecue. All of this is recklessly extravagant, even prodigal of the Father. The Son has blown his inheritance, and now the father is giving him a new one? Yes, all the way down to the sandals, to raise his son from the dust. The son had lost sight of his son-ness, and was in that respect, dead to himself, he was never dead to the Father. The moment he came to his senses and desired a restored relationship, even if it was, if it was out of a selfish desire for survival, the son started to come back to life. For the father, it was never a matter of whether he would celebrate, only a question of when.
Now, the elder son was out on the fields and on his way back, as he drew near to the house, he could hear music and dancing calling one of the servants. He asked what he was all about. The servant told him, “Your brother has come and your father has killed the calf we've been fattening because he's got him back safe and sound.” He was angry then and refused to go in, and his father came out and began to urge him to come in, but he retorted to his father, “All these years, I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed any order of yours, yet you never offered me so much as a kid, for me to celebrate with my friends, but for this son of yours, when he comes back after swallowing up your property, he and his loose women, you kill the calf we had been fattening.”
Now, your experience may be hard or may be different than mine, but this is hard for me to hear. I see so much of myself in the older son, obedient, dutiful, hardworking, and also prone to jealousy, anger, resentment, and bitter joylessness. Henri Newman's commentary cuts deep. There is so much resentment among the just and the righteous. There is so much judgment, condemnation, and prejudice among the saints. There is so much frozen anger among the people who are so concerned about avoiding sin, but as Newman notes, perhaps the story should be called not by its familiar title of the prodigal son, but rather the parable of the lost sons. Why? Because the one who stayed home also became a lost man. Exteriorly, he did all the things a good son is supposed to do, but interiorly, he wandered away from the father. The younger son's lostness is apparent. The older son's lostness is veiled in righteousness. The lostness of the resentful saint is so hard to reach, Newman maintains, precisely because it's so closely wedded to the desire to be good and virtuous. I don't particularly enjoy reading my missionary journals, not because I hated my mission, quite the contrary, I had a good mission. In every measurable respect, I was a good, maybe excellent, missionary, hard-working, dutiful, a scriptorian, I think that's a word we made up, obedient. I don't regret at all my best efforts to serve the Lord with all my might, mind, and strength, but what was missing from the equation was my heart. With that key ingredient left out, my righteousness was brittle, my service was commendable, and bore good fruit. I know that God approved of my best efforts, but I was often smug, overbearing and judgmental, especially toward other missionaries whom I thought were squandering their inheritance. For a long stretch on my mission, particularly when I had what I considered to be multiple younger sons as companions in a row, all I could see was how lost they were. I resented them and believed deep inside, though I never would have admitted as much that God approved of me more or had a special reward in store for me because I had earned his love, precisely because I had my head down working so hard in the father's fields, and was always thinking about how my labor compared to others. I couldn't, or didn't, look up to see how far away from home I really was. After my mission, I don't recall being invited to any of the homecoming talks of these younger son companions of mine. Had someone invited me, I might have declined my own version of refusing to eat with sinners, or I might have attended, and upon seeing them being welcomed home with festivities and rejoicing, would have silently seethed. I may have even had a quiet little conversation with the Father, “You and I both know what kind of missionaries they were, God. they don't deserve this kind of welcome home. Remember how good I was?”
The father said, “My son, you are with me always, and all I have is yours, but it was only right we should celebrate and rejoice, because your brother here was dead and has come to life. He was lost and is found.” That's it. That's how Jesus ends the story. What happens to the brothers? Does the younger son change his life? Does the older son come in to the party? Jesus doesn't say. This is where the parable becomes a choose-your-own-adventure story. After reading this, you and I get to decide what comes next. It's been nearly three decades since my mission. I can honestly say I have none of those feelings of resentment anymore. It's not because time heals all wounds, that's a load of crap. Time is neutral, it only gives space for wounds to either heal or fester, depending on how they're treated. My bitterness towards those younger son companions has healed only because the father came out to me and urged me to come into the party. I hesitated at times, my self-righteousness resisted the invitation. What about all my hard work?
The first historical reference we have to this parable is from Irenaeus in the late second century, when he called it “The Parable of the Two Sons.” That's a better name, I think, than “The Parable of the Prodigal Son, because the latter title focuses our attention only on the younger son and forgets that Jesus is talking to a dual audience of younger sons and older sons, both of whom are lost. But I think the story is only secondarily about the sons. We don't even know what happens to them at the end of the story. I believe the main character in the story, the one Jesus really wants to draw our attention to, is the father, whose love is recklessly extravagant. To me, this has become the Parable of the Prodigal Father. “My son, you're with me always, and all I have is yours.” This might be the hardest line in all of scripture to believe. I propose it might also be the most important. This is Jesus, the only begotten of the Father, Emmanuel, God with us, the revelation of God in the flesh, giving voice to the Father. He reveals a father who ran to the younger son, clasped him in his arms, and kissed him fervently. He reveals a father who came out to the older son and urged him to come in. This is in Henry Newman's telling of the story of a God who goes searching for me and doesn't rest until he has found me. This is the story of a father whose hands have always been stretched out, even when there were no shoulders upon which to rest them. God has never pulled back to his arms, never withheld His blessing.
How many sermons and Sunday school lessons have been given about a stern, angry, judgmental God, a God who withholds favor and delights in punishment? A God whose love you must earn through some combination of self-abasement and righteous worthiness? Can you find passages in Scripture to support that view? Yes, absolutely, but scripture is a buffet, not a served plate. Latter-day Saints don't believe that all scripture is created equal. What you choose to put on your plate will determine the nature and quality of your spiritual diet. In these three stories, Jesus offers us sumptuous fare, the vision of a God who has no favorites, or rather has only favorites, who wants to find you more than you want to find him, who is relentless in his pursuit of you and me, whose love is not predicated or dependent on you loving him back, but whose love comes only by invitation and persuasion, never by compulsion. In speaking to the tax collectors, sinners, Pharisees, and scribes, which of us does not feel fall in one or more of those categories. Jesus asks us to put everything that I've read and heard about a jealous, angry, vengeful, withholding God on one side of the scale, and put his three stories about the Prodigal Father on the other side of the scale. Which way do my scales tip? Do I trust that Jesus is telling me the true story about God?
Now, there's one thing that's curious about these stories, especially the parable of the Prodigal Father. There's a father and there are lost sons, but where is the Savior? Where's the Redeemer? Where's the atonement, where's the middleman? Can God, as Jews and Muslims have often asked of Christians, just forgive sin without needing a mediator? Here's my brief answer; you might have a different or better one. Jesus is everywhere in these three stories. The shepherd is the Father and the Son. The woman is the Father and the Son; the prodigal father is the Father and the Son. On another occasion, Jesus taught that the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. If Abinadi and a host of other prophets are correct, the economy of salvation may not be quite so hyper-specialized as we sometimes assume. All three of these stories are fundamentally about restoration, specifically the restoration of God's people, spoken of by ancient and modern prophets. A shepherd finding a lost sheep, a woman finding a lost coin, and a father finding his two lost sons. All these things are about to use the term coined by William Tyndale "At-one-ment". The Grand work of salvific love, God's work of reconciliation and atonement, is a joint venture of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The more I've reflected on Jesus' teaching in Luke 15 over the years, the more I've come to see it as containing not three separate parables, but one larger story with three component parts. It is, in short, the greatest love story ever told, all of the sheep, all of the coins, all of the children. The father is running to gather us all. Thank you.