The Prodigal Father

prodigal, adj. 1 spending money or resources freely and recklessly; wastefully extravagant. 2 having or giving something on a lavish scale.

[This post discusses one of Jesus' best-known parables, available here. Many of the observations come from N. T. Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God; quotations are his unless otherwise noted.]

Jesus used parables to retell the story his audience was living. His storytelling invokes familiar symbols that show continuity and dialogue with an audience's experience and traditions, but often in perplexing or subversive ways. He welcomes listeners to imagine themselves as part of his story, and he asserts by implication that this is the story--that their choice is not whether to make themselves part of it, but rather which part they will choose to play. Even inaction has a corresponding role.

This parable (like many others) is "the story of Israel, in particular of exile and restoration. It corresponds more or less exactly to the narrative grammar which underlies the exilic prophets, and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and a good deal of subsequent Jewish literature, and which must therefore be seen as formative for second-Temple Judaism. The exodus itself is the ultimate backdrop: Israel goes off into a pagan country, becomes a slave, and then is brought back to her own land. But exile and restoration is the main theme. This is what the parable is about."

Exile and restoration are "the central drama that Israel believed herself to be acting out"--Jesus did not have to convince anyone of that. What his story claims, however, is that the hope of restoration is being fulfilled right now, through Jesus' ministry itself (which includes the telling of the parables making this claim). Thus there is an implicit comparison between one's response to Jesus and former responses to the earlier geographic return from exile: "those who grumble at what is happening are cast in the role of the Jews who did not go into exile, and who oppose the returning people. They are, in effect, virtually Samaritans."

Jesus is implying that resurrection, forgiveness, return from exile, "the reign of YHWH...were all happening under the noses of the elder brothers, the self-appointed stay-at-home guardians of the father's house. The covenant was being renewed, and Jesus' welcome to the outcasts was a vital part of that renewal."

The father in the story is being "reckless, prodigal, generous to a fault." In the peasant context of the story, "[f]or the younger son to ask for his share of the inheritance is almost unthinkable: it is the functional equivalent of saying to his father, 'I wish you were dead.' The father should have beaten him, or thrown him out. Instead, he agrees. The son ends up doing the job beyond which it was impossible, in Jewish eyes, to sink: feeding pigs for a gentile master. He then does a further unthinkable thing: he returns home, threatening to disgrace the whole family in the eyes of the village. The father runs to meet him; senior members of families never do anything so undignified at the best of times, let alone in order to greet someone who should have remained in self-imposed ignominy. The party is for the whole village, like a big family wedding; a fatted calf would be far too much for a single household. The elder brother, meanwhile, also shames his father, by quarreling with him in public, and in his turn suggesting that he wished the father dead so that he could at last enjoy his share of the property; but again the father is astonishingly, unbelievably, gentle. The story ends, within its cultural context, too soon: it demands a last scene, preferably a reconciliation." [emphasis mine; italics in the original]

It may be necessary to stop and take a breath here. The father in the story displays his love not only by welcoming the prodigal son home, but also by remaining faithful even after he tells the father 'I wish you were dead,' and also by loving the other son even when he can't understand the love extending to his brother.

Taking up the family inheritance, I imagine, is something like taking up the family name and reputation; what you do with it reflects on your upbringing and the quality of your parenting. The younger son 'bears his father's name' so poorly as to reject everything that constitutes his identity as God's chosen (which would certainly have been important to his father); if his asking for the inheritance didn't show that he didn't give a lick about his father, his actions thereafter make it plain. The older son in his turn shows that he is not aligned with the father's intentions; his complaint is less 'It's not fair!' and more, 'I have honored you, and my brother has not; you have been disgracing your own name and our family, myself included, by your actions.'

"[T]he parable of the prodigal father points to the hypothesis of the prophetic son: the son, Israel-in-person, who will himself go into the far country, who will take upon himself the shame of Israel's exile, so that the kingdom may come, the covenant be renewed, and the prodigal welcome of Israel's god, the creator, be extended to the ends of the earth."

Another important point in assessing the impact of the actions within the story is that "the whole village would know what the younger son had done, and would have told the awful and shocking story of his behaviour over and over again. When he returned, it would not be to a modern-style middle-class suburb where everybody (in theory at least) minded their own business, but to a peasant village which thrived on narrative. Not mere gossip, either: the community would order its life and thought by telling and retelling important events which had made them who they were...It is the world of informal but controlled oral tradition."

This fact helps to explain why Jesus would have spoken in parables in the first place; one can imagine his disciples being able to recount them after a few hearings. Additionally, the itinerant nature of Jesus' preaching helps to account for the various versions of parables found in the gospels: he would probably have told many slightly varied versions of the same stories in many different villages. This quality of oral tradition for the life of a community also explains why the disciples decided to write down the gospel narratives: around the collapse of the Temple in AD 70, the community which the story of Jesus served was disintegrating; it would no longer be told with the same centralized and formational purpose in the same context, but would need to be 'ported in' from outside. This is especially true as the early church extended itself beyond its Jewish borders.

"The parable only makes sense as a retelling of Israel's story; but it also only makes sense as a profoundly subversive retelling of that story...As a parable, not least in its manner of concluding one scene too early, it makes sense precisely at that moment in history when the possibility of Israel's redemption happening in this fashion is being controversially mooted, not when it is being climactically and publicly celebrated. The parable thus fits exactly into the gap between Judaism and early Christianity..."

Jesus' practice of open commensality--eating meals with anyone and everyone--corresponds to the feast in the parable as the sign of God's invitation to a new way of being Israel.

One last quote from the book on this (it devotes ten full pages to this parable, and considerable space to many others throughout; it's worth reading for the insights into parables alone):

"Dramatically, historically, theologically, the parable fits perfectly into the ministry of Jesus, as we shall be studying it in the rest of this book. Jesus is reconstituting Israel around himself. This is the return from exile; this, in other words, is the kingdom of Israel's god. Those with vested interests in different visions of the kingdom are bound to disapprove strongly. The strange announcement of resurrection, twice within the parable (verses 24, 32), makes excellent sense in this context. Jesus' actions, and his words, themselves stand in need of vindication. Is his offer merely a reckless gesture, which the hard realities of history will prove to have been empty? Are his celebratory meals simply an empty charade? He is making a claim, a claim to be the one in and through whom Israel's god is restoring his people. The claim is highly controversial. It points, within his own teaching, to a final clash with the authorities, who will wish him dead and act on that wish. Like any good Jew, he believes that if he faces this, in obedience to the divine plan, he will be vindicated. And the word for that is 'resurrection'."

Note that Jesus is neither the first nor the last Jew to make such claims, and that his vindication did not come about as would have been expected (he was indeed crucified). Many had claimed that 'the kingdom of God is at hand', and many had led calls to 'repent' in one way or another; Jesus' combination of claims, however, may be unique. 'Repentance' in a sense that Jesus often uses it, means "what Israel must do if her exile is to come to an end" (or "if YHWH is to restore her fortunes at last"). One important aspect of this in context is "to abandon revolutionary zeal"; Jesus is actively opposing a violent uprising against Rome (that is, the pagan oppressors). The phrase 'believe in me', similarly, evokes "trust in and loyalty to a leader." The way we use these words today belies this meaning, but take for example a passage from Josephus in which he responds to a brigand's plot against his life by telling him:

"that I was not ignorant of the plot which he had contrived against me . . .; I would, nevertheless, condone his actions if he would show repentance and prove his loyalty to me. All this he promised..."

The phrase 'prove his loyalty to me' could just as well be translated 'believe in me'. Anyway, the point is: "This was not simply the 'repentance' that any human being, any Jew, might use if, aware of sin, they decided to say sorry and make amends. It is the single great repentance which would characterize the true people of YHWH at the moment when their god became king. What is more, this repentance seems to have little to do with the official structures of the Jewish system. True repentance, it seems, consisted rather in adherence and allegiance to Jesus himself."

Jesus didn't oppose the Temple because of corruption. A common interpretation of his Temple action is that the sellers of sacrifices and the money-changers were extorting money or simply trying to make a buck, and that Jesus was opposing them because they had desecrated the Temple for personal gain. This probably isn't the case; Jesus turned the tables of those selling sacrifices because this would stop up the operation of the Temple system entirely. He didn't oppose it because it wasn't pure-hearted, but because it was now obsolete. His Temple action wasn't just to say "love God more purely," but to say "I am forming a new Israel around myself in which I replace the Temple." This action could be perceived as his chief prophetic action (compare Jeremiah walking around Israel naked for three years, Hosea marrying a prostitute, etc.), and in fact the culmination of all prior prophetic (symbolic) action.

Similarly, Jesus didn't oppose the Pharisees because they were 'legalistic', and he was proposing a new religion of 'grace' or perhaps merely a return to the grace that was truly intended by the Torah. Instead, the conflict is thus: "For the Shammaite Pharisees [the dominant sect until AD 70], the coming kingdom of YHWH would be a matter of national liberation and the defeat of the pagans. For Jesus, the kingdom was on offer to those who would repent of just that aspiration. It was inevitable that the two would clash. When they did, what was at stake was far more than an argument about the details of how Torah ought to be kept, the niceties of what constituted purity and impurity...The object of [Jesus'] critique, I suggest, was the 'zeal' that was leading Israel to ruin - and which was maintained and reinforced by precisely those aspects of Torah which was maintained and reinforced by precisely those aspects of Torah which marked out Israel over against her pagan neighbours. ... We have got over the old idea that law-keeping was an early form of Pelagianism, by which Pharisees and others sought to earn their justification or salvation by moral effort. ... We must instead accept at face value what the Jewish sources themselves say: these laws, with all their detail and specificity, formed the boundary fence around the people of Israel, the nation of the Jews. ... Jesus, precisely in affirming Israel's unique vocation to be the light of the world, was insisting that, now that the moment for fulfilment had come, it was time to relativize those god-given markers of Israel's distinctiveness."

There is much more to be said and learned, and in seeking and explaining what the prodigal love of the father (expressed in the kingdom of God) is like, I would have to go on explaining the whole book. For the time being, I will content myself to go on reading it.

[EDIT: In so doing, I just Tumbled an extended quote from the book on the concept of 'belief' in the call of Jesus here.]