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FINDINGS IV By Harry T. Cook
Lent IV - C - March 10, 2013
Joshua 5: 9-12; II Corinthians 5: 16-21; Luke 15: 1-32
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By Harry T. Cook 3/4/13 You have to search for it in the Joshua and Corinthian readings, but it is writ large in the gospel lection. The concept is "redemption," as in the mainly Hebrew idea of negotiating the return of an alienated property or treasure that had been taken by force, sold in trade or merely separated itself and become lost.
In the Joshua reading, the Israelites' fictive emancipation from Egypt/1 is recalled as they dine no longer on manna/2 but on the produce of the land in which they find themselves free at last and which they shall eventually occupy. The effect of whatever supposedly took them into Egypt had been neutralized, and they now stood "redeemed" -- in effect, bought or brought back into the embrace of the deity of their fathers.
In 2nd Corinthians 5, one of the denser passages of Paul's theology, it is said that Paul's deity -- probably in his imagination an amalgam of Zeus, Yahweh and λογος -- basically determined to make a re-creation (the Greek word is κτισις, meaning "founding" or "foundation") and, in the process, reconciling the former foundation to himself through the ministration of the divine self as represented in the one Paul calls "Christ," or the anointed one." Reconciliation" is part of the action of redemption.
That set of ideas is seen more clearly in the passage known as the parable of the prodigal son, being, perhaps, the most excellent grace note in the whole of the New Testament. It certainly ranks in the Christian world with the 23d Psalm, 1st Corinthians 13 and the Lord's Prayer for cherished religious texts. One wants very much to think that someone named Jesus -- "the" Jesus to more orthodox believers -- told this story pretty much as it appears in Luke 15. Even if "a" or "the" Jesus did not tell the story or one very much like it, the parable's sentiment nonetheless fits well with the ethic of one of the prominent sayings attributed to a Jesus: "Forgive seventy times seven" (Matthew 18:21, var. Luke 17:4).
To believe with any intellectual honesty that "the" Jesus told the prodigal's story, one would have to posit an early and original source for it, which some analysts have done (calling it "L"), and which only Luke would have known about and/or which only Luke used. If it were not original with Luke or some proto-Lukan tradition, surely any gospel writer would have included it in some form. Yet the story appears only in Luke.
Of course, neither the prodigal son story nor its theme of unconditional forgiveness fits too well with Matthew 25: 31-46, wherein judgment, not forgiveness, is paramount. Also it is not likely that much first century CE Jesus Judaism, not to mention emerging synagogue Judaism, would have been ready for the universalism generally expressed by Luke in the parable.
A good many exegetes have turned themselves into eisegetes in their efforts to parse this parable, e.g. treating it as an allegory. Called "the parable of the prodigal son" by translators of the English bible of the late 1500s, its central figure is certainly the father. And while the dispositions and actions of both younger and elder sons are the color and melodrama of the piece, it is the father's disposition and action that make the story what it is and that gives the parabolic point to it -- the point being that the father's love for both his sons extends to understanding and forgiving their rejections: of him by the younger, and by the elder of the younger.
One can make a case that the original parable (whether from the lips of "a" or "the" Jesus) comprises vv. 1-24 while 25-32 constitutes a kind of midrash added later. There is much to commend such a hypothesis inasmuch as 15: 24 reads like a dramatic ending: "'This son of mine was dead and is alive; he was lost and is found!' And they began to celebrate," which is the father's uncompromising explanation for the feast.
If, as I have long proposed, the gospels are in large part the history of nascent Christianity, vv. 25-32 may have been added to take into account the rift between the more or less established communities of Jesus Judaism and Gentile converts -- the figure of the elder son being a sympathetic contact point for Jews who may have felt ill used by the ready acceptance of uninitiated Gentile converts. Think here of the conflict depicted in Acts 15: 1-29 and Galatians 2: 1-21 and of the meditative role assigned by Luke to James in Acts 15: 13-21.
Rudolf Bultmann and others insist that that Luke 15: 11-32 is of a piece and in more or less its original form (whatever they mean by "original"), and that the two distinct sections of the parable are necessary to the main point of the whole, viz. that divine forgiveness embraces both the egregious and blasphemous wastrel and the faithful but intolerant good brother.
Verse notes: v. 12: Luke has the younger son ask for his patrimony as if his father were already dead. Since he was chronologically the second of two sons, the older would, by custom of the time and place, get two-thirds of the estate and he himself one third. Luke says the father "divided" the substance between them, meaning perhaps that Luke for theological purposes wanted to depict the abused father as being even more generous than custom provided. In any event, it appears that in Luke's imagination the father held on to much of his wealth, through the process of what we would call today "life estate," to continue the home-front enterprise and to be able (and ready, as it turns out) to lay on a big feast upon the prodigal's return.
V. 13 says the younger son "gathered all he had." The Greek term here is "συναγαγων" meaning "to gather up," in this case converting material property to cash, making the inheritance portable.
V. 17: "When he came to himself" -- i.e., when sobriety and common sense returned -- in Luke's imagination he began to calculate the cost of his stupidity and resultant loss, and composed a speech to give to his father on whose mercy he was about to throw himself. He can't even get to the front door before his father meets him on the road, and leads him back into the bosom of his family. The point is that he was "νεκρος" -- dead -- and now, the joyous father proclaims, is alive. The death may refer to the custom of the time to the effect that a son who treated a father as the prodigal's had been treated was as good as dead, cut off not by the family but by the exercise of his own poor choice.
V. 25 depicts the elder son busy at his appointed work, even though Luke depicts him as in possession of his share of the family wealth, in which, as we have observed, his father held life-estate. The father attempts to explain to the elder son why the hoopla for the younger. No record is made of how it went for the younger son after the party or whether the two sons ever reconciled.
That's a parable for you. You identify with its oft-told story and perhaps with one character or another, maybe not the same one each time. Thus the story ends up meaning one thing to one person and another to the next, and to each a different thing at a different time.
My revered teacher, the late Dr. George A. Buttrick, said of this parable: "No story more instantly touches the nerve of actual life. Let it be read, without any comment or explanation, and it conquers us."/3 At 10, my daughter, now the very bright and analytical law school graduate, used to ask me to read her the parable at bedtime. I never asked why, but I knew it spoke to her in some way. The sentiment it engendered may have produced my Father's Day card from her one year. It was a photo of a father, his daughter by the hand. The message read: "For listening any time, for believing every time, for loving me all the time . . ." Speaking of being conquered.
As the world moves away from serious consideration of the old gods of the old religions, away from the lovely but impossible idea that an invisible deity holds all in its hands and will make everything all right somehow, what will become of such stories as the father and his prodigal son?
The father, as Luke depicted him, was the avatar of unconditional love, and, more than that, of an aggressive love. His love for his sons -- the younger a terminally disrespectful wastrel, the elder an insufferable prig -- was entirely independent of their conduct toward each other and toward him. That image must have hovered over the labors of the hymn writer as he paraphrased the 23d Psalm thus: "Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, but yet in love he sought me, and on his shoulder gently laid, and home, rejoicing, brought me."/4
Of course, both the psalmist and the hymnist were envisioning the biblical deity, the former no doubt in images evoked by some gentle shepherd of their acquaintance, the latter by the psalm itself and of the "good shepherd" appellation associated with Jesus of Nazareth, especially by John the Evangelist (see John 10: 11-18). John had already established for kerygmatic purposes the idea of Jesus being the incarnation of God.
Given the uncritical deference given to the Bible, even by clergy who should know better, it will be difficult to craft a homily on this text while not only observing but practicing intellectual honesty. The placement of Luke 15:11-32 at this place in the liturgical stream of Sundays is a mute appeal by editors of the lectionary to preach divine forgiveness which the creeds assert came through the events that will depicted in the lections over the next three weeks.
The agnostic non-believer and the secular humanist will have to be given something of more substance if he or she is to deal with this text. Buttrick's suggestion that it be read without comment or explanation is not a bad idea, but it would then have to be read as Richard Burton might have read it: movingly and memorably. Failing that, the homilist might treat the story as a large-canvas painting and bid the congregation, as it were, to stand back and regard it both in its parts and as a whole. The homilist, like a knowing docent, can point out this shadow, that shaft of light, etc. He or she might ask the congregation to imagine sights, sounds and smells not accounted for in the story.
It would not be at all inappropriate to focus on Luke's remarkable father figure and to ask how his demeanor, restraint and generosity might be seen as models for national foreign and domestic policy initiatives, of community organization, of civic virtue, of family life.
1/ There exists no archaeological evidence for the Exodus as it is depicted in the Bible. The more probable explanation for the tribal presence in Canaan of those who became Jews is that they migrated from eastern coastal cities of the Mediterranean, which were economic oligarchies, into the hill country of what is now northern Israel where they settled in simple, egalitarian communities.
2/ "Manna," from the Hebrew "man-hu," meaning "what is it?" is a natural honey-like substance excreted by desert insects, but depicted in the Bible as a gift sent down by Yahweh to assuage the Israelites' hunger in their transit from Egypt to the promised land.
3/ Buttrick, George A., The Parables of Jesus, 1928, Harper & Brothers, p. 189
4/ "The King of love my shepherd is," Henry Williams Baker, st.3, Church Hymnal Corp. The Hymnal 1982, p. 645
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