Tag Archives: prodigal son

The Prodigal Parable

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The Parable traditionally known as The Prodigal Son (Lk. 15: 11–32) is obviously a story of estrangement and reconciliation and forgiveness. So clear is this message, there should be no diluting or compromising it with violence, discord, or unforgiveness. However, the United States, a country filled with active churches, has the highest rate of incarceration in the world by a large margin. On top of that, we are seeing a spirit of vengeance in politics that seems to keep on growing. Does this parable’s meaning just disappear at the church door on the way out to the “real” world? A lawyer, Preston Shipp, author of Confessions of a Former-Prosecutor is an example of this disconnect. While raised in the church, he dreamed of being a prosecuting attorney from a fairly young age to protect society from the bad guys who victimized the good people. For many years, he fulfilled this dream by working at the state attorney’s office in Nashville. All this time, Jesus’ parable was in a totally alien universe, to judge by his own account. So, somehow, the simple and clear message of the parable is extraordinarily difficult to hear and believe in and act out in life. Why is this? Does the Parable itself give us insights into these difficulties? Let us take a look for ourselves with the help of Preston Shipp.

The elder brother’s relationship with his younger brother is not brotherly, although I suppose a cynic might say that’s what brotherhood is. Given the outrageous way the younger brother left home (demanding, not requesting his half of the inheritance) there are understandable reasons for this attitude. In any case, the elder brother’s calling his younger brother “that son of yours” in speaking with his father, suggests a highly depersonalized relationship with his brother. Preston Shipp writes about how he realized that the justice system is designed to prevent a prosecutor from having any personal awareness of the person he was prosecuting, let alone a relationship. This changed when a professor he had in college asked him to teach some law classes for college credit in a woman’s prison. This experience of bonding with incarcerated persons lead him to leave the prosecutor’s office. He now works for the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. Clearly, the way we manage relationships has a lot to do with how forgiving, or not, we might be. The second time Preston taught a course, he was highly impressed by a woman named Cyntoia Brown. She was underage when convicted of murder, but was sentenced as an adult. As he learned of her exposure to sex trafficking from an early age and other factors, he saw a person in a way that a prosecuting attorney is not encouraged to see a defendant. Imagine his shock when he received a copy of a court document he had filed while still working as a prosecutor, showing that he himself had rejected her appeal of a 51-year sentence and had never recollected it after meeting her in class.

Although the elder son is dutiful in the sense of staying home and working on his father’s farm, the way he berates his father for receiving his younger brother suggests he has little love for the work or for his father. Serious dissatisfaction with one’s work and family situation can harden the heart and make one less inclined to forgive. However, when the father tells the elder brother that everything he has, his elder son also has, we gain the suspicion that perhaps the elder brother was surrounded with blessings, like fattened calves, that he did not see or appreciate. Such lack of appreciation also dampens a sense of forgiveness of other people. The elder brother may have stayed with his father geographically, but his mind and heart seem to have been miles away.

The trauma of abuse or violent crime can make it difficult for the victim to forgive. Preston Shipp encountered many such crimes and knows what they cost the victims, although he also realized that the justice system did nothing to assist such victims except to feed any vengeance they might have. There is nothing in the parable to suggest that the elder brother had suffered any such trauma. The father, on the other hand, was surely traumatized by his younger son’s departure, and yet he welcomed him back with open arms. Cyntoia Brown was traumatized when she saw that her appeal had been denied and that Preston Shipp had been the one who reviewed it and rejected it. Preston expected to be skewered by her when he came to the next class, but he found her deeply forgiving, in spite of her hurt. This particular story has a happy ending in that, with the help of some celebrities taking up her cause which brought her into the public eye, Cyntoia was finally released from prison and has become an activist for many social causes, hoping to prevent what happened to her from happening to other people.

Shipp explains in many ways how vengeance is systemic in our judicial system and throughout our country’s cultural system. This system of vengeance is greatly exacerbated by systemic racism that has characterized American culture since colonial times and continues unabated to the present day. Racism, of course, entails much depersonalization of the other. More important, participation in such as system skews our perception of reality where many things taken for granted shouldn’t be. Will we ever bottom out of this collective sin the way the younger brother bottomed out of his sensual sins? On the other hand, this parable depicts a party being celebrated by an entire household, except for the elder brother. We can take this party as an image of a society transformed by forgiveness and reconciliation, an eschatological vision, we might say. Surely this party is an image of God, in Christ, “reconciling the world to himself.” (1 Cor. 19) Does this image attract us in any way, enough for us to desire to enter into it? Or are we more attracted to a society governed by the elder brother as he berates his father for such a celebration?

.When the father says to his elder son that the younger son had been dead and has come to life, (Lk. 15: 32) the story shifts to the Paschal Mystery. Such radical forgiveness makes one vulnerable, as the father was vulnerable. Who would want to be treated as the younger son treated his father? Who would want to be treated the way the older son treated his father? It is sobering to recall that the person who told this beautiful and edifying story was crucified as a criminal. Can we trust that this victim is risen and is still inviting us to the party?

Jacob & the Prodigal

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???????????????????????????????????????????Kenneth Bailey’s book Jacob & the Prodigal overlaps with important sections of my own book Moving and Resting in God’s Desire: A Spirituality of Peace. In using the thought of René Girard and his colleagues to explore ways of renewing Christian spirituality (see Violence and the Kingdom of God for an introduction to Girard), I comment at length on the stories of fratricidal strife in Genesis and Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke. (The Parable is better titled something like “The Prodigal Father and His Two Sons.”

Wee both see Jesus’ Parable as seeking to resolve the strife between brothers although, like the story in Genesis, the Parable is left open, leaving the possibility of resolution open but not fulfilled in the text. Having grown up in the Near East, Bailey has much knowledge of Semitic culture that many of us in the West do not have. As a result, Bailey offers many important insights into the Parable and the earlier narrative that pass many of us by. For example, Bailey emphasizes the foolishness of the Father in the Parable in running to meet his son at the edge of the village. For a grown man to run for any reason was considered shameful and to run for such a purpose especially so. This is just one example among many of the new insights Bailey has to offer us. Bailey treats the Parable as the climax of a trilogy of parables in Luke 15 which begins with the Parable of the Lost Sheep and continues with the Parable of the Lost Coin before concluding with the Parable of the Prodigal Son. By studying the parables together, Bailey explores the Christology of the Parables where the shepherd, the woman searching for her coin and the father all become images of Jesus Himself as he reveals how overwhelming and unimaginable the Love of God is.

The final portion of the book is a comparison of the Parable with the Saga of Jacob and Esau. Many of the parallels are contrasts which are at least as illumining as the likenesses. In both cases we have two brothers in strife. Isaac, however, in his in ineptness in being tricked is a huge contrast to the father in the Parable. Another contrast is that Jacob does well in the foreign country while the Prodigal Son does not. Another likeness is that neither Jacob nor the Prodigal Son repent of wrongdoing. (Bailey explains at length that the Prodigal Son is only scheming to get set up in a craft to get enough money to live on; he is not repenting of asking his father for half the estate, brutal as that was to his father.) Bailey argues that Esau doesn’t really forgive Jacob as I argue in my take on the story. The number of armed men Esau brings could suggest an aggressive meeting but it could be a defense measure, not knowing how many armed men Jacob might have. Bailey argues that the vowels of the Hebrew word for “kiss: are the same as the vowels for “bite,” leaving open the possibility that Esau bit Jacob. I can’t argue the linguistic case but it seems to me that so aggressive an act would have led to a more violent reaction than we have. In any case, I see Jacob not believing in Esau’s forgiveness and rather than a reconciliation, the story ends in a permanent separation.

In the Parable, the two brothers are separate at the end, thus keeping up the conflict that I see between them dating back to before the younger brother leaves. In the Parable, however, the central separation is between each of the brothers and their father. The younger son does seem to have accepted his father’s welcome, although we don’t know if he persevered in his gratitude. The older son is at odds with his father as well as with his brother. The challenge is whether or not the older son will accept his father’s love for his younger son. In like manner, Bailey demonstrates that this challenge is thrown out to the scribes and Pharisees who criticized Jesus for eating with “sinners.”
Bailey’s book is a valuable source of new insights that deeply refresh our understanding of a Parable that we think we understand so well that we have let it go stale. Most important, Bailey’s study makes the Love of God revealed in Jesus “full of sap, still green.”

The Prodigal Father and His Sons

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The famous parable traditionally known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15:11–32) is the quintessential illustration of pre-emptory forgiveness, one that closes the case on Jesus’ teaching on vengeance and forgiveness. This parable is better called “The Parable of the Prodigal Father and His Two Sons.” The opening of the parable draws a triangle: “There was a man who had two sons.” We expect tension out of a triangle, and we get it right off the bat when the younger son asks for his share of the property. The father accedes to his son’s request (demand?) and the younger son goes off with the proceeds. The elder son stays at home with his share of the property, at least geographically. What kind of father would be so foolish? Why would a young man leave a father who would give him whatever he wanted? Was it to get away from his brother? The stories about paired brothers in Genesis predispose us to suspect that the two brothers are mirror images of each other.

The parable goes on to say that the younger son “squandered his property.” Literally, he “scattered his substance.” That is, the younger son, while trying to forge an individual selfhood separate from his father and brother, completely loses himself in dissolute living. Geographical distance has not freed him from continuing to be a mirror image of his older brother. Then comes a famine and the social crisis that comes with it. Chances are that the scarcity was magnified by created scarcity. In such a social crisis, there must be a victim. A foreigner is particularly vulnerable to being a victim in such a crisis. The younger son fit the bill perfectly. He was deserted by everybody, in spite of all the money he spent on his women and carousing friends. Nobody was willing to take him in. He ended up as a servant who feeds the pigs (an unclean animal for Jews) and “no one gave him anything.” In this desperate situation, the younger son recalled how well-fed his father’s servants were, and he “came to himself.” Perhaps it was embarrassment that made him want to return as a servant, but perhaps he also didn’t want to re-enter the triangle with his father and brother.

The father’s ecstatic reception of the lost son and subsequent celebration blows apart the family triangle, leaving no room for mimetic strife. In contrast to the mimetic process that organizes society around a dispensable victim, the indispensable victim who is no longer lost has been found. The elder son, however, wanted to preserve the old triangle. His sour attitude suggests that he still needs to have his younger brother live irresponsibly. The elder brother’s universe would collapse if his younger brother began to play a responsible role in family affairs. No wonder the younger son ran away from a brother like that!

When the older brother keeps his distance, the father runs out to him with the same solicitude he showed the returning younger son. The elder son’s disingenuous accusation of not being allowed to celebrate is shown up for what it is. Apparently, the elder son never thought to celebrate with his friends until his father threw a party for that son of his. What the elder son has done is put himself into competition with his younger brother, when there is no need for competition. This sort of mimetic rivalry creates a stumbling block in the way of forgiveness. It remains to be seen whether or not the younger brother will forgive the elder for his unforgiving attitude.

We are likely to judge the younger brother for his callous irresponsibility and the elder brother for his amazing insensitivity. But if we do that, we find ourselves ensnared in the mimetic struggle between the two brothers, comparing them and taking sides until our own capacity for love is obscured and our capacity for celebration fizzles. The Prodigal Father does neither. He does not upbraid the younger son for leaving; neither does he upbraid his elder son for being such an insufferable prig. He only invites both of them to the party. Most of us have a hard time even wanting to be a father like that!

The parable ends with this challenge of forgiveness and unconditional love: Do we rise to the challenge of the Prodigal Father and renounce our irresponsibility and self-righteousness?