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THE WORK OF CHRISTIAN ART

A Lecture to Americans

The Story of the Father and Two Sons

Rembrandt: “Jesus Preaching” (La Tombe), 1652

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There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.” And he divided his living between them.

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Not many days later the younger son sold all he had, Journeyed into a far country And wasted his property in extravagant living. And when he had spent everything A great famine arose in that country And he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself To one of the citizens of that country And he sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he would gladly have eaten the pods That the pigs ate And no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s servants have bread to spare and I perish here with hunger. I will arise and go to my father and say to him. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you and am no more worthy to be called your son; make me a servant.’” And he arose and came to his father. And while he was at a great distance his father saw him And had compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to the father, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you and am no more worthy to be called your son.” And the father said to the servants, “Bring the best robe and put it on him and put a ring on his hands and shoes on his feet. And bring the fatted calf and kill it And let us eat And make merry. For this my son was dead and is alive, He was lost and is found.” And they began to make merry. Now the elder son was in the fields.

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And as he came and drew near to the house He heard music and dancing And he called one of the boys and asked what this meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come And your father has killed the fatted calf Because he received him with peace.” But he was angry and refused to go in So his father came out And was entreating him. But he answered his father, “Lo these many years I served you And I have never disobeyed your commandments Yet you never gave me a kid to make merry with my friends. But when this son of yours came Who has devoured your living with harlots you killed for him the fatted calf.” And he said to him, “Beloved son, You are always with me And all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, For this your brother was dead and is alive, He was lost and is found.” The priest picks up the Gospel from off the altar and in great ceremony, with acolytes on either side, processes down from the marbled sanctuary and through the rood to the great crossing. Out of respect for the holy words, the congregation stands, shuffling and coughing, the squeaking of pews echoing down the vaulted nave. The golden book is opened. The liturgical formulas are intoned. And the priest reads out the words of the Savior Of The World. Or perhaps there is no priest. Perhaps there is no vaulted nave and splendid ritual. Perhaps there is no magnificently ornamented book of Gospels and no precise liturgical formula hallowed by ancient practice. Instead a deacon, or layman, or brown suited minister, reads the gospel passage from a Bible worn with frequent bedside use. But again the congregation stands. And again the congregation shuffles. And again the fellowship hear read out the eternal words.

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And so the story is rehearsed in cathedrals and country chapels, read by cardinals and journeymen plumbers, that affecting tale of the bad boy who leaves home, loses all that he has, and is taken back by his very good and kindly father. Yes, yes. The congregation has heard it all before. Yes, yes, isn’t it a lovely story? Yes, yes, isn’t that bad boy bad and isn’t that father a most kindly man? Here comes the line about the pigs, and here’s the line about the fatted calf. One phrase follows the next. Close the eyes. Shift the weight, right foot, left foot. It’ll be over soon, then time to sit down again. Yes, the pious parishioner nods. Such a familiar story. Such a comfortable tale. Isn’t God indeed like that very nice father? And yes indeed, there are many ways when I am like that self-centered boy. How pleasant it is to know that God will be like that nice father; He will take me in too. The priest returns the gospel to the altar. The deacon sits down. The congregation settles back into their seats. The Bible has been read. The story of God’s love for His people in the similitude of a parable has been proclaimed. How lovely it all is. How pleasant the quiet of the church. But was anyone shocked? Was anyone astounded? When this story was read did anyone, in deep offence, ask for the reader’s apology? Was the reading interrupted by shouts of protest, cries of blasphemy, fists raised in the congregation? Or did anyone, fully understanding the tale, in righteous indignation, demand that the reader be punished, even perhaps put to death? Was the story’s end greeted by a hail of stones? No. Of course not. No such demonstration marked the story’s close. No call for execution accompanied the reader’s return to his seat. And that is the problem. The parable was read but it was not heard. The story was unfolded, but it was not intimately understood. It was listened to, but not felt. Today, when the parables are read they fall over us like heavy coats, familiar, comfortable, and cozy. They are sweet stories of quaint piety. Like horses, we nap standing, hearing the familiar drone of the religious words. We have heard this tale before. Buzz, buzz, on goes the reading. We have it memorized and can even perhaps cite its chapter and verse. Buzz, buzz, on goes the reading. We know its beginning, its end, and frequently even its “theological point” and the explanatory comments on the bottom of the page on where it occurs. Buzz, buzz, on goes the reading. Yet we are never shocked. We are never offended. We never hear it and then call for the death of the reader. Sometimes, perhaps there is a glimpse of some terrifying glory in these words. Occasionally, perhaps a barb within the tale pricks us into the suspicion that there is more here than the pious drone. But only very rarely, as the lector stands before us or as we read the passage alone does the parable spring from the page, grabbing us by the throat, striking us with the revelation that either we must die of the story-teller must die. Yet this is the character of Jesus’s parable (and whether the parable, in both its formal design and content, is the work of the historic Jesus or of a later redactor is of no

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significance here since the church accepts the parable as canonic; it has the full authority associated with any word or act of the Savior recounted in the gospels). Jesus tells a story that requires death; either the hearer’s or the teller’s. The parable shocks. The shock is not a studied revelation, the result of sophisticated academic labor, but an immediate response, as immediate and unstudied as is a welt to a slap or a gash to a knife’s slash. Being cut, we are not taught how to bleed. Being whipped we are not instructed in how to raise a welt. These are immediate responses, natural and untutored. So too is the shock of the parable. But we don’t respond to the reading of the parable like this. We listen, attentive perhaps, and perhaps even moved a bit by the pathos of the tale. But we are never deeply shocked. Why? We are not shocked by the parable because Jesus did not tell the tale to us. He did not speak it to us. Through divine providence and the agency of the church, the Christian believes that the parable has been preserved for us, and by faith we believe that it is useful for us, but non-the-less the story was not spoken to us. We were not there when he told it. Jesus spoke the parable to men and women and children in the villages and meadows of a Palestine removed from us by two millennia. And although scholars may translate the words of Luke’s Greek into learned and insightful contemporary English, or German, or Korean, or Farsi, the culture in which we hear those words—that culture of the private Bible study, or the pontifical mass, or the free-church prayer meeting—this is not the culture of the Palestinian peasant or the devout Pharisee or the sophisticated Hellenistic trader of the first century. We are not shocked because we do not understand. Or better, we are not shocked because we do not understand the ancient words within their own ancient context. We understand the words, and even the grammar that makes those words sensible, yet we do not understand the world in which those words were spoken and in which that grammar was manipulated. To understand those words, in the sense of understanding the shock, we must try to understand them within the context in which they were framed and spoken and heard, what Wittgenstein called their “game.” Wittgenstein observed that understanding a language was very much like understanding a particular “game.”

The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgment play a very complicated role, but a very definite role, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture (n.b.: to describe a set of aesthetic rules fully means really to describe the culture of a period). What we not call a cultured taste perhaps didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. An entirely different game is played in different ages. What

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belongs to a language game is a whole culture. In describing musical taste you have to describe whether children give concerts, whether women do or whether men only give them, etc., etc.”1

The situation is something like this. A Moroccan, eager to both use his English and to learn about the United States, once asked a visiting American if Americans ate much tajine (tajine is a kind of stew cooked in a dish with a tall, conical lid, cooked over a charcoal brazier a which is frequently used in Moroccan homes to end the Ramadan fast). “Why no,” the American replied. “Americans hardly eat any tajine at all.” “By heaven,” exclaimed the Moroccan, “couscous every day! How sad!” Couscous every day. The American laughed, and we laugh with him. But the Moroccan doesn’t understand the mirth at all. What is funny here? Has he misunderstood the English words? Did he somehow not understand the grammar? “Why no. Americans hardly eat any tajine at all.” What is comic about that? The Moroccan has understood the English words well enough. He understood the negative response. He understood the statement of fact that Americans rarely eat tajine. But he did not understand these English words in their American-language context. Another way to say this is to point out that the Moroccan’s response (“By heaven! Couscous every day!) is not truly idiomatic. While his English words are grammatically correct, they are really little more than gobildygook because they make no cultural sense. The Moroccan has understood the English words only within a North African context, not within the frame of the kind of daily American life that makes those words meaningful. So the American immediately laughs at the comedy of his Moroccan friend’s response, but the Moroccan doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t laugh because he can’t laugh. He can’t laugh because the world of Big Macs, Chinese take-outs, pizza delivered to the door or frozen in the refrigerator, the drive up Tex-Mex restaurants, the Four Seasons and California cafes that feature edible-flours—the whole world of American food—is unknown to him. It is not part of his life. And although the Moroccan may certainly understand the English words “hamburger” or “egg roll,” he does not understand their role in Americans’ eating habits. Now, the American can explain to the Moroccan why he laughs, telling him that Americans have a greatly varied diet with the foods of many cultures readily accessible and that the notion of eating couscous alone to an American is very funny because it would be so very odd. So the American laughs. And when the American tells the story to another American, they both laugh. They both laugh because they immediately recognize the incongruity between the Moroccan’s question and his response to its answer. But the Moroccan doesn’t laugh. And even after the situation is explained to him, he can only nod in a kind of distanced understanding. Yes, he can now say that he sees why an

1 Ludwig Wittenstein, Lecture & Conversations on Aesthetic, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. By Cyril Barrett from notes by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 8, Nos. 25 & 26. See all his Philosophical Investigations, Nos. 7 & 9.

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American might laugh at his response, but he does not laugh himself. At best, he might smile a bit. And, after the explanation, he knows more about America life than he did before and, using his imagination, he can muse about what life in America must be like and how it must be to have couscous only as an exotic dish. So even if he cannot spontaneously laugh at the joke, he has gained a bit of understanding. He might now be able to smile a bit. Another way of saying this is to observe that an appropriate response to the American’s answer, that is to say an idiomatic response, lies in more than getting plausible English words together in a grammatically sensible way. The words must also make cultural sense. If this isn’t the case, communication doesn’t take place. Here, the Moroccan thought that he was responding with sympathy at the improvised cuisine of Americans when the American heard it all as a joke. A misunderstanding took place, and we would not say that the Moroccan exhibited an idiomatic fluency in American English. This kind of misunderstanding can take place within the same culture. Here is a passage from Walker Percy’s Thanatos Syndrome: Here’s old Frank Macon, polishing the terrazzo floor. I saw him a week ago, just after I returned. Frank Macon is a seventy-five year old black janitor. I have known him for forty years. . . He clapped his hands softly and gave me one of his, a large meaty warm slab, callused but inert. “Look who’s back!” he cried, casting a muddy eye around and past med. He throws up an arm. “Whoa!” “How you doing, Frank?” “Fine! But look at you now! You looking good! You looking good in the face and slim, not poorly like you used to.” “You’re looking good too, Frank.” “You must have been doing some yard work,” says Frank, good eye gleaming slyly. “Yes,” I say, smiling. He’s guying me. It’s an old joke between us. “I knowed they couldn’t keep you! People talking about trouble, I say no way. No way Doc going to be in trouble. Ain’t no police going to hold Doc for long. People got too much respect for Doc! I mean.” Again he smote his hands together, not quite a clap but a horny brushing past, signifying polite amazing. He turned away, but one eye still gleamed at me. One would have to be a Southerner, white or black, to understand the complexities of this little exchange. Seemingly pleasant, it was not quite. The glint of eye, seemingly a smile of greeting, was not. It was actually malignant. Frank was having a bit of fun with me.

I knew, and he knew that I knew, using the old forms of civility to say what he pleased. What he was pleased to say was: So you got caught, didn’t you, and you got out sooner than I would have, didn’t you? Even his pronunciation of police as po-lice was overdone and farcical, a parody of Black speech, but a parody he calculated I would recognize. Actually he’s a deacon and uses a kind of churchy English: Doctor, what we’re gerng to do is soliciting contributions for a chicken-dinner benefit the ladies of the church gerg to have Sunday, and such like.2

Percy’s point here is that to understand the language the hearer must understand more than the words. Even an American who is fully fluent in American English would profoundly misunderstand this exchange unless he were also idiomatically familiar with the subtleties of race relations in the Deep South. Understand the words isn’t enough.

2 Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), pp. 9-10.

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The words must be understood within a context of gestures, particular syllables stretched—and other clipped—postures and glances, and even the history of the region; in other words, the whole language game must be grasped for the words to be understood within their appropriate arena. To understand the parable, and thus understand much of Jesus’s purpose in telling it, requires understanding its shock. And to understand its shock the original context of Jesus’s story must be resurrected and his tale place within it. 3

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But before we go on to examine that context, two caveats are needed. First, by saying that the parable’s modern hearer does not understand the parable in the sense of understanding its shock, I do not mean to suggest that Jesus’s first century words are by definition completely opaque to modern hearers. That would be patently ridiculous. No one understands the parable as a story of a generous younger son and a stingy father. The basic contour of the story, that of a son who misuses his father, squanders his resources and is graciously accepted back by his father when he returns home paupered—is certainly understood by any modern hearer and the gap between the first and the twenty-first centuries is not so wide as to obscure that.4

3 Even significant modern scholars run the risk of misunderstanding the parable by ignoring its original context. Note this discussion of the parable by John Crossan: “The story is utterly believable and quite possible. Can you imagine, asks Jesus, a vagabond and a wastrel son being feted by his father and a dutiful and obedient son left outside in the cold?” The problem here is that the first century Palestinians couldn’t imagine such a scene at all. It was bizarre quite to the point of incredulity and shocked them to the quick. See John Dominic Crossan, In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus (Somona, California: Polegridge Press, 1992), pp. 12-17. 4 This is not always the case. Occasionally cultural differences are so great between antiquity and our own era that contemporary Western readers completely misconstrue the earlier materials. Modern exegetes of Luke 2.7 have almost universally interpreted the Messiah’s birth in a manger described there as evidence of Mary giving birth in some sort of a livestock shed because she and Joseph had been denied lodging in an

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Second, The kind of understanding of the parable about which we are now concerned (the kind of understanding that makes its shock comprehensible) in-other-words a historical/aesthetic understanding, is not necessarily the only or even the most important kind of understanding to have of the parable. We have already seen that one way of knowing if a language is understood is to see if responses to phrases, questions, statements, etc., in that language are idiomatic, if they make sense. Can we then ask, what would be an idiomatic response to the story of the Father and Two Sons? What kind of response would demonstrate that the hearer understood the story and sensibly reacted? Another way of saying this would be to ask how would we recognize a comic response to the story, a response like “By heaven! Couscous every day!” Paul Holmer suggests that there are a variety of ways of knowing and that the different avenues of knowing produce different kinds of knowledge, or fluency, in different games. The “historical/critical” game is one. The theological game is another.

My point is that it is one kind of game in which the telling of the story is done only to fill out the account of Middle Eastern history, and quite another to tell it in order to make the reader a part of a community of faith, Jewish or Christian. In the former game, one addresses curiosity, one serves the interest of being accurate, and one provides an explanation of how people got the way they did, granted their time and circumstances.5

This historical game is played by gathering data, digging at archeological sites, learning old languages in order to read primary writings, checking this against that and in interpreting the stuff in a sensible way—usually in the form of a book.

For the kind of understanding this yields is just that—a certain kind of understanding, and there are several kinds and way of understanding. Because we can do this sort of thing for the Old Testament and the New does not mean we are closer to understanding them truly. Instead it only means that we can now understand them historically.6

Playing the historical game results in historical understanding: knowledge of who did what to whom, when they did it, perhaps some reasons why, and a few things that the deed possibly lead to. Theological understanding is not like that.

inn. Furthermore, such a reprehensible violation of traditional hospitality codes is interpreted as one part of Luke’s multifaceted portrayal of the Messiah as rejected by his own people. Yet Kenneth Bailey suggests that this might be a misinterpretation. Citing both traditional practice and archeological evidence which suggests that first century Palestinians lived with their livestock under one roof in a kind of “split-level” arrangement (the manager in such a structure marking the division between the family and livestock zones), Bailey argues that the Holy Family were not shutted-off to a barn by a cruel innkeeper but rather taken in a private home. See Kenneth Bailey, “The Manager and the Inn: The Cultural Background of Luke 2.7”, Theological Review (Beirut: Near East School of Theology, Vol. 2., Nov. 1979), pp. 35-44. 5 Paul Holmer, The Grammar of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1978). P. 5 6 Ibid., pp. 7-8

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But when I tell the story, maybe the same story even down to the details, so that one will emulate the ancients’ courage, live their virtues, eschew their vices, find their law, and seek their God with might and finesses of spirit, then I am doing something quite different. Another game is being played.7

That other game is the theological game and playing it results in theological understanding: “What the hopes, fears, and loves are, what the beliefs are for those who find God in Christ Jesus.”8 Just as the historical game required historical tools for its playing, so too does the theological game require theological tools. But the tools here are quite different than those usually required for other games. Guilt and shamefulness is required if someone is to be fluent in theology, that is if he is to respond idiomatically to theological statements. And a hunger and thirst for righteousness and a love for one’s neighbor are also helpful.9 It is crucial to recognize that an idiomatic theological response to the parable is not dependant upon historical knowledge just as a historical understanding of the work does not depend upon a theological understanding. Although these ways of knowing may, or may not, buttress each other, they are not dependent upon each other. They are different ways of knowing and they do different work. Historical understanding makes you a historian. Theological understanding makes you fearful of God. Let us go back to our question of which might be an idiomatic response to the parable? If we consider that as a theological thing, then someone who responds idiomatically to it would say things like, “I am disobedient and foolish, like that younger son, and I am ashamed for it,” or “Self-centeredness is wrong. That elder son is self-centered and so am I. I want to be made different.” Certainly we would agree that someone who, upon hearing the parable and responding in those kinds of ways, understands the parable, at least basically. Such a person’s response would be idiomatic. And since such a response shows a fluency with theology, which is to note that the sayer knows shamefulness and seeks mercy—among other things—what is the purpose of placing the story within its original first century context? If historical understanding is a different kind of understanding than theological understanding, and since only theological understanding focuses upon the life-and-death issues of “what must I do to be saved?” (which is the theological issue, what someone did because he thought it might save him is the historical issue), isn’t the kind of thinking we’re doing here in this lecture unnecessary? It might be interesting certainly, but not fully required? We must recognize that today, just as it was two thousand years ago, it is fully possible to understand the parable without understanding anything what-so-ever about its historic context (as if the Pharisees and publicans and children around Jesus were historically

7 Ibid., p. 5. 8 Ibid., pp. 8-9 9 Ibid., p. 9.

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conscious of their context—that they were in a province once invaded by the Hittites, largely ignored by Alexander the Great, that their spoken language was a linguistic subset of a larger family of Semitic tongues, etc., etc.!). When people hear the parable in modern English or German or Korean and respond with a deep conviction that their lives have been changed they are responding idiomatically. In short, they understand the parable. But this apparently doesn’t happen very often, at least now here in America (and I am an American lecturing only to other Americans, I have no right to speak to any others). When we earlier considered the scene of the parable’s reading, with the congregation standing like horses in the noonday sun with barely even a swish of a tail or a shake of the harness—with the story whizzing around their ears like summer flies—that scene was not unfamiliar to any of us. That is indeed what happens when the parable is read in church, any church: Lutheran, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, Fire-Baptized Apostolic, Syrian Orthodox, Korean Presbyterian or Swedish Baptist. And, upon reflecting on that universally sleepy response, it appears at least very different from the responses of the Palestinians who heard the parable from Jesus’ own lips because a good portion of those listeners apparently rejoiced in later killing him. Nobody nowadays wants to kill the reader of the story. Hardly anybody really notices. And that’s the problem. Why don’t we listen? Why don’t we respond? Why are we at best sentimentally moved by a touching fairy tale instead of shaken to our quicks by our confrontation with truth? We don’t listen because we are largely deaf to the story. And we are deaf to the story in part because the parable is first an aesthetic object that was created for theological purposes that, being transposed from one culture to another, has lost a significant part of its aesthetic power. In short, we are back to our first observation. Or near to it. Most of us don’t respond to the parable, we can’t make an idiomatic response to it, because we are not fluent in the “game” in which it is cast. We are in the position of that Moroccan who stares back at the American, wondering why he laughs. We can see now that our lack of fluency with the parable is more profound than that original observation would suggest. It is not only that the parable traffics in matters common to first century Palestinians and are therefore foreign to us, but more importantly it requires us, as hearers, to possess certain personality qualities (shamefulness, hopefulness, humility, etc.), things that we have described as showing “theological fluency,” for us to understand the parable and to respond to it idiomatically, sensibly. I have said that we fail to understand the tale because we are theologically deaf to it. Here at least, we are on common ground with Jesus’s first hearers. Jesus invented his parable for the theologically deaf. Because he appeals to characteristics which his listeners possess either not at all or weakly, Jesus uses the parable to engage their imaginations. He uses the story to place his hearers within a context in which things like repentance from an unforgivable sin and mercy beyond all reckoning are seen as possible.

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As Paul Holmer observed, “Imagination is the broker between what is learned and what is, in consequence, possible.”10 “Alright,” Jesus is as much saying, “You don’t know what mercy is but listen to this story and imagine what it might be like. And in your imagining, if only for a moment, put on mercy, imagine yourself as being merciful, and see what it is like.” And having fully followed the parable (which is an aesthetic medium), the idiomatic responses of Jesus’s listener would be things like, “Ah, yes, that is what it is like to be fully penitent,” or “Ah, yes, that is what it is like to be truly loving,” or “Ah, yes, that is what it is like to be someone who serves willingly, with joy.” Or even, “Ah, yes, this man contradicts all that I live for, and he must be done away with.” The purpose of the parable is to open the theologically deaf to the idea, the possibility, of godly speech. Again, from Paul Holmer:

When we do not know the meaning of Christian teaching, it is also the case that we do not have any way to put on the saying, to make it work for us. The expressions lose their life, and they become dead in our mouths. The task is not always to revivify the teaching; instead it is to place the listener in another context, so that the words will spring to life.”11

That is the purpose of the parable, to put the listener in another context. And by in large, we don’t get it. Or better, we don’t get it with the same immediacy with which Jesus’s Palestinian hearers got it. Of course one reason we don’t get it is that we don’t much hunger and thirst after righteousness and we believe mourning is to be cursed, not blessed; we don’t much possess the theological dispositions required to hear the tale. And that point must not be over looked. But also we don’t get the parable with the immediacy of its first century audiences because the tale does not impress us aesthetically. Because we fail to experience the parable’s aesthetic strength the story’s theological barb is dulled. The theological purpose is weakened because it is the aesthetic form which propels the theological point. And we fail to experience the parable’s aesthetic strength because it is cast in and trades with the aesthetic and cultural vocabularies and expectation of a people and time foreign to us. It is not in our vernacular. An aesthetic object itself, the parable fails as an aesthetic object to modern hearers because it fails to fully engage the imagination in the manner in which any aesthetic object should and in which it was intended. How the aesthetic response to an object changes as the culture around it changes is another lecture. Here it is enough to say that the things about an object that are considered worthy of aesthetic attention change not only according to whoever is attending to it but more significantly they change according to that person’s culture. In

10 Paul Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, p. 28 11 Ibid. p. 29.

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the case of the parable, it is cast in a storytelling form no longer immediately recognizable to our culture and trades upon expectations foreign to our daily lives. Historical research, by reconstructing for us the aesthetic and social expectations of the parable’s culture, can help us see how its first hearers experienced the tale during the course of its telling. Of course historical research results in historical understanding, not in Godly speech (which is the parable’s purpose). Yet, if we are concerned with the Work Of Christian Art, and since such a work will always exist within a particular culture and trade in particular ways upon the aesthetic and social aspects of that culture, it is important to have a historical understanding the culture of this parable so that we can understand how Jesus shapes his story to exploit those cultural expectations. Jesus was an artist. His parables are the first and greatest Works of Christian Art. They most profoundly shock. To hear them is to feel an earth quake beneath our feet and to have a vision of ourselves as ourselves. But to understand His art as art and to feel its shock we must understand the culture for which he crafted it and the aesthetic shape of his story.

III Jesus casts the parable of the Father and Two Sons in a form that Kenneth Bailey calls a “double parabolic ballad,” each section of which is formed out of symmetrical thematic arches with the second section’s final stanza purposefully omitted.12 Jesus’s first century 12 Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet and Peasant (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1976), p. 158. Almost all of the formal observations and cultural comments here (as well as the version of the parable quoted at the chapter’s head) are from Bailey’s magisterial work. Using modern

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A. Introduction There was a man who had two sons

1. A son is lost and the younger of them said to his father, “Father give me the share of property that falls to me.” And he divided his living between them.

2. Goods wasted in expensive living Not many days later the younger son sold all he had, journeyed into a far country and wasted his property in extravagant living. 3. Everything lost And when he had spent everything a great famine arose in that country and he began to be in want. 4. The great sin (feeding pigs for gentiles) So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country and he sent him to his fields to feed pigs. 5. Total rejection And he would gladly have eaten the pods which the pigs ate and no one gave him anything.

6. A change of mind. But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s servants have bread to spare but I perish here with hunger.

61. An Initial Repentance I will arise and to my father and say to him, “Father I have sinned against heaven and before you and

and am no more worthy to be called your son” 51. Total acceptance And he arose and came to his father. And while he was at a great distance his father saw him And had compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him. 41 The Great Repentance And the son said to the father, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you And am no more worthy to be called your son.” 31 Everything gained, restored to sonship And the father said to the servants, “Bring the best robe and put it on him and put a ring on his hands and shoes on his feet.

21 Goods used in joyful celebration And bring the fatted calf and kill it and let us eat and make merry.

11 A son is found. For this my son was dead and is alive, He was lost and is found.” And they began to make merry.

Example I

Western exegetes, medieval Arabic translations and exegetes (hitherto almost completely ignored by scholars), and his own significant experience with peasant Middle Eastern peoples, Bailey has offered a carefully considered reconstruction of the first century Palestinian’s cultural milieu.

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hearers would have recognized this as a common literary form (although they probably would have found its artistic quality remarkable) and would have known that Jesus used the shape to structurally emphasize his tale’s most important points. Two groups of three line stanzas form the parable: the first group cadencing with the father’s joyful reception of his younger son and the second section cadencing with the father’s defense of his action before his elder son. The symmetrical structure of both sections can easily be seen if the general content of each stanza is diagrammed.13[Example 1] The younger son’s transformation is dramatically articulated by its placement in the parable’s formal center. Here he repents, the story literally pivoting at its center. The first five stanzas deal with this son’s descent from a relationship of true sonship with his father, the second set of five marks his return and restoration. By placing repentance at the structural keystone in this arch, Jesus formally emphasizes it for his hearers as one of the two principle themes of this part of his tale. The other theme, grace (which is exemplified by the father’s steadfast love), Jesus emphasizes by binding the story with the father’s gifts of the inheritance and the celebratory feast of reconciliation. Within a literary form circumscribed by the father’s love, Jesus formally emphasizes the superiority of grace over individual repentance, as if repentance occurred within the orbit, or embrace, of steadfast love. Yet no such thematic closure characterizes the parable’s second section. That this second arch is left purposefully incomplete can be seen by again diagramming its thematic progress [Example 2].14

B. Introduction Now the elder son was in the fields

1 He comes and as he came and drew near to the house he heard music and dancing and he called one of the boys and asked what this meant. 2. Your brother is safe, Feast. And he said to him, “your brother has come and your father has killed the fatted calf because he received him with peace.” 3. A father comes to reconcile But he was angry and refused to go in So his father came out And was entreating him. 4. First complaint (how you treat me) But he answered his father, Lo these many years I have served you and I have never disobeyed your commandments yet you never gave me a kid to make merry with my friends.

13 Ibid., p.160. 14 Ibid., p. 191.

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41 Second complaint (how you treat my brother) “But when this son or yours came who as devoured your living with harlots you killed for him the fatted calf.” 31 A father tries to reconcile And he said to him, “Beloved son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours. 21. Your brother is safe, festival feast. It is fitting to make merry and be glad For this your brother was dead and is alive, He was lost and is found.”

11. MISSING FINAL STANZA? [And he came and entered the house and joined in the music and dancing and he began to make merry.]

MISSING CONCLUSION? [and the two sons were reconciled to their father}

Here, in the parable’s second arch, the final stanza and conclusion are missing (a 1 prime corresponding to the earlier 1). Because of the carefully completed arch form of the parable’s first part, and because of the similar formal care taken through most of the parable’s second arch, the first-century listener would expect one more stanza to complete the story. Its omission is jarring. To provide some sort of literary closure the hearer must supply the final lines himself. In other words, by first crafting his story within a set of formal thematic inversions and then, at the last minute, violating that structure, Jesus shocks his hearers not only with the tale of the forgiving father but with the formal incongruity of the parable itself. If the story is to have an end the listeners themselves must provide it. As a piece of literature, the parable exhibits a degree of economy and concinnity typical of the most artfully crafted aesthetic objects. Superfluous detail is absent. The arched structure is not a mannered artifice but is instead a carefully considered form designed to clarify each of the two section’s principle themes by placing them at the arche’s centers. The double arch formally testifies to the thematic parallels between the parable’s two sections. Each arch deals with a type of sin and chronicles its progress: the sin of rebellion and the sin of pride. Each arch traces a mode of repentance: the elder son (who believes that he can justify himself) and the younger son (who knows he can not).15 But the double arch design also helps to emphasize the differences between the two sons. While the first arch centers on the younger son’s decision to return to his home, the second arch contrasts this with its rehearsal of the elder son’s complaints, which are really a litany of his refusal to seek grace. One arch ends with the celebration of a son entering into his father’s banquet of reconciliation while the truncated second arch ends with an invitation to which no response is offered.

15 Ibid., p. 205.

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What might such a response be? Will the elder son go into the house and be reconciled with his brother, or will he refuse? Although the carefully balanced structure implies that this elder brother will be reconciled, the final stanza thus complementing the “arrival” character of the first stanza, the nature of that missing stanza is ambiguous. Its absence requires Jesus’s listener to consider himself in the story and forcibly turns the listener’s attention from considering a story “out there,” involving someone else, to a story “in here,” focusing upon himself as an individual. How this move dramatically affects Jesus’s principle listeners, the Pharisees, can be seen after we reconstruct the events of the story’s telling.

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IV

A crowd has gathered around the storyteller. Dignified and pious Pharisees, more learned in religion than this country teacher, are curious as to what he might say—or better—in what kind of mistakes he might make and which they might correct in front of the gathering (because they have heard of his bizarre teachings before). Children play in the dust while their mothers watch from the well nearby. The din of peddlers hawking their wares, braying donkeys, haggling merchants and screaming children all makes conversation difficult. Everybody shouts. And there are others here too. Gentile guards (here from the Roman garrison), and even the town’s moral rubbish mix with the crowd. Apparently the teacher has such types as intimates for several known reprobates – a tax collector, a prostitute, and there are others (they are all well known)—seem to be on the friendliest terms with him. Seeing them, the Pharisees step aside for a moment, murmuring, not wishing to dirty themselves by accidentally brushing against one of them. “What kind of teacher is this man that he associates with such wickedness?” they ask each other with raised eyebrows. “Doesn’t he know what kind of people these are?” The teacher appears to hear them and turning to them begins a new story. There was once a man who had two sons. The crowd quiets. The Pharisees nod knowingly to each other. Yes, a good way to begin a tale: a father and two sons, a traditional situation, one we ourselves have used to instruct the ignorant. We know well how it will go: a story concerning the dignity of the father as against one son who is wise and one who is foolish, like the tales of Jacob and Esau and Cain and Abel, stories about the working-out of the judgment and the majesty of the Lord. A good choice, with strong precedent, they all agree. Ah, but much of the power of the tale lies in its telling, in the story teller’s craft. Let us wait and see how this teacher spins-out his web. And the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.” A gasp goes through the crowd. Could we have misheard? Did he really say that? A son demanding his inheritance from his living father? Could it happen? Have you ever heard of such a thing? Would it even be possible? Never in my village, never in the memory of all the elders. Never in yours either? Such a thing doesn’t even happen in the houses of the idolaters! Surely, we misheard. The wind scrambled the phrases, it’s not believable. No? You heard the same? How horrible! What effrontery! The boy has asked for his father’s death! The upstart can’t wait for his father to even become infirm; so impatient

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is he for his inheritance he demands it now. The boy has treated him as if he were nothing, this, his father! The insolence! Is there a law for such a thing? Did not Abraham, while living, give gifts to his sons by Keturah? Yes, you’re right but this was not the assigning of an inheritance but gifts given to Isaac’s potential rivals to invalidate any claim they might have upon Isaac’s inheritance. And it was a gift, not a response to a demand! But does not the Mishna speak of a father assigning his property to his children while yet alive? Yes, but there the heirs have no right to sell the property until the father’s death and besides such a decision is the father’s alone and done while ill, perhaps anticipating his death. The heirs do not demand the gift. No, that act of this son, this demand for his inheritance is so monstrous that it lies outside of the Law. It is unimaginable. We must have misheard. But we did not mishear. This is indeed what the storyteller has said, this is what that younger son has done. Ah, what will the father do? The lad is a beast, a shame upon his whole family, an unclean thing like a snake that would strike its own father and live-off the flesh. Like any father, this father is a man of dignity. He is a man of property, respected in the village. And this boy has given him the gravest insult possible. “Go off with you old man!” the boy has as much said. “Be dead to me!” Of course the father must beat the boy, beat him across his head and shoulders and back until his cloak is wet with his blood, until it streams down across his loathsome face. The boy must be punished. And he must be driven out of the village and his name cursed. Or perhaps the father is a man of unusual self-control, of the greatest dignity, and of profound wisdom. The boy is a fool, and beating a fool never brings him to wisdom. Yes, such a father might spare his son the beating (and himself the indignity of such a scene), but he would none-the-less banish the boy forever from his presence. Yes, perhaps. But there is a law for this. Has not Moses written, “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, “This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones, so you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”16 Certainly this is a most rebellious son, is he not? Should not he be stoned, for isn’t his demand a monstrous evil? Yes, indeed! This creature can’t be tolerated. It must be done away with, destroyed, like a misshapen thing that comes out of a cow’s womb. Destroy it, purge our village from the monster! Oh, but this is a better story than we expected! This weaver of tales is clever indeed! Who would have imagined such a novel situation!

16 Deuteronomy 22.18-21.

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Let us see what this storyteller’s father does. Does he now drag the pup before the elders? Will this father demand his stoning? And he divided his living between them. Silence. Stunned, dumb astonishment. The father gave it to him? And not only to the younger son did the father give his inheritance, but to the older son too? To both of them? We could not possibly have heard this right. This can’t possibly be what the storyteller said. But again, this is what you heard too? The father is a fool. He is worse than a fool. He is a man without dignity, without self-respect, without honor. He did as that monster of a son asked? How can that father ever again show himself at the village gate? What man would dirty himself by sitting beside him? Who would heap derision upon his head by consulting that man, asking him for advice? No one. No one would have such contempt for his own person as to associate with such a fool. This father does not take that son to the elders to be stoned? He gives him no beating? He pronounces no banishment? The son is not the fool! It’s the father who is the fool! While living, the father divides his wealth between his sons? He makes himself a pauper, a bondsman in his own sons’ house. Where now are the dowries for his daughters? Where now are the flocks and herds that testify to the Lord’s blessing upon Him? Where are the lands, the lands of his father and his father’s father, lands that sustain him and his household? And what now can he sell to buy the sacrifices required at the Temple? Nothing. All is gone. Given away. He has turned-over all to his two sons. And like the poorest menial, when he goes up to the Temple he must now beg a pigeon to offer-up on the altar in atonement for his sins. And what sins. This man is no man at all. He is even less than a woman. Perhaps he is mad. The storyteller goes on. Not many days later the younger son sold all he had, journeyed into a far country and wasted his property in extravagant living. What a disgusting family! May they all be accursed! The father is a man without any manliness and look at this second son! Having been given his inheritance—let such a notion be accursed—this son now has sold it! He sold it! Sold the land of his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father! The herds, the fields, the slaves, stores of grain and vats of oil—all sold and changed into jingling coin! Most certainly he went into a far country, for who in his village would let such a son remain, who would allow such a disease to fester among them? Would you? Or you? Would anyone in your village? The father is a fool but the village is not a village of fools. Of course they would drive the boy out, cursing his backside. Phath! Let such a one live and die amid foreigners! Phaht! Let him take his filthy coin and squander it with worshippers of idols and imbibers of debauchery! Phaht! Phaht! Of course he shall come to ruin, for the Lord is not blind. He is not mocked. He has seen all that his wretch has done. Oh blessed be the Lord for the justice of His judgment!

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The Pharisees again turn to each other. This is an odd family indeed yet God’s judgment is just. The storyteller has done well here. Let us now observe the final condemnation of this miserable boy! And when he had spent everything a great famine arose in that country and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country and he sent him to his fields to feed pigs. And he would gladly have eaten the pods which the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. Ah, the Pharisees say. Blessed be the Name Of The Lord and blessed be forever the justice of His judgment! How fitting it is that this son has sold himself into a gentile’s service. As the Lord did punish the sins our ancestors with exile in Babylon, so too is this miserable sinner punished with menial service to the foreigner! How fitting it is that this rebellious boy now feeds swine! Let him wallow in their filth! And let him fight with them for their muck-stained swill! So let it be to all who flaunt their disobedience before the Law of the Lord Almighty. Let judgment flow down from the heavens like mighty rivers and let the sinner stand in fear of the Lord! This is a good storyteller! An interesting tale! Why did we hear rumors of this man’s unorthodoxy! This is sound instruction, of benefit to all of those sinners who gather about him—ah, how frightened thy must be for their own futures! How they must shudder! This is an excellent man indeed, to make these sinners see so clearly the wickedness of their ways! Certainly, the people in this story are unusual, so much the better to grab the attention of those simple folk, scattered over there, around him. We have misjudged the man, this is excellent instruction. But he continues, let us listen: But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s servants have bread to spare but I perish here with hunger. I will arise and go to my father and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you and am no more worthy to be called your son; make me a servant.’” A good story indeed! Ah, the fool has come to himself. Perhaps he has really repented. It is possible, it is not? Did not the great King David himself repent his adultery with Bathsheba? And did not Abraham repent his lies before Pharaoh about Sarah, his wife? Or perhaps this ill-begotten son simply has seen that while he starves, his father’s servants have bread. Desperation has driven him to return home, complete with a nicely prepared speech! Can you imagine the scene his return will cause in the village? Ha, ha! With the women mocking and the men turning to him the soles of their feet! Ah, what a farce we will have here! The fool of the boy, how richly he deserves the humiliation he has wrought for himself! But what will the father do? I wonder, don’t you? Who can tell, with such an unpredictable man? Is he now wise? Will he devise some stratagem to test this son’s

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sincerity, to see whether he has truly repented of his evil or is only hungry, and will do even this to fill his belly? Will he trick them, as Joseph tricked his brothers when they came to him in Egypt, seeking relief from the famine? This is a very good storyteller indeed! Such a cleaver turn here. How shall the father complete the righteous judgment of the Lord? And he arose and came to his father. And while he was at a great distance, his father saw him and had compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to the father, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you and am no more worthy to be called your son.” And the father said to the servants, “Bring the best robe and put it on him and put a ring on his hands and shoes on his feet, and bring the fatted calf and kill it and let us eat and make merry, for this my son was dead and is alive, he was lost and is found.” And they began to make merry. Silence. Even the donkeys have ceased their braying. Have the flies stopped their buzzing too? Dumfounded shock. This can not be! This is an outrage! Does this storyteller mock God? Does he blaspheme divine justice? This father is a monster before all heaven! Does he see his son from a distance because he has been looking for him? Looking for this fool? Looking for this wretch who wished him dead and makes his own honor a mockery? And seeing this son, this father runs to him! Runs! Like a boy, or a servant, or like a calf running to a cow, the man runs! He runs! What village elder would run anywhere? A man with pride walks slowly, with dignity. Servants run to him. He runs nowhere. But this father runs to him! To him, his son, a miserable wretch who should fall at his father’s feet, prostrating himself in the dust before his father, kissing his feet holding the hem of his cloak. But this father! He grasps his son, and kisses him! This kiss, this sign of reconciliation, of forgiveness, this father bestows upon his son even before the boy has asked for forgiveness! But perhaps the boy is not such a fool after all. He too is shocked by this father’s actions. Before such behavior, he changes his little prepared speech, now only confessing his sin and worthlessness, knowing that there is nothing that he can do to make amends. And now what does the father do? He has run out from the city gates to this beggar who was yet a distance off. He has created a public scene, and has been followed by his own servants and who knows what else village riff-raff! Will he lecture the boy on the enormity of his sin? Will he recount to him his follies, both for the boy’s benefit and that of the gathered townspeople? Will he pronounce judgment, as the dignity of the Law demands?

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No! This storyteller’s father does none of these things! He tells his servants to clothe this, this . . . this piglet with his best robe, his own robe, the one he reserves for only the highest feasts and festivals! And he commands that a ring be put on his finger, a signet ring! This son can now bind contracts! And shoes are put on his feet, shoes as befit a freeman, a master of servants! And the father declares a feast for the entire village with a roasted calf! The son is not to return to universal mockery, but to a festival in his honor! And the reason? That the father thought him dead, and he is alive! Dead? But he should be dead! Did he not wish his father dead? And did he not sell the lands of his ancestors? And did he not engage in filthiness with foreigners, polluting himself, bringing shame upon his family? And did he not squander his inheritance? And did he not live as un-unclean animal, more foul than Nebuchadnezzar insane, on all fours? Dead? Honor and justice and righteousness require his death! His bones should still lie outside the village gate, there, in that spot where he was stoned and the jackels ate away his rotting flesh and the ravens picked at his bones —in the spot where his father now embraces him! Is there no man under that roof who can restore the clan’s honor with that monster’s blood? Miserable and sorry household, when the men are less than bitches. And this father, this worse than a fool who runs out to greet his returning son, who rejoices in his life and who forgives him for all the grotesque deeds in which he has reveled—such a father is a monster greater than the son. Ah, but a greater monster still is this storyteller, this man who would turn honored custom and Divine Law on their heads! But this cannot be the tale’s end, formal convection does not allow. What about the other son? The elder son, who stayed with his father? Perhaps we have a man of honor here. Perhaps he will redeem his family’s reputation. We must see. The teller goes on. Now the elder son was in the fields. And as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing and he called one of the boys and asked him what this meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come and your father has killed the fatted calf because he received him with peace.” But he was angry and refused to go in so his father came out and was entreating him. At last! A voice of righteousness! The presence of honor! This older brother has been working in the fields and comes home to find a feast in progress, a feast in honor of the brother who has brought so much shame upon the family. Yes, his father has proclaimed the feast and yes, custom and decency dictate that this brother should bow to his father’s wishes and attend the banquet, but a banquet for him? For that dog? Surely he can be forgiven the insult of refusing his father’s hospitality in these circumstances? Did not that other brother humiliate his father when he took his leave? Why should he have him back now?

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Yet again this father demeans himself – he is quite unbelievable, isn’t he? He comes out from the banquet and asks the elder son to join their celebration. First this father runs out from the village to his younger son and now he abandons his guests for his elder son. Such a father may be a fool, and he may have no sense of shame before his guests (humiliating himself before these boys!) but it is a serious insult to refuse hospitality, and the elder sons knows better. He should go in, he should obey. The storyteller continues. His elder son speaks. But he answered his father, “Lo these many years I have served you and I have never disobeyed your commandments yet you never gave me a kid to make merry with my friends. But when this son of yours came who has devoured your living with harlots you killed for him the fatted calf.” Ah! Even this one has no respect! He addresses his father without any salutation, as a man would address a servant or a child! He disobeys custom and shames his father by refusing his invitation to enter into the feast yet he has the cheek to say that he has never transgressed his father’s wishes! Yes, he has worked in his father’s house, yet apparently he was working grudgingly, for now it seems that he resents that even little feasts were not prepared for him and his cronies! But here is more here. Since his younger brother demanded that his inheritance be given him, the estate has been divided between the two sons. Although the property of the elder son, that half of the estate which his father gave cannot be disposed of by the elder son until after his father’s death. Of course his younger brother did just that, breaking the law, but while this older brother kept the letter of the law, doesn’t it at least seem possible that he too resents the fact that the estate is not his to do with as he pleases? Not his, so that he might kill a kid or his own pleasure? Is he too, within his heart, looking for his father’s death? So, how will this father deal with these new insults? Furious, he should chastise this son for his haughtiness. Yet, will he strike him, as he should have struck his younger son before? Has this father learned something now of the value of honor? How will he address this other son? And he said to him, “Beloved son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad for this your brother was dead and is alive, he was lost and is found.” He calls him son! He calls him beloved son! He ignores his rudeness, the haughtiness of his address, the selfishness of his complaints—however valid they may be—and the arrogance of his conduct! He ignores the fact that this son too wants him dead! In the face of all of that, this father reminds his son of his continual love for him! And he defends the appropriateness of celebrating his brother’s return!

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What will this brother do? How will he respond? Will he enter the banquet and be reconciled with his brother? Will he humble himself before his father? But does such a father deserve honor? Does such a man who violates all the dictates of a man of honor, of dignity, a man who does violence to the traditions of his village—does such a man merit any consideration at all? Does not such a man—this father who fails to whip his son for violating his family’s honor, who runs to greet him upon his return (soiled and unclean as he is), who accepts the public insults of his elder son—does not such a man himself demand punishment? So, what does the elder brother say? How will this tale end? What? The storyteller has turned his back. He is walking away. He has left the story unfinished. What does the brother say? The crowd shouts after him. Finish the tale! What does the brother say? What does the brother say?

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Jesus’s parable shocks. It disrupts the status quo. It frightens its hearers because it presents them with a dilemma that they must resolve on pain of their lives. Or better, through the telling of the parable, Jesus purposefully places his hearers in a situation where, through their imagination, they must confront themselves with themselves, judge themselves, and contemplate the possibility of joy. And they do this by ending the parable themselves. What does the elder son do? What does he say? They each must decide.

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And who are these hearers? They are the Pharisees, the men Jesus heard murmuring about the presence of sinners among his listeners. The parable is directed to them. What would the Pharisees say? What could they say? As Jesus abruptly ends his story the Pharisees find themselves looking at those sinners around Jesus, knowing that they are like the story’s younger son, defilers of the Law. The Pharisees know that those sinners should be punished, their sin purged from the people. And the Pharisees look forward to a time when the Lord’s reign will be returned to Israel and those sinners, and all others like them, will be judged. Yet here Jesus tells a tale of the repentance and gracious acceptance of a sinner far worse than any of those people who the Pharisees see standing there in the market, listening to the parable with them. If such a one as that younger son can be given forgiveness, what about those others? And if they, blatant sinners, can be forgiven, what about the Pharisees themselves? Of what merit is the piety of those who have served the law many years and never disobeyed a commandment? With alarming directness, Jesus turns the parable on them in his second section. They, the Pharisees, must recognize Jesus’s intention of identifying them with the stubborn and graceless elder son, just as they must recognize the identification of the wicked younger son with the sinners standing around Jesus. The elder son insults the father by refusing to come into the feast. He will not participate in the feast not only because his brother has been forgiven and restored, but also because he believes himself slighted. But Jesus does not complete his tale. He does not give this elder brother’s response to his father’s second invitation. What might it be? Join this feast? Eat and make merry with that wicked brother, come so late to decency? Where would be the joy in such humiliation? And with that father? How can such a father be honored and obeyed? What would the Pharisees think? In the father, Jesus presents to them a character they can only abhor. He is disgusting. He does not behave even as a Gentile father ought, let alone a Jew. He does not discipline his wayward son, but instead yields to his evil request. He mocks God’s law in failing to fulfill the requirements of Deuteronomy 21.18-21. He does not defend his own dignity. He abases himself twice: before his younger son when he returns and a second time before his elder son when he refuses his invitation to the banquet. A father is the pillar of social order and stands before his family as God stands over Israel. Yet this father fails to honor God’s commandments by not keeping them, brings derision upon his household, and threatens his community with social disintegration. The Pharisee would recognize the storyteller’s intended similarity between the father and God, the actions of the father being conventionally understood as similar to the actions of God. But such a comparison here, between Jesus’s father in the parable and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, would be monstrous to the Pharisee. It would be more than

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monstrous, it would be blasphemous and the pious and Law-keeping Pharisee would be forced into demanding that Jesus be killed for suggesting that God would behave in the spineless and immoral manner of this father. The Pharisee’s conclusion is clear. Jesus presents good as if it were evil and evil as if it were good. And for such blasphemy Jesus must die. Or perhaps, must the Pharisee die? Must he alter his life so much, refocus his mind and action so completely that he in a sense (or perhaps literally), must die? Must he die, perhaps so that he might be born again? And so the ground moves beneath his feet. The world the Pharisee thought he had inhabited is not the world he lives in at all. The God whose Laws he keeps on his forehead, to whom he offers sacrifice and obedience is not as he imagined Him. The Pharisee looks at the sinners, those other ones whose very wickedness defines his own righteousness (they break the law, he keeps it; they mock God, he honors Him) and no longer sees their sins but now stares into the face of his own wantonness. Through the shock of the parable (a shock like an earthquake), the Pharisee has seen the world as it truly is and not as he has pretended it to be, and he has seen that it is his fault. He is a sinner. But how can he, he who contemplates on the Law both day and night, he who through his own discipline (and indeed, suffering, for it is hard to keep the Law)--upholds the Law and thus both proclaims the Law before the people and spares them God’s judgment—how can he be so unrighteous? How can he be so wrong? And yet, he has glimpsed the world as it truly is, and not as he has pretended it to be, and he has seen himself as he truly is. And so he howls. He howls like a man fighting with swine for swill. He howls in shame and disgust and horror. “O miserable wretch, how might I be unmade!” Yet, seeing himself as he truly is, his sight is yet faulty. For he is not a miserable wretch, but a beloved son. And God, the God of the Law who he had thought he had known—this God will embrace him, and kiss him, and place a ring on his hand and a lordly cloak upon his back and shoes on his feet—not because of what he has done but because he is beloved, and he has returned. What is this Pharisee to do with this vision of the world as it truly is and not as he pretended it to be, this world revealed to him through the shock of the parable? Will the Pharisee, like the elder brother, put aside all the good he has done, all the commands he has fulfilled, and enter the banquet as an equal with his brother the law-breaker, enter only because his father invited him and loves him? And shall the Pharisee obey the father, not because the Pharisee (through his own will, or by merit of his own strength, or because of the happenstance of his own condition) fulfills the Law as it is written, fulfills it like a contractor fulfills a contract (out of self-pride or fear of litigation)

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but simply because the father is his father, inscrutable, and beyond his ken? Will the Pharisee become like a little child, who sits at his father’s knee not because his lessons are learned or instructions are obeyed, but because his father loves him, and he loves his father? Does the Pharisee hunger and thirst after righteousness, or is he perhaps sated? Does his Law-keeping make him pure, so that he has no need of seeing God? Is he poor in spirit, or is he already so rich that the kingdom of heaven has no attraction for him? Are his daily actions so balanced, so chaste before the Law, that he needs no mercy? Or is his life already so lost that he is willing to lose it completely so that it might be gained? Seeing the world as it truly is—that brief vision revealed through the shock as if by a lightening bolt, will the Pharisee ponder the vista, or will he shut tight his eyes, having no taste for panoramas other than the one he has cherished for so long? What does the elder brother say? What does the Pharisee himself say? The answer lies in the character of the listener. Through the bizarre and shocking shifts and turns of the parable the listener finds himself confronted by himself so that he might both judge himself and find mercy imaginable. This is why the parable is described as requiring death, either the death of the storyteller of the death of the hearer. For the storyteller places the listener in a situation in which the listener finds himself confronted with a character of a life so different from his own, that either his own life must be transformed to conform with the parable—where the listener must die to his own dearly cultivated delusions—or the storyteller must die as an act of self-defense. What then is an idiomatic response to the parable? How do we know if the parable is heard and understood? The listener howls. He howls for either his own death or the death of the storyteller. An idiomatic response to the parable is a call to death. The Pharisee who has no hunger for righteousness—but rather possesses a desire to be dressed-up in righteousness, as one might dress-up in a particular hat or wear a shiny medal—who has no love of justice—but instead loves his power to judge others and the weapon with which he taunts them—who sees within himself no need for mercy—for to see that in himself would be to also see his faults—and whose testimony of meekness is given in proclamations in market places—such a Pharisee will seek to lay hands on the storyteller and kill him. And the Pharisee who, in loving the Law, continually seeing how far short of it he comes, who recognizes in himself the pride of the elder son—and who is willing to contemplate that recognition—who looking upon the sinners around Jesus sees them suddenly as his brothers and sisters—such a Pharisee will hear the parable and cry within himself, and come to Jesus, perhaps under cover of night, and say, “Rabbi, what must I do to be saved?”

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And a sinner, standing near Jesus, hears the story (although Jesus has not really directed the parable to him, but to the Pharisees, standing over there, away from him), this sinner knows his sin and finds it a comfortable companion. This sinner is miserable yet he loves his misery. He is hopeless, but finds a kind of solace in his hopelessness (for at least he thinks he knows who and what he is, and there is a kind of pride in that knowledge). This man hears the parable, and hates the teller, and with the first Pharisee, he too would pick up a rock to stone the storyteller because this story has challenged him to the quick. If joy is possible then he should do all he can to possess it. But if there is no joy, if there is no restoration possible, then there is a certain glory in the man’s misery. And there is an honor in knowing what you are beholding to nothing. So he clings to his misery, and he too wishes the storyteller dead. But another sinner hears the parable. She has no pride in her actions and despises herself for what she has done and aches with a knowing pain that the evil she has done can not be undone. Now this woman hears the parable and pictures herself as that younger son and now imagining that before unimaginable love of the father and now believes that forgiveness might be possible and now through the jostling of the crowd she crawls in the dust and now reaches out with all her strength and clutches at the hem of storyteller’s cloak so that she too might be healed from her misery – so that she might be made whole and live in joy. These—the response of disgust, and hope, and anger, and desperation—are all idiomatic responses to the parable. Each of these listeners has heard the story had has immediately understood it. Their different responses, determined by their individual characters, are all appropriate. They have recognized immediately the shock of the parable and, through their imagination, have found themselves compelled to recognize themselves through it. Finally, the formal design of the parable not only emphasizes the story’s crucial points but more importantly propels each of them to a point of decision: what does the elder brother say? What do I say? All of this is done immediately and without explanation. And the idiomatic response—“what do I say”—is as untutored and spontaneous as the American’s laugh to “Ah, couscous every day!” But again, this is not the usual response to the parable as it is read in our churches, or in our libraries, or on our park benches today. The response is not an immediate one of shock, that shock leading to outrage or profound repentance from self-righteousness—we seem to largely misunderstand it, even giving it an absurd title, “the Prodigal Son,” as if the younger son were the most important figure in the tale, and not the elder brother and the incomprehensible father! And even now, having briefly rehearsed the cultural setting of the parable and considered a variety of idiomatic first century responses to it, the modern reader’s reaction to the story is still not outrage or remorse, but rather bemusement. “So that’s what it’s about? How very interesting. How quaint.” The reaction is like that of the Moroccan to the American’s explanation of his own laughter. There is no immediate outburst of belly shaking jollity but rather, “So that’s what it’s about? How very interesting.”

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It is the purpose of the creator of the Work of Christian Art to invent works like Jesus’s parable, audacious, troubling, shocking-- so that, through their imaginations, the artist’s listeners, ,or viewers, or readers might find themselves confronted with themselves to the point where they are presented with a decision about how they will choose to live their lives. If theology “is that interpretation and that game which we all must play if we are to refer our lives to God,” then the Work of Christian Art is theology in an aesthetic form.17 Rather than being a piece of “art for art’s sake” the Work of Christian Art is a kind of “active pedagogy.”

This is how theology finally realizes itself in its correct form. The teachings do not have to change at all, for they are a kind of constant stretching through the ages. But the active pedagogy in which they are exercised must insinuate the listener into a new role; his self-evaluation, his subjectivity, his aims, wishes, hopes, desires, must be altered so that the grammar of faith becomes relevant. When the right supposal envelopes him, when he understand himself to be a prisoner, a victim, a sinner, a changeling, then the teachings will come to life.18

The purpose of the Work of Christian Art is to bring the teaching to life. The model for this “active pedagogy,” the template for the Work of Christian Art, are Jesus’s own aesthetic works, his parables. These parables are masterfully crafted stories of sophisticated aesthetic interest. Their formal design reinforces their disturbing content which purposefully undermines the listener’s conventional understandings. In this way, the parables engage the listener’s imagination (and through his imagination, his emotions) in a situation where the teaching of the Faith takes on a plausible vividness. And in a world of browns and grays, of perhaps’s and maybe’s, of pluriform veracities, such vividness shocks. The Work of Christian Art will shock. For the Gospel shocks.

17 Paul Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, p. 9. 18 Ibid., pp. 29-30.

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