Chapter Four PRODIGALS AND PARADIGMS

Transcription

1 Chapter Four PRODIGALS AND PARADIGMS Wright, N. T., Feb 07, 1997, Jesus Victory of God V2 : Christian Origins And The Question Of God 1. Jews, Peasants and Prodigals History proceeds by telling stories. Here is one of the best known: There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me. So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, How many of my father s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands. So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son. But the father said to his slaves, Quickly, bring out a robe the best one and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found! And they began to celebrate. Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound. Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him! Then the father said to him, Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. 1 Son, or father? The prodigal son, it is often called; but the son is not the only prodigal in the story. This is an explosive narrative, designed to blow apart the normal first-century reading of Jewish history and to replace it with a different one. Just as we saw in NTPG that some retellings of the Jewish story were designed to subvert others (the book of Susannah being a case in point), 2 so this tale subverts the telling of the story which one might expect from mainstream first-century Jews, not least those claiming to be the guardians of Israel s ancestral heritage. The story will serve, as we conclude the Introduction to this book, as a case-study to whet the appetite, to point forward to some of the main themes that will emerge, and to underscore the points of method that emerged from the previous chapter. Years of scholarship have produced many commentaries on Luke, and many books on the parables. But none that I have been able to consult has noted the feature which seems to me most striking and obvious. Consider: here is a son who goes off in disgrace into a far country

2 and then comes back, only to find the welcome challenged by another son who has stayed put. 3 The overtones are so strong that we surely cannot ignore them. This is the story of Israel, in particular of exile and restoration. It corresponds more or less exactly to the narrative grammar which underlies the exilic prophets, and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and a good deal of subsequent Jewish literature, and which must therefore be seen as formative for second- Temple Judaism. The exodus itself is the ultimate backdrop: Israel goes off into a pagan country, becomes a slave, and then is brought back to her own land. But exile and restoration is the main theme. This is what the parable is about. 4 Babylon had taken the people into captivity; Babylon fell, and the people returned. But in Jesus day many, if not most, Jews regarded the exile as still continuing. The people had returned in a geographical sense, but the great prophecies of restoration had not yet come true. 5 What was Israel to do? Why, to repent of the sin which had driven her into exile, and to return to YHWH with all her heart. 6 Who would stand in her way, to prevent her return? The mixed multitude, not least the Samaritans, who had remained in the land while the people were in exile. 7 But Israel would return, humbled and redeemed: sins would be forgiven, the covenant renewed, the Temple rebuilt, and the dead raised. What her god had done for her in the exodus always the crucial backdrop for Jewish expectation he would at last do again, even more gloriously. YHWH would finally become king, and would do for Israel, in covenant love, what the prophets had foretold. 8 Exile and restoration: this is the central drama that Israel believed herself to be acting out. And the story of the prodigal says, quite simply: this hope is now being fulfilled but it does not look like what was expected. Israel went into exile because of her own folly and disobedience, and is now returning simply because of the fantastically generous, indeed prodigal, love of her god. But this is a highly subversive retelling. The real return from exile, including the real resurrection from the dead, is taking place, in an extremely paradoxical fashion, in Jesus own ministry. Those who grumble at what is happening are cast in the role of the Jews who did not go into exile, and who opposed the returning people. They are, in effect, virtually Samaritans. The true Israel is coming to its senses, and returning to its father, as Jeremiah had foretold; 9 and those who oppose this great movement of divine love and grace are defining themselves as outside the true family. There are, perhaps, other echoes, of quarrels between two brothers which left the younger vindicated and the elder angry and disinherited. 10 These give to the story a sense of depth and resonance. But the main line remains clear. Israel s history is turning its long-awaited corner; this is happening within the ministry of Jesus himself; and those who oppose it are the enemies of the true people of god. 11 Luke, to be sure, has used the story within his own larger story. There is an interesting parallel, again not always observed, between Luke 15 and Acts 15. In both, people are being welcomed in from beyond the boundaries of normal acceptability. In both, this provokes grumbles from the guardians of the ancestral traditions. In both, the grumbles are answered by the claim that Israel is entering, has indeed already entered, the time of renewal, of return from exile, of the kingdom of her god. That is the appointed time for outcasts to be welcomed. 12 The crucial passage in Acts 15 is the quotation from Amos 9:11f.:

3 After this I will return, and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen; from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, so that all other peoples may seek the Lord even all the Gentiles over whom my name has been called. Thus says the Lord, who has been making these things known from long ago. 13 In other words, it is time for the Gentiles to come in, because Israel s exile is at last over, and she has been restored. The Temple has been rebuilt; the Messiah has come at last. But where did Luke get that idea from? As I argued earlier, it was a major theme within his whole work, but he did not invent it. It was something he held in common with all the other major early Christian writers. Israel s Messianic restoration, and the consequent theological rationale of the mission to the world, are to be found (to look no further) as striking themes within Matthew and Paul as well, and for that matter in story after story of the pre-synoptic tradition. 14 Like a great pincer movement, therefore, we can work inwards towards Jesus, from the Jewish context of his own work and from the Christian theology of the early church. Israel has been waiting for redemption, for the return from exile. The early Christians are behaving as though it has already happened, and are justifying this by telling stories about Jesus himself. The simplest solution (not that New Testament scholars usually opt for the simplest solution) is that Jesus himself believed that he was the agent of this strange return from exile, and that he lived and acted accordingly. His welcome to all and sundry, that free commensality of which Crossan writes so movingly, was a sign that resurrection forgiveness restoration return from exile the reign of YHWH were all happening under the noses of the elder brothers, the self-appointed stay-at-home guardians of the father s house. The covenant was being renewed, and Jesus welcome to the outcasts was a vital part of that renewal. And, in the middle of it, the father himself was being reckless, prodigal, generous to a fault. Careful study of the peasant context in which the story makes fullest sense offers the following striking points. 15 For the younger son to ask for his share of the inheritance is almost unthinkable: it is the functional equivalent of saying to his father, I wish you were dead. The father should have beaten him, or thrown him out. Instead, he agrees. The son ends up doing the job beyond which it was impossible, in Jewish eyes, to sink: feeding pigs for a gentile master. He then does a further unthinkable thing: he returns home, threatening to disgrace the whole family in the eyes of the village. The father runs to meet him; senior members of families never do anything so undignified at the best of times, let alone in order to greet someone who should have remained in self-imposed ignominy. The party is for the whole village, like a big family wedding; a fatted calf would be far too much for a single household. The elder brother, meanwhile, also shames his father, by quarrelling with him in public, and in his turn suggesting that he wished the father dead so that he could at last enjoy his share of the property; but again the father is astonishingly, unbelievably, gentle. The story ends, within its cultural context, too soon: it demands a last scene, preferably a reconciliation. Most commentators have focused on the welcome home as the great sign of the father s love. Helmut Thielicke, famously, wrote a book called The Waiting Father. 16 But the thrust of the story, the emphasis on the prodigal love of the father, is felt much sooner, and sustained

4 much longer. Exile, as some of the greatest prophets had seen, was itself part of the strange covenant purposes of Israel s father-god. Israel could be allowed to sin, to follow pagan idolatry, even to end up feeding the pigs for a pagan master, but Israel could not fall out of the covenant purposes of her god. She could say to her god I wish you were dead, but this god would not respond in kind. When, therefore, Israel comes to her senses, and returns with all her heart, there is an astonishing, prodigal, lavish welcome waiting for her. Equally, the same generous love is still extended to those who, hurt and upset, cannot at the moment understand how it can possibly be right to welcome the prodigal home. Each of these levels of meaning resonates appropriately when we envisage Jesus telling the story and telling it in pretty much the setting Luke has given it (Luke 15:1 2). Jesus is acting, as an increasingly large number of scholars admit, as if he is simply bypassing the Temple system altogether. He is claiming to admit all and sundry into the renewed people of Israel s god. In telling this story, he is explaining and vindicating his own practice of eating with sinners: his celebratory meals are the equivalent, in real life, of the homecoming party in the story. They are the celebration of the return from exile. What is more, Jesus is claiming that, when he does all this, Israel s god is doing it, welcoming sinners no matter whether they have passed all the normal tests for membership, as long as they will accept the welcome of Jesus. What, is Israel s holy god likely to behave in such a way? Yes, replies the parable, just as the prophets foretold: just like a father who For Israel s god to act in this way is not an innovation; it is consistent with his character as revealed throughout Israel s long and chequered history. This is who he is, who he will be. Despite the elder brother. The parable does not teach, in the sense of teaching abstract or timeless truth; it acts. It creates a new world. Those who object to what Jesus is doing are warned of the role they are in fact playing in this new world, in the great climactic drama of Israel s history. Resurrection, the return from exile, is happening, and they cannot see it. The battle-lines are drawn. It is not a matter (as has often been imagined, and now quite often refuted) of Jesus offending some petty scruples here or there, or of an abstract challenge offered by one timeless religious system to another. Jesus is claiming to be ushering in Israel s long-awaited new world; and he is doing it, apparently, in all the wrong ways. Jesus is enacting the great healing, the great restoration, of Israel. And he interprets his own actions in terms of the fulfilment, not of a few prophetic proof-texts taken atomistically, but of the entire story-line which Israel had told herself, in a variety of forms, over and over again. 17 His opponents find themselves standing under a new sort of spotlight. If this is the new exodus, those who are objecting to it are cast as Pharaoh. If it is the real return from exile, the objectors are the Samaritans. If Jesus is in some sense building the real Temple, the objectors ironically, since their own worldview focuses so strongly on the Temple in Jerusalem are cast as those who resolutely opposed its rebuilding. 18 They, in their turn, are saying to Israel s covenant god that they wish he were dead. This, however, merely underlines the wish that the elder brother be reconciled. In Luke s gospel the Samaritans are given a new hope, a new possibility. The elder brother in the story is, implicitly, condemned, in order then to be offered a new chance. The parable creates a new situation, in which the hearers are confronted with a

5 choice, a warning, and an invitation. Dramatically, historically, theologically, the parable fits perfectly into the ministry of Jesus, as we shall be studying it in the rest of this book. Jesus is reconstituting Israel around himself. This is the return from exile; this, in other words, is the kingdom of Israel s god. Those with vested interests in different visions of the kingdom are bound to disapprove strongly. The strange announcement of resurrection, twice within the parable (verses 24, 32), makes excellent sense in this context. Jesus actions, and his words, themselves stand in need of vindication. Is his offer merely a reckless gesture, which the hard realities of history will prove to have been empty? Are his celebratory meals simply an empty charade? He is making a claim, a claim to be the one in and through whom Israel s god is restoring his people. The claim is highly controversial. It points, within his own teaching, to a final clash with the authorities, who will wish him dead and act on that wish. Like any good Jew, he believes that if he faces this, in obedience to the divine plan, he will be vindicated. And the word for that is resurrection. 2. From Parable to Paradigm (i) Towards a Hypothesis Wright, N. T., Feb 07, 1997, Jesus Victory of God V2 : Christian Origins And The Question Of God One swallow does not make a summer; one parable does not necessarily reveal a paradigm, a full outline of Jesus aims and career. But it gives a clear indication of certain vital points, both of content and of method. Of content I have given an indication in the previous paragraph. Of method there is more which should be said at this point. We have seen, in one small instance, that the double context of Judaism and the early church the great complex entities which we studied in NTPG Parts III and IV does indeed provide a pincer movement by which we can go back towards Jesus himself with an excellent chance of finding solid historical ground. We have also seen the clear value of reading the material in terms of the relevant worldviews, and of the stories in which they were regularly expressed, sustained, or subverted. The parable only makes sense as a retelling of Israel s story; but it also only makes sense as a profoundly subversive retelling of that story. When we examine the particular sort of subversion in question, it turns out to be one which is presupposed from the very earliest days of the church. As a parable, not least in its manner of concluding one scene too early, it makes sense precisely at that moment in history when the possibility of Israel s redemption happening in this fashion is being controversially mooted, not when it is being climactically and publicly celebrated. The parable thus fits exactly into the gap between Judaism and early Christianity, into the intertextual and intercommunal space between the worldviews we studied in the previous volume. It is thus decisively similar to both the Jewish context and the early Christian world, and at the same time importantly dissimilar in just that sense which we saw highlighted in some recent Third Quest work. 19 It is vital to recognize this double movement. Without it, one is in the difficult position of working simply from later and Christianized texts, or from complex reconstructions of Judaism. Along with the much-discussed criterion of dissimilarity must go a criterion of