Parable of the Prodigal 3

... continued from sometime.
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The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a case in point (Luke 15).  In its current form in Luke, we hardly notice anything Jewish about it.  If we know that Jews did not eat pork, then the fact that the prodigal ends up in a place where there are pigs might stand out to us (15:15).  But the story in Luke very nicely reaches out to us across time without its original overtones having to do with Israel.

So we read the story in relation to how eager God is to forgive those who have left him.  Any sinner, no matter how far he or she has strayed, can come back to God, and God will welcome them with open arms. It is absolutely true.  It is a story about a God who is more interested in seeing us healed and restored than in making sure justice is done.

Many of us barely notice the elder brother.  He might represent justice to us.  It is not fair that the sinful son should get such an easy path back.  He should have to pay.  Of course the elder brother is really more concerned about himself.  Where is his party?  He deserves one.

This way of reading the parable is perfectly legitimate.  It is perfectly Christian and fits with our values and thinking.  At the same time, this parable likely had a much more specific and concrete meaning originally, in whatever exact form Jesus told it.

We hear hints of it in Luke 15.  The Pharisees are upset that Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners (15:2).  This is the context from which the parable springs.  The sinners are the "lost sheep" (15:3-7), the "lost coin" (15:8-10), and the "lost son" (15:11-32).  The implication is thus that the Pharisees are the elder brother, the sheep that stayed, and the coins the woman had not lost.

It is hard for us to take what Jesus says here as it is.  We want to put "sinners" in quotation marks.  Are we all not sinners?  Were not the Pharisees sinners too?  We want to do that, but Jesus did not, and Luke did not.

In a similar context in Luke 5:31-32, Jesus flatly tells the Pharisees that "those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance." Jesus does not contest that the tax collector was a sinner, and he places the Pharisees on the healthy/righteous side of the equation.

This is hard for us to handle.  Surely Jesus was being sarcastic.  We know the end of the story, so aptly captured in a mini-version of this parable.  In Matthew 21:28-32, Jesus speaks of a man who had two sons.  One said he would go work in the field but did not.  Another said he would not, but did in the end.  The one who did the will of the father was the one who ended up going in the end.

This is a parable of the reaction to Jesus' ministry.  The Pharisees and others like them were like the son who said he would work, but did not in the end.  We have such a bias built up against the Pharisees that it is hard for us to see that most of them were actually trying to do God's will.

We should not criticize the Pharisees for trying to keep the Law.  Many of them were no more legalists than some of us are.  You might say you do not observe Halloween out of conviction. They did not do certain things on the Sabbath out of conviction.

Of course some of them had their priorities out of order too, just like some of us do.  Some of them were more interested in the rules than in people.  And some of us are more interested in the rules than people to.  However, as far as Matthew 21 is concerned, their problem was that they did not accept Jesus or the kingdom God was bringing through him.

But at the point of Luke 15, Jesus is still putting the Pharisees on the healthy, righteous side of the equation.  Meanwhile, the tax collectors and prostitutes really are sinners.  Jesus never accepted the sins of these individuals as okay.  What he accepted was the possibility of their repentance and their importance to God.

Jesus was decades before Paul would write, "all have sinned."  When Jesus calls them sinners, he reflects the fact that they were not even trying to keep the Scriptures.  The father asked them to work in the fields, and they said no.  What is important is that in the end they accepted Jesus and stopped sinning.

So the Parable of the Prodigal Son both speaks to us today powerfully and it had an original meaning in relation to the earthly ministry of Jesus.  The earlier meaning had to do to the focus of Jesus' ministry and its end result.  Jesus saw the "lost sheep" of Israel as the main target of his ministry.  He meant to reclaim the sinners of Israel for the kingdom.  They accepted.  But ironically, those who initially were not lost, ended up lost.

We read it as a statement of God's willingness to forgive and reclaim us no matter how far we have strayed.  It is also a warning for us not to begrudge others to whom God shows mercy.  "Mercy triumphs over judgment" (Jas. 2:13).

Parables of the Kingdom 1

It has been October 6 since I posted on Jesus and the kingdom.  I had been writing on "The Essential Jesus" before getting quite distracted.  I now want to resume blogging about Jesus from now till the time he returns... or until I finish or am otherwise distracted ;-)
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Parables of the Kingdom
Mark has this to say about the way Jesus taught the crowds that followed him: "he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples" (4:34, NRSV).  It goes against the way most of us think about parables, but Jesus tells his disciples that his parables are meant to be something like riddles to the crowds, "in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand'" (4:12, NRSV).  These stories, that some use as an illustration of how clearly Jesus taught, sometimes had the effect of confusing, of distinguishing those who had faith from those who did not.

Now this way of looking at Jesus' parables fits especially with one of the special themes of Mark--the hiddenness of who Jesus was and the misunderstanding of his followers.  Luke does not treat Jesus' parables in this way.  The second Jesus volume in this series will explore unique features in each gospel like these.  What I take away from Mark for now is that Jesus' followers--including his disciples--may have looked back at his teaching in hindsight with a somewhat different understanding than they had when he was on earth. Looking back, his parables may have looked somewhat like riddles that they could only really understand now.

Mark tells us that these parables or riddles were the main way Jesus spoke publicly. [1]  The kinds of parables Jesus told are exactly the kinds of stories that fit an agricultural world: stories about seeds, farming, day laborers, feasts, muggers, not to mention economic and religious pressures from "outsiders."  The parables in the gospels range from very short stories to one line comparisons (called similes). [2]  Sometimes the same basic parable varies a little from gospel to gospel, a fact worth a quick moment of reflection.

It is true that Jesus likely retold the same parable on more than one occasion and that he may very well have varied them himself from time to time.  However, this fact does not likely account for all the variation among the gospels for two reasons.  First, these stories were likely told and retold from the moment Jesus shared them. [3] It seems almost certain that the gospel writers were not bothered by the sorts of minor variations that come from oral tradition. It is simply wrong to demand they follow modern expectations about how to do "investigative reporting."

A second factor is that they also felt free to edit their sources themselves in order to emphasize certain things. [4] They were oriented around the message.  They were not antiquarians whose main goal was to make sure they told it exactly how it happened or to get the quotes exactly as they were originally said.  The gospels are more like The Message than the King James Version.  Detailed comparisons of the gospels demonstrate this fact over and over again beyond any reasonable doubt.

We cannot critique them for their focus on the message rather than on precise historical reconstruction.  That is our problem and our hang-up, not theirs.  They were not in error to do so. We are in error if we insist that our standard is the only correct standard!

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[1] On the parables, I want to suggest two books that I consider very helpful: Craig Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1990) and Klyde Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).  Older classics that are now less helpful include C. H. Dodd's, The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961) and Joachim Jeremias' The Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972 [1958]).

[2] In an earlier day, the German scholar Adolf Jülicher put some very strange restrictions on what Jesus could or could not have really said based on the form a parable might take (Die Gleichnisreden Jesu 2 vols. [Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1888, 1899]).  Famously, he thought a parable that really went back to Jesus could only have one point and certainly could not be in the form of an allegory, where the various elements of the story had some figurative significance.  Scholars now rightly recognize that these claims, which were strangely influential for almost a century, have little basis at all.

[3] This is a key insight from the work of Kenneth Bailey, Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008).  A nice overview of some of the implications is in James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).

[4] I will show why this is almost certainly the case in the second volume of this series.

Parable of the Good Samaritan

The Bible assignment this week for the Missional Church course involved some interpretive and applicational work on the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I am not a Luke scholar but I enjoyed the onsite class today and am enjoying the ongoing online discussion as well. I feel like I've gained some new insights.
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Part 1
1. When the expert in the Law asks Jesus who his neighbor is, what is he really asking Jesus?
Several people noted that the expert in the Law wanted to "justify" himself (10:29). The sense seems to be that he wants Jesus to reach the conclusion that he is in fact keeping the commandment to love his neighbor. The lawyer is thus asking Jesus who he must love or, as one student put it perhaps more accurately, who he did not need to love.

Several pointed out that the opening tone of the expert in the Law was adversarial. He is "testing" Jesus (10:25). Interestingly, the parallel passages in Matthew 22 and Mark 12 have Jesus giving the answer. But we must bracket our knowledge of those other passages to hear Luke in its own literary context.

Interestingly, the earlier part of the chapter is about the sending of the 72, a number quite possibly symbolic of the nations. So the literary context is perhaps already suggesting that Gentiles are neighbors to this expert. It is indeed possible that the very placement of this story causes the mention of an expert in the Law to have a tone of conflict even as the story opens.

2. When Jesus suggests through the Parable of the Good Samaritan that it was the Samaritan who acted as a neighbor to the half dead man, how does this answer the earlier question of the expert in the Law?
Luke seems to pull a switcheroo here. The question the expert in the Law asks is, "Who is my neighbor?" We might thus expect the story to have the Samaritan as someone the Law expert should help, that the expert in the Law should behave neighborly toward. We might expect the Samaritan to be the one mugged.

The effect of the switch is much more powerful and effective than if the Samaritan had been the one mugged. The effect is to say, this Samaritan, someone you would not say has eternal life because he does not follow the Law correctly, does not worship at the right worship site, whose people from time to time has sided with Israel's enemies, this Samaritan does a better job at loving his neighbor than you do. In a sense, this Samaritan is closer to eternal life than you are! This Samaritan knew how to love his neighbor, even if you don't. There is shame involved here in an honor-shame world.

And of course the person mugged is someone who is to be loved as a neighbor as well, a double whammy. We can understand why a priest and Levite might avoid this bloody person. They no doubt wish to remain clean and pure according to the Law. Yes, they at least seem to be leaving Jerusalem rather than going up. But they are still staying clean, going above and beyond the call of duty in following the Scriptures. The expert in the Law would presumably know this. Jesus is thus not an absolutist on such issues. It is essential to make exceptions to the rules when greater values come into play and trump lesser ones.

So a bloodied man who might make me unclean is the expert's neighbor and the Samaritan acted as a neighbor and is presumably the expert's neighbor.

Part 2:
3. What is the implication of Jesus’ answer for who we are to love and what love means in concrete terms?
Now we move from interpretation to application. We have been asking what the text meant. Now we are asking its significance for us today. I suppose if we are to be careful with the implications, this parable is not exactly a "love your enemies" story. The Samaritan is not the mugger in the story. He is a "good" Samaritan who loves his neighbor. We better get the full blown love your enemy message from Matthew 5.

But the Samaritan was someone who crossed a social boundary line. He was someone who, because of where he was located in the world by geography and genealogy, was not someone a carefully Law-observant Jew might want to love as neighbor. And of course Samaritans were in fact the geographical neighbors of Judea and Galilee.

The parable seems to give us a double whammy answer to the question of who we are to love. We are, of course, to love the unfortunate victim. Fitting in well with Luke's general theme of good news to the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden is the inference that we should be a neighbor to those who are in trouble and need. The Samaritan, by the same token, implies that we are not to let identifiers like race, gender, or any kind of external identifier stand as a barrier to loving. Some application today would be that we would not let a different skin color or the fact that someone was an immigrant or a Muslim stand as an obstacle to us loving them as neighbor.

Love here seems very concrete. The compassion the Samaritan feels is toward a person in distress, not a hands holding "we are the world" sing along. You can act lovingly toward another person even when you don't particularly like them.

4. Are there any people or people groups in the immediate context of your church that some in your congregation do not think of as “neighbors” in the manner of the parable?
There are a lot of "mugged" people within blocks of my house. They don't know they've been mugged. They make lots of wrong choices. They do drugs or make a mockery of child raising. They do petty theft when it's an easy target. These mugged people pass the mugging along.

But they are themselves slaves, in bondage to forces they have little clue about. They may not even know how miserable their lives are. Being a Samaritan to them, aside from little acts of openness, looks to some prophets with a great vision and special gifts to implement it.