Texts: Romans 9:13; Luke 15: 11-32
Slanted and Enchanted V: The Parable of the Prodigal Son
Throughout the season of Lent we’ve been focused on the parables of Jesus, reasoning that the words of Jesus are as important to consider as his actions. Jesus speaks unlike any preacher any of us have ever encountered. He tells stories that look and feel much like the world that you and I move through, though they’re not quite realistic all the way down. They slant reality somehow. But like a fairy tale, the parables open toward enchantment and wonder, toward mystery, and ultimately, toward grace. The stories are simple in a way, but also extraordinarily complex. You can never quite get to the bottom of them. They elude final and fixed meanings. There’s always something more to notice within them, which testifies to their appeal, and their power. We began our journey through the parables by considering the parable of the sower, after which we moved into the parable of the Good Samaritan. Then it was the parable of the talents, and after that the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. This week we come to the most famous and well known of all the parables, that of the Prodigal Son.
It’s famous enough that we almost cease to hear it. The themes of transgression, forgiveness, resentment and sibling rivalry run so deep that the parable has taken on a life of its own in song, literature, and art. There’s the famous Rembrandt painting. There’s an entire book dedicated to the parable from Henri Nouwen. There’s a lovely song from Michelle Shocked called “Prodigal Daughter,” in which she reverses the gender of the prodigal. There’s even a version of the parable within the Buddhist tradition, which probably predates the one found in Luke. That’s all to say that the themes of the story run deep. But it’s also to say that sometimes, those themes are so familiar that we no longer feel the pull of the story. We no longer sense how slanted the story actually is, and how enchanted too.
In part, that may be because of where we place our emphasis within the story. We tend to identify the center of gravity as the father, who, we assume, is representative of God. The parable thus becomes a story about wayward sinners like you and like me, welcomed home into the generous embrace of the father. I’ll describe what the parable feels like when it’s understood from that direction. But then I’d like to slant it, considering the parable from the direction of the prodigal himself. It’s his story that feels most revelatory, most fruitful for consideration.
First, the traditional reading. Since his death a few weeks ago, Billy Graham has been in the news lately, and I got to thinking about one of the sermons he preached at his revivals in the late 1940’s. Summoning the martial imagery of the post-war era, he entitled the sermon “Retreat! Stand! Advance!”[1] Within it, he tells the story of the prodigal in a way that captures well the thrust of the story as traditionally understood. The father is a stern but loving dad who tells his son to put some firewood in the woodstove on a cold night. The son is, according to Graham, absorbed in a novel, and doesn’t respond. The father loses his temper, and says, “Son, if you don’t get that stick of wood and put it on the fire you can leave this house.” The son stalks out and he slams the door. But he doesn’t get the firewood. He just leaves, fed up with living in the father’s house. Like the prodigal, he stays gone for a period of time. At last he grows weary, and he returns home, begging for forgiveness. The father, in Graham’s telling, softens, and he embraces his son. But he also adds, “Son, that same stick of wood is in the woodshed. Get it, bring it in, and put it on the fire, and you can come in.” On Graham’s account, the son is now cognizant of what he has. He’s aware of all the good things that he once took for granted, and he joyfully does what the father asks him to do. The son is forgiven, and the order of the father’s household is upheld.
Now, it’s not hard to discern the differences between Graham’s telling and Luke’s. There are no stipulations given by the father in Luke. There’s none of the sternness, none of the stubbornness. There’s a party and a celebration, which Graham seems to miss entirely. Even so, the way Graham tells the story catches the tone of the story, at least when it’s read straight. A son transgresses a code. He willfully flees a household, insulting the family. He discovers that the world is hard. He struggles. And he ultimately returns, begging forgiveness, begging to be taken back into the structure from which he has fled.
But here’s the rub of it all: Soften the father, make him kind, generous, compassionate, as he seems to be in Luke’s account. Make him tender, show him embracing the son, as Rembrandt does. Make him all those things, and the force of Graham’s interpretation still remains. The structure of the story still remains. There’s the order of the father’s household, or squalor and loose living. There’s the structure of the family, or there’s moral decay. You can live within the household structure or you can starve with the pigs. What’s it going to be? Player’s choice. But of course, what kind of choice is that? Is that what the freedom found in Christ finally means? You obey the rules, or you starve? You color within the lines, or you dine with swine? It feels akin to King George III in the musical Hamilton. After the United States achieves its independence, he emerges on the stage to sneer, “You’ll be back, soon you’ll see, you’ll remember you belong to me.” No matter how gracious the Father finally is, the parable seems to contain an emotional trap.
Let’s slant it, then. What would it mean to think about the parable from the perspective of the prodigal, rather than the father? Might there be an urgency to his quest? Might there be a logic within the prodigal’s behavior that Jesus wants his listeners to see and understand? Instead of identifying God with the father, might it be that God is somehow identified with this wayward son?
It’s worth considering that the parable of the Prodigal Son is actually the third in a series of parables that Jesus tells. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus is criticized by the Pharisees for eating and drinking with tax collectors and prostitutes. The criticism, in other words, is that he’s down in the trough, with the unclean of the earth, debasing himself with the swine. Is that not the place to start when reevaluating the prodigal son? What does it mean that Jesus seems to behave and identify in remarkable ways with the prodigal?
To move toward answering that question, we need to notice what happens right after that the Pharisees level their criticism. As we might expect, Jesus tells three stories. The final one is the Prodigal. The first two are much shorter, involving a lost coin, and a lost sheep. A valuable coin is lost, and a woman turns her house upside down until she finds it. Then she rejoices. Or again, in a flock of one hundred sheep, one gets lost, and the shepherd goes out of his way to find the one. And then a son, who is lost, but then is found. Always, always, it’s assumed that God is the one searching. Always, always, it’s assumed that we’re the ones who are lost. But the text never, ever says that. Could it be that we’ve been landing wrong in this story?
Perhaps, perhaps, Jesus is saying that God is far more akin to what has been lost or discarded than what has been found. Perhaps God is the precious coin that was lost, and it’s we who are trying to find God. Perhaps God is the sheep that, through our own lack of care, through our inattention, is simply left behind. Maybe sometimes it’s all of us who have to double back, to look for God. And if that sounds plausible, could it be that God is far more akin to the prodigal than we might immediately assume? One point of the parable, then as now, would be to understand God as somehow akin to the prodigal, the one who somehow gets cut out or discarded within the strictures of our religious and moral systems. Maybe that’s what’s happening within the story Jesus is telling.
Let’s work our way into the mind of the prodigal. He is, perhaps, a figure that most of us can recognize from moments of our youth, when we couldn’t wait to be free of the regulation and structure of a home, or a school, or a dead end job. But he’s also a figure for that part within each of us which chafes whenever we’re told what’s good for us, whenever we’re told by someone else what it is we actually want, whenever we’re pressed into a mold that simply doesn’t fit, that doesn’t work. Isn’t the prodigal ultimately a figure for the spirit who yearns to be free of an order that, while not altogether bad, comes to feel claustrophobic? Understood in that way, the prodigal could be the gay kid, or better yet, the trans kid, trapped somewhere in Middle America, knowing that he’ll suffocate and die, emotionally and physically, if he doesn’t get out. The prodigal would be the artist struggling toward creativity in a sea of practicality, where no one quite understands the fierce desire to create something. The prodigal would be the person in the joyless marriage, trying to free him or herself from a sense of entrapment. The prodigal is a figure for all of the restless and reckless souls everywhere who have ever longed to strike out on their own, to test their skill, to see and be something more than what is at hand. Is Jesus suggesting that he, and thus God, somehow understand what that process is like? Is God developing, growing, learning, the way adolescents are asked to develop, learn and grow?
The German poet Rilke imagines him exactly that way. In his poem “Departure of the Prodigal Son,” Rilke imagines the prodigal as one, to quote the poem, “setting forth from all the entanglement that is ours and yet not ours.” He imagines him as one seeking to break away from the burrs and brambles of life, struggling to see afresh what he had ceased to see because of its familiarity. He imagines the prodigal as a movement of the spirit, a journey of faith, setting off into the unknown, into the uncertain, where he risks, and ultimately encounters, failure. He imagines him as one who must become acquainted with humility, with loss, with mending broken things. But most importantly, he imagines the prodigal as one who sets forth again, and again, and again. Rilke rightly notices that while the parable tells us that the prodigal returned, it doesn’t tell us that he stayed. Contrary to received opinions and revered interpretations, Jesus may be telling us in his own slanted and enchanted way that God is somehow discovered within that process. He may be telling us that God too changes and grows.
Wouldn’t that be good news? It would mean that you’re free to grow as God grows in you. It would mean that you’re free to make mistakes, free to learn, and that you’re free to come home whenever you need to. And it would also mean that you’re free to set out again when it comes time. It would mean that you don’t need to be trapped by whatever feels like it is trapping you, and that God is rooting for you when you’re attempting to fly. It would mean that God is with you when it feels like you’re flailing. It would all be a way of saying that as you continually grow and come into yourself, God is continually growing and coming into being within you. That feels like good news in this slanted and enchanted story.
But we need to address one lingering concern. What do we make of the father in that reading? Who is he? And what of the eldest son? What do they have to do with anything? Again, it’s helpful to approach those questions from the side, from the slant, as opposed to straight on. And the way to do it is to recall a tradition of sibling rivalry narratives in the Bible, and especially in the book of Genesis, that Jesus seems to be drawing upon.
In each of the Genesis narratives, one sibling is embraced by God, while the other is rejected in the most painful way imaginable. There’s Cain and Abel. For one reason or another, an offering that Abel presents to God is accepted, while Cain’s is rejected. Cain feels shame and jealousy, and so he murders his brother. There’s Noah and his sons. One of those sons, Ham, has his entire bloodline rejected and disowned by Noah after offending him. There’s Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael is Abraham’s so called illegitimate offspring, born of his concubine. Once Isaac is born, his true heir, Ishmael and his mother are abandoned and left to die in the wilderness. Then there’s Jacob and Esau. Poor Esau is tricked out of his birthright, and Jacob becomes the one beloved of God, while Esau becomes the hated, as the Apostle Paul puts it so memorably in his letter to the Romans. If you think your family is difficult or dysfunctional, you can take comfort from the fact that the families depicted in the Bible are almost invariably worse. They’re viper’s nests of seething resentments and rivalries that last for generations. What’s more, those stories of sibling rivalry were almost always used to explain and justify the social divisions that plagued the biblical world, all those who were not the children, or the real children, of God.
On this understanding, the parable of the Prodigal Son could be understood as Jesus’s attempt to intervene within that entire tradition of sibling bloodletting, that entire tradition of social exclusion. Might Jesus be flipping the script on that entire tradition, such that a careful listener might come to understand that, contrary to received understandings, God was with the exiled member of the rivalry, and that God somehow suffered when Ham and his children were cursed, that God walked with Esau when he was tricked and forced into exile, that God wept and mourned when Ishmael was left to die in the desert. I like to think that Jesus has all those stories of siblings in mind as he tells his story, and that he’s telling a story that will help to heal those rifts. On that reading, the story would be about persuading the Pharisees to quit drawing lines in the sand, to quit their practice of deciding who’s in and who’s out. On that reading, the father would be the Pharisee who opened up a closed religious and moral system to let in the air, to let in the riff raff, to let in all of God’s children. The story would be about a closed religious system allowing God to come back in – for God, Jesus has announced over and over again, dwells with those who fall outside the boundaries of the religious system. It’s something that followers of Jesus have had to learn over and over again – even, perhaps, the Apostle Paul, even, perhaps, you and me.
We in 21st century America know something about sibling rivalries. Is the parable about us as well as the ancient Hebrews? Is it about sorting those rivalries out before they get nasty? Maybe the parable of the prodigal son is finally about all the dispossessed, all the disinherited, who are trying to find their way in the world. Maybe it’s about our American siblings south of the Rio Grande, who wonder why their brothers and sisters up north have grown so spiteful and resentful. Maybe it’s about our refugee brothers and sisters, who, according to some, destabilize the whole household through their presence. Maybe it’s about our tortured racial relationships in this country, where some have been deemed extraneous to the flourishing of the country. Maybe it’s about an underclass of people who have always been treated as second best, and have now internalized it, trying to get away from a dehumanizing situation. Maybe it’s about all those things and more.
But maybe most of all, the parable of the prodigal son is about learning to hear the freedom dreams that stir within each one of our hearts. Maybe it’s about learning to bless those dreams in ourselves, and in others, rather than stifling them, or resenting them. I like to believe that that’s where God finds us all in the parable of the prodigal son.
[1] Graham, Billy, Calling Youth to Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House), 1947. See the sermon “Retreat! Stand! Advance!”
