A few thoughts on some recent Internet Prodigal Son banter, from David Zahl and Will McDavid:
As much as I admire The NY Times, it’s not where I go to read about grace. You? And yet, David Brooks was back at it again this week, talking about the parable of the prodigal son(s) and endorsing grace as an essential factor in crafting social policy for those who’ve squandered their inheritance/potential/goodwill. Check it out:
We live in a divided society in which many of us in the middle- and upper-middle classes are like the older brother and many of the people who drop out of school, commit crimes and abandon their children are like the younger brother. In many cases, we have a governing class of elder brothers legislating programs on behalf of the younger brothers. The great danger in this situation is that we in the elder brother class will end up self-righteously lecturing the poor: “You need to be more like us: graduate from school, practice a little sexual discipline, work harder.”
But the father in this parable exposes the truth that people in the elder brother class are stained, too. The elder brother is self-righteous, smug, cold and shrewd. The elder brother wasn’t really working to honor his father; he was working for material reward and out of a fear-based moralism. The father reminds us of the old truth that the line between good and evil doesn’t run between people or classes; it runs straight through every human heart.
The father also understands that the younger brothers of the world will not be reformed and re-bound if they feel they are being lectured to by unpleasant people who consider themselves models of rectitude.
The true detectives among you don’t need to read the whole column to know that Brooks is drawing heavily from Tim Keller’s reading of the parable (one by no means original to him), which stresses the self-righteousness of the elder brother and underlines, quite brilliantly, the offense of grace in a Type-A setting. Brooks uses Keller’s take as a jumping off point to advocate for the policy-making methodology focusing on “mutual confession and then a mutual turning toward some common project.”
Anyway, in a predictable yet nonetheless disheartening display, no sooner had Brooks published his piece than the objections appeared. If it didn’t sound so blatantly elder-brother-like, we might venture to say that the pushback indicates how successfully Brooks conveyed the radical aspect of the parable. Yet it’s also a lesson in how hardwired we all are for Law. How do we take what is arguably the clearest and most beautiful picture of God’s mercy in the New Testament and turn it into a lesson about works and virtue? In this case we talk about repentance. Cue Rod Dreher:
I mostly agree with Brooks’s point here, but would emphasize that the Prodigal Son repented in humility. In practical terms, that means he recognized the error of his ways and came back with firm intention of changing. As Brooks says, the reconciliation and redemption of the Prodigal Son requires mutuality. If the Father and the Older Brother do not make it possible for the Prodigal to find welcome and restoration, then it won’t happen. On the other hand, the Prodigal must make a decisive act of humility, which is to turn from his life-destroying ways. Notice the Prodigal doesn’t come back expecting his family to forgive and forget, and restore him to his former state. Having tasted the bitterness of his own waywardness, he just wants to do whatever he can to be part of their community again.
Now, we shouldn’t expect those who have erred and done badly with their inheritance to grovel, but there absolutely has to be what Catholics call “firm purpose of amendment” — that is, a strong and sincere desire to turn from one’s errors. I’m not sure how one judges that…
If this sounds reasonable, that’s because it is. But Christ’s parable is not about a reasonable son or a reasonable father or their reasonable relationship. Doubtless Dreher means well, but his line of thinking opens the door for forgiveness to be predicated on proper repentance, or what he calls “firm purpose of amendment” (a milder “desire and resolution” in his ex-tradition’s catechism). There may be other biblical passages you could use to defend such a framework, but this isn’t one–after all, the son isn’t even allowed to finish his speech or declare his intent. So if the phrase “firm purpose” makes you shiver, you’re in good company. It’s a reliable recipe for religious neurosis, one which thrusts a person into the kind of excruciating internal guessing game that drove Martin Luther to despair: How do I know I’ve really repented? What if I say I repent but don’t feel it? What if I feel repentant but don’t act on it? What if I only act on it for a while? What if there’s something I need to repent of that I can’t remember? What if my neighbor’s repentance looks a lot firmer than mine? What if I’m in a coma? You get the idea.
When repentance gets cast as our part of the equation of forgiveness (or reconciliation, or redemption), rather than the God-given way we connect with His prior forgiveness, we dig ourselves into a hole of scrupulosity, that rather outlandish-sounding word for using penance as a tool, or technique, for appropriating grace. It’s telling, too, that earlier in the article Dreher summarizes Brooks’s view as emphasizing the truth that the Kingdom of God is “mostly about love, mercy, and grace.” Hmmm… Some might say it is comprehensively concerned with those three words–and comprehensively concerned with justice, too, such that love and justice coincide perfectly in God. In any case, the “mostly” here should raise an eyebrow. It leaves (too much) room for our inner-elder brother to stretch his legs–and all of us have one. The “mostly” allows space, however minute, for our too-predictably-human “justice” to take control of matters but also, and more fundamentally, because it implies that love and justice are locked in a zero-sum tension. Yet the Prodigal Son story views justice–the younger son’s reconciliation–as something which occurs totally through grace. Or as John Chrysostom commented:
“[W]hen the right time comes for the lost one to be saved, it is time neither for courts, nor for minute examinations, but only for philanthropy and forgiveness. No doctor hesitates to administer medicine to one who suffers in order to demand correction and exact vengeance from him for his disorder. Even if it was altogether fitting for the prodigal son to deliver himself up for punishment, he was punished enough by living in a foreign land.”
We see here an interior compulsion toward repentance, because God knows we all suffer from self-recrimination and manifest self-sabotage. Some Christians may need a hospital to get better, but I for one need, as Dreher so ably (if unsympathetically) puts it, a hospice. And that’s not only growing out of an observably and realistically low anthropology: it’s practical as well. As Christianity’s currently less-than-rosy reputation bears out, a strong focus on “amendment of life” can act as a potent form of denial, allowing us to skip lightly over our problems toward the newer, better versions of ourselves… and reprimand others when they don’t seem as high on progress as we are. Or as low on progress, for those of us who err on the side of proud pessimism. All that to say, going out and lecturing the elder brothers in us won’t work any better than lecturing the youngers–both are invited to the feast, both are assured of their father’s love, and that’s why the father remains, for the story at least, the central figure.
On that note, tomorrow marks the beginning of the 2014 Liberate conference. The theme of the event this year is, not surprisingly, One Way Love. It’s been too long since we posted an excerpt from that wonderful book, so here’s a passage that touches on the dynamics we’re trying to parse:
I remember a recently divorced woman who came to me for counseling. She was consumed by anger at her ex-husband, and it was spilling out into her relationships with everyone around her, including her children. She had plenty of reason to be mad. He had treated her terribly and then abandoned her at a particularly vulnerable time. You could not blame her for her anger.
After she finished sharing, I asked if she thought there was any possibility of forgiveness.
“Forgive him? He would never ask for forgiveness! And unless he asked for it, I would never grant it. And even then, I’d have to really believe it, you know? I’d have to see some real change. We are only called to forgive those who have repented. That’s how God works.”
Oh, really? I remember thinking at the time.
Now, there are plenty of reasons why she might not forgive or be able to forgive her ex-husband, but invoking God as her example would not be one of them. If God forgave only those who sincerely repented and changed their ways, it would be a very short list.
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8 responses to “Lecturing the Prodigal Son(s) in The NY Times”
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Are you preaching to the Galatians or are you preaching to Corinth? Preaching Galatians to the Corinthians comforts the already comfortable. Or, says to the prodigal you are fine in that pig slop.
Brooks was mostly talking about government and wishing that you could have “grace” coming from the government. That is a major confusion of law and gospel. First the government is the institution of the law. It is the curb. Second, right now the government is involved in dispensing all kinds of false grace, just stay in that pig slop of sexual and family dysfunction. Grace that truly restores is not found in the institution of the law, but in the church in Christ. Having this government preach grace would end up not with the welcoming of the prodigal, but the Father sending word for him to stay in the mud. That is a much different conclusion.
I know no other course but to affirm both of these poles within the grace continuum who is the man Jesus Christ. Mark’s rejoinder, “Preaching Galatians to the Corinthians comforts the already comfortable” is perfectly fitting.
This is a great topic for conversation/debate. I tend to agree with your emphasis, in large part, but the thing you don’t want to do is get tempted in your rhetoric to start arguing over an imaginary story in your own head rather than the one Jesus actually tells.
What I mean is, one might imagine the father going off into the far off country himself, searching far and wide, and finally finding and carrying his unrepentant son home in his arms–the son, perhaps, kicking and screaming in the process–until finally they arrive home and the son gratefully repents, having witnessed the recklessly unconditional nature of his father’s love. (And then perhaps the son runs off again the next day and the next, and the father continues to go after him and bring him back! etc, etc.) All of this might be an amazing illustration of the “one way love” scheme–and indeed, a beautiful–even Christian–story it would be.
But it’s not the story Jesus tells. In fairness, the parable of the lost sheep seems to come much closer to that particular idea. But the point here is, for whatever reason (and I suspect Jesus did actually have his reasons), Jesus did not tell the Prodigal Son story that way. In this story, the son actually does something in the far off land which Jesus himself had been urging people to do since the beginning of his ministry: He comes to his senses, gets up and sets out for home (seemingly practicing his apology speech on the way). But while he is still a long way off, and even before he can get out a word, the father runs to meet him, throws his arms around him, and kisses him. Then he actually hears the son’s apology. Then, the father begins preparations for the party.
So again, a profound story about grace it is. And yes, the great climax of the story is the father’s love, not the son’s apology. But there are complexities here that you don’t just want to gloss over: the fact that the son repents (or begins to repent) in the far off land is no mere or random detail. It is in congruity with the message Jesus and John the Baptist (and the prophets for centuries before!) had been preaching all along. The story loses none of its ‘edgy’ grace-ness when it includes this detail. This was probably one of the most offensively subversive stories Jesus told during his ministry. We need not try to make it more so. Not only is this story radical in its proclamation of grace already, but Jesus’ particular way of telling it gives us SO much. More than just an idea or a theological concept to chew on like ‘grace’ or ‘one way love’, what we get is a whole world of grace and meaning and consequences and love that can shape our thoughts and feelings about God for a lifetime.
My concern here is not just with the details of this story but with that more general urge, which many of us have experienced, to gloss over the details of the text in order to make a certain theological point as strongly as we can. Few theologians and preachers are not met with this temptation in their work: to let the world know how uniquely ‘radical’ their particular way of thinking about the gospel is. And yeah, Jesus was radical. But he was also much more balanced in the way he dealt with ideas than we tend to be. And the story of the Prodigal Son is a good example of that.
Gosh, I thought it was obvious that the father’s grace is extravagant. I never believed that ne’er do well younger brother ever really repented. He “came to his senses” when he realized he’d eat better if he ate crow, and headed back practicing the speech he thought was necessary to spring the gate open.
But the even greater grace, for my money, is extended to the elder brother. Remember how chapter 15 begins, with the scribes and Pharisees “grumbling” while they listen in. I loathe them, just like I loathe those older brothers who can’t quite get this grace thing. But there goes the father, who skips the dress down of the older brother I would have delivered, and invites him saying, “son, all that is mine is yours.” Hummph. This is a particularly interesting story when you consider all the other elder brother younger brother stories in the Old Testament. Plenty of younger brothers get over on their elders. Do we ever see a hand stretched out toward the bitter elder siblings like we do here?
The assumption that the younger brother’s planned speech is just a ruse and that he wasn’t repentant is eisegesis, plain and simple. The prodigal son story is parabolic exposition of the scenario taking place in Luke 15 where tax collectors and prostitutes are repenting and flocking to Jesus and the Pharisees are grumbling. Don’t make the younger brother you, just take him as one of the three characters in the parable and interpret the salient features- parables never have more than a couple points to be interpreted, so let’s not dig deeper than Jesus intended.
Well said, Sam!
Yep, Sam is onto something. If a major motion picture were to come out today on the prodigal son story, some of us might prefer to see the son’s decision (to go back home) left out of the script, so that all the more emphasis might be placed on the father’s one-way love. But that’s not how Jesus tells it. Somehow, it seems Jesus means for the son’s repentance to be a central element in the story, however inadequate it might be compared to his crimes (and to the father’s love). The point is not that repentance makes up for your crimes, nor that you must do it to merit forgiveness. Of course not. The point is, if reconciliation (let’s call it ‘two-way love’) with his son is the father’s goal, then forgiveness without repentance is meaningless. Repentance is the only way he can get his son back. His own forgiveness is simply not enough. To equate mere forgiveness with salvation is like painting all of creation as merely a courtroom and God as merely a judge, as though the highest salvation we can receive from him is simply to be ‘let off the hook’. But there’s something deeper happening in Luke 15, and the courtroom is not the operative metaphor. This is a story about a father wanting his son to come home. And the father’s delight is not primarily to forgive/forget what his son has done, but to have him back in his arms again. One-way love is always incomplete and unsatisfied until it becomes two-way love. That is its goal all along.