Faith Lessons by Ray Vander Laan: On the Prodigal Son and Thinking the Eastern Way, Part a
The Western mode of thought comes from the ancient Greeks. We think abstractly. We like to take what we learn apart, see how it’s made, and extract the underlying principles.
RVL’s students in high school have to dissect a frog in their biology classes. When they cut a frog apart and look inside, they learn many truths about the frog. They learn how his heart works, how his lungs work, and so on. They never learn who his girlfriend is. You can only learn who the frog’s mate is by observing him in the wild. You can’t take him out of the pond and learn how he lives.
The Western approach to a frog is to dissect it. The Eastern approach is to learn the frog’s story. Both approaches gain truths. But you can’t truly understand much of what’s written in the Bible unless you study it in its native environment before you take it apart. After all, many of the scriptures were written by Easterners for Easterners.
Consider the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
(Luke 15:17-22) “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18 I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.’ 20 So he got up and went to his father.“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.21 “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’22 “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.”
Notice that the father ran to the son. In Palestine, fathers do not run. It’s considered extraordinarily undignified. And they certainly don’t run toward a sinful son. Rather, honor requires that the son come to the father. For the father to run toward the son, before the son has apologized, would have been shameful. And yet this father was willing to suffer humiliation just to reach his son a few minutes sooner.
The father embraced the son before he expressed his repentance. Indeed, the son only intended to ask for a job so he could eat. He had no intention of asking for forgiveness, only a little mercy.
We typically ignore both the cultural environment of the story and its textual environment. The story is preceded with —
(Luke 15:1-2) Now the tax collectors and “sinners” were all gathering around to hear him. 2 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
What did the father do in the story? He ate with the prodigal son — a son who’d been shamed and humbled. The father suffered humiliation to do so. And who is the father?
The father is God. And who was suffering shame for eating with humble sinners? Jesus. Jesus was doing exactly what the father does in the story — hurrying to meet sinners coming toward him, before they even realize how much grace is available — and eating with them, in that culture, a sign of acceptance and even protection.
Jesus was claiming to be God — and to be a God who acted in this wondrous way, a way of behavior utterly foreign to those who criticized him. Indeed, his critics were being caricatured as the older brother —
(Luke 15:29) But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.”
This is a rebuke. This older son never learned to be like his father and reacted to his brother’s return selfishly and lovelessly. And yet God is gracious even to the older brother —
(Luke 15:31-32) “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'”
Imagine being in the crowd and hearing Jesus treat both the “sinners” and Pharisees with such compassion, while putting himself in God’s place. It would have been obvious that the Pharisees were God’s children, but children who were severe disappointments who had totally misunderstood their father’s heart. And the God that Jesus portrays would be far more attractive than the God presented by the Pharisees.
Faith Lessons by Ray Vander Laan: On the Prodigal Son and Thinking the Eastern Way, Part b
Now, there’s a much more subtle point that Jesus makes, that the teachers of the law would likely have picked up. In the Psalms, nearly every metaphor used for God is about his power, his strength, and his holiness. But three metaphors are used of God’s gentleness —(Psa 23:1-3) A psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3 he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.(Psa 131) A song of ascents. Of David. My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. 2 But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. 3 O Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore.
(Psa 103:13-14) As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; 14 for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.
David compares God to a shepherd, a mother, and to a father to show his gentleness and compassion. In Luke 15, Jesus tells three parables about eating with sinners —
(Luke 15:4) “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lo”st sheep until he finds it?”
(Luke 15:8) “Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?”
(Luke 15:11) Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons.”
God is compassionate toward his people — even the sinners — as a shepherd cares about each of his sheep, as a mother guards a coin, and as a father loves an irresponsible son.
In the Old Testament, God speaks harshly of the people’s leaders, calling them bad shepherds.
(Ezek 34:8-9) As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock, 9 therefore, O shepherds, hear the word of the LORD:
By comparing himself to a good shepherd, Jesus implicitly compares his critics to the wicked shepherds in Ezekiel who did not search for God’s flock — leading to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. The parable surely stung.
Barclay notes that married women in the First Century wore ten coins on a chain, rather as women today wear a wedding ring. The coins were so important to a woman that they couldn’t be taken from her, even to pay a debt. The loss of a coin was not only a financial disaster, it would be deeply embarrassing that she failed to protect this symbol of her marriage. Imagine her husband coming home and asking how she could have lost the coin had she not taken the necklace off — and why take it off?!
Jesus taught at several levels at once. If we abstract the parables, reducing them to: “God loves people” or “God wants all to be saved,” we lose much of the message. The message is rich and complex, and bears repeated study and reflection at multiple levels. We musthagah the lesson — not reduce it to abstractions.
RVL says that the Jewish approach to the parable would be to ponder it for months, asking daily, “Did I live the parable today? Which character in the story was I?” It’s much more than a life-application moral at the end. It’s to enter the story to try to see myself through God’s eyes as Jesus reveals God to us. Hagah the story.
Church of Christ application
I grew up in the Churches of Christ. I attended David Lipscomb College. And when I finished college, my view of Jesus was that he came to earth to teach some simple moral lessons and to die on the cross so we could be saved via the Five-Step Plan of Salvation. Our job is to pursue God by getting the steps exactly right and then living a moral life, centered on regular church attendance involving 5 acts of worship. These parables were conventionally interpreted to mean that our churches should have “lost sheep” ministries to recover members who’ve become irregular in their attendance.
Jesus tells us that, rather than sitting back and waiting for us to repent and come to him, God pursues us, even to the point of suffering humiliation. God searches furiously and desperately for sinners, like a wife searching for her lost coin in a dark room before her husband gets home and asks how she could have been so careless! God goes into the desert alone, searching for a sheep for fear that the sheep might die — even though the shepherd, wandering the wilderness alone at night, puts himself in danger of hyenas and lions. He risks his own life for the sheep who can’t survive without him.
God does not, as a condition to saving us, give us challenges and tests to see whether we truly love him. God leaves the comfort of heaven to seek those who need him — even though they are impenitent sinners who no more deserve his forgiveness than the prodigal son. God is willing to be humiliated by eating with sinners — in a culture where eating with someone implies acceptance. God is willing to risk the embarrassment of running toward an impenitent son, embrace him, and wrap him in new clothes, because he can’t bear being separated.
Jesus is God. Jesus tells us and then shows us who God is. And yet we play the role of the elder son, resentful that the Father may actually forgive those less obedient than we. We feel unappreciated when God lavishes his love on sinners, and wonder where our kid goat is? Haven’t we been loyal? Haven’t we followed the rules? Why would the Father embrace those who don’t try as hard as we do?
As a result, we re-interpret God to be a God just barely gracious enough to approve us, and certainly not gracious enough to approve others. Our God is a God who waits on people to come to him in perfect obedience to all five steps. Our God keeps his pride … his dignity. Our God would never eat with sinners.
And yet … and yet God came to earth, took the form of a man, and suffered shame and humiliation, showing us his true character. And the lesson is that we should be like God.
The character in the story we should play is someone who used to be like the older brother but is now like God. And like God, we should be looking for prodigal sons, on the road but not yet all the way home, rushing toward them to embrace them, showing them a grace far beyond anything they imagine they deserve. And if we suffer embarrassment because of it, that’s good. It just makes us that much more like Jesus link
Three Worlds Notes
Luke 15
LITERARY WORLD:
Observations:
Luke 15
LITERARY WORLD:
Observations:
1. It would seem important to say that this is part of a larger unit. Luke 15 really has three parables (the lost sheep, the lost son) that work like one parable with three parts. Verse 1 says “Jesus spoke to them this parable,” and then the rest of the chapter is in red letters. Since “the primary point of a parable is that a parable has one primary point” (class notes ), it seems best to treat the whole chapter as one parable with one main point. Paragraph divisions can get in the way!
2. Connecting the three stories as one, but as in a progression, you notice a decrease in percentage of who was lost (one out of a hundred sheep; one out of ten coins, then one of two sons. This might suggest that lost people really matter to God, no matter how many there are.
3. The whole parable is addressed specifically to elders and teachers. It feels like the point of the parable is that they should see themselves as the judgemental older brother. The parable is told as a response to “Jesus welcome sinners and eats with them” (15:2)
4. I wonder if the prodigal son really visited prostitutes as the elder son accused him. It doesn’t SAY that earlier.
The story reads like classic art, even a poem, or well-thought-out literature or a movie
Climax is profound..but in a way, we are left hanging (Did the older brother ever rejoice?).
6. In an outline of Luke as a book, this section comes under the heading that one writer called “On the Road To Jerusalem.” This may mean that everything that happens in this section has a sense of urgency.
7. The whole context of the broader section (Luke 14-15)has an emphasis on parties/ banquets. This could be intertextuality, intercalation (Capon, page 285). Hmm, why would God throw a party?
8. The whole parable is structured as a huge chiasm, suggesting the theme is resurrection. Source: http://heritagefellowship.net/_teachings/hcf_091227_prodigal_son_handout.pdf
9. In Matthew 18:12-14 There is a parallel parable to the lost sheep. The main difference there is the sheep “wandered off,” as opposed to being “lost” in Luke. This might raise the question of each writer’s “targeted theological purpose.” That whole chapter in Matthew seems full of pleas for forgiveness and restoration, as does the Luke chapter.
HISTORICAL WORLD:
1)All three “lost” persons were “outcasts” in the Bible’s historical world: A shepherd was considered dirty(“Faith Lessons” video: “The Lord is My Shepherd”), women were not were not highly honored, and a son who had done unclean things was to be shunned.
(Summers, Commentary on Luke. p.118 and Bible Background Commentary, online). This even suggests that Jesus was talking a risk with his audience by having the “God figure” in the story an unrespectable person: dirty shepherd, woman…or a father who would seem effeminate by running in public (in that historical world.)
2. The prodigal asking for his inheritance early was like saying “Dad, I wish you were dead: a grave insult. The father putting a ring on the prodigal’s finger was the equivalent to him giving his son his credit card, a radical restoration (class notes 8/17).
3.Eating pig food would not be kosher for a Jew, it must have been humiliating. Or had he quit being a Jew at that point? (Bounded set)
3. The father killing the calf was an intertextuality to Old Testament sacrifices.
CONTEMPORARY WORLD:
1.Do I love unconditionally like all three God figures in the parable(s)?
2.Who am I in the story? The elder brother?
3. If Jesus told the story today, what images would he use? A lost computer, credit card, and mother?
4 As a mother, would I risk my reputation by doing something taboo like running in public, if my wayward child returned home?
5. Capon (chapter four) calls this one of the “misnamed parables.” If we call it the Prodigal Son, wd focus on the human. If we call it the Prodigal Father (Prodigal meaning “lavish or excessive” we apply it by focusing more on “am I radically loving like God the Father, taking initiative to seek lost or wayward sons?” than “Which brother am I”?
Through the prophet Isaiah, God spoke of the Temple as ?a house of prayer for all the nations? 
