Lk15v1-2 The NIV has the teachers "muttering" about Jesus' involvement with sinners. Mutter. What is it to mutter? The OED defined it as "to say something in a low or barely audible voice, especially in dissatisfaction or irritation." Muttering is the paradigmatic picture of a peaceless, self-involved, small-minded, God-forgetful mode. It is neither speech not silence, it wants to express discontent without having to dialogue about it, it clings to its injustices but is not brave enough to do anything about them. It does not surrender nor confront, it is the worst of all worlds. It is like a cloud of bees caught in a net, fraught for the one inside the net, and causing uncertainty and helpless distress to those nearby. I am a mutterer. I pray for myself and my muttery mates that the Christian virtues of Eph4v2 patience, humility, gentleness and love might be transubstantiated in my soul, yoked to Christ's, and that I may sit in deeper silence, speak with greater clarity, and mutter less.
Lk15v3-4 🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🌑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑 Be more sheep. Be more shepherd. Though it's not in this parable in the way that it is more explicitly in Jn10v12's account of hired hands by contrast, I'm struck, this morning, by the portrait of ownership which is represented, even taken for granted, in the energetically attentive relationship between the shepherd and the sheep. We are owned by God. The owner attends to the 1%, he pores over the detail, nurturing the little things which make all the difference. Caring for 1% accuracy in the quality of a rented property's finishes would seem obsessive. Maybe we have an obsessive God. The flock is not the homogenised statistical collateral of a fungible asset, just as a home-owned home is no mere property in a collateralised portfolio. To be more shepherd, to be more sheep, my life is not for rent, and thusly I must learn to buy. Unlike the gig economy's Uber-isation of everything to a cosmic spartan shell-and-core shared-ownership scheme, we are eternal stakeholders. This parish is our patch for the long haul. This season is our brief moment to do the doing of imaging particularistic ownership.
Lk15v5-6 Here are some of the actions of Jesus towards me: He Finds me. He Carries me. He Rejoices Over me. He Finds me. He Carries me. He Rejoices Over me. Each starts with my passivity and ends with my response. He is the Good Shepherd, and you will find me here with Him, because he Found me first.
Lk15v7-8 "..more joy.." More. Joy. I tend to think of heaven as flat rate constant total joy already always ~ everlasting joy Is35v10, perfect peace Is26v3. Instantly infinite and incomparable. And yet it is yet possible to be yet more-than. Because there is always more. An incomparable God is a fractal of comparative adjectives.
I'll bang this drum, as much for myself: God is More-Than Mt11v9-10 "Everyone is looking for more-than. Eternity, as set in the heart of man Ec3v11. Eternity is transcendence is more-than. God is more-than. And he desires your more-than. A quick glance at more-thans in the esv: 2Ki6v16 'Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more-than'; Ps40v5 'you have multiplied wondrous deeds, yet they are more-than'; Lk12v23 'Life is more-than'; Lk12v23 'And the body is more-than'; Rm8v37 'No, in all these things we are more-than' .. these verses are more than mere comparative praise. God is more-than, he is overflow, he is superabundance, he is a fractal of constantly more-than. This is what John's disciples went into the wilderness to find. More-than. Ps130v6.
"..who repents.." Something mysterious happens between v6 and v7. The passive becomes active. Being found is repentance? That is the miracle. It is credited to you. "..repentance.." What is repentance, and how do you make it happen. This is no mere apology, it is not worldly sorrow's feeling sorry for itself. A turning. A permanent change. A culture shift. A measurable difference. Being qualitatively other than all previous states. The appreciation that you are a sinner, in a peculiar, bespoke, unique corruption - that conviction is a miracle. A turning-to, which is a being-found and a being-laid-on-shoulders - that is a miracle. A being-rejoiced-over as having repented - that is a miracle. Those in our life, for whom we wish change for, any change, of any lasting degree, any turning from and turning to, any recognition of their glory and depravity - it is all miracle.
"..one sinner.." He singles you out. I tend to think of the lost sheep story as a message for a world generically. As if on a sliding scale of lostness, Jesus rounds up the sheep. As if on a normal distribution curve there is a spread of sheep, scattered at distances from the fold across the countryside, and that the hound of heaven yaps around the periferies to draw them in by degrees. No fam. He singles you out. If you are hearing this, it is for you.
"..rejoicing in heaven.." (NIV) Eternity is explosively responsive. Eagerly waits, plots and nudges. Heaven has skin in the game. The unseen realm is electric with pent up expectation. Any minute now. This is not nothing. One sinner repenting. It never gets old. It is never mundane. There is nothing prosaic about such a rebirth, nothing automatic in such a restoration. It is a high-stakes adventure, a heist movie, a worldcup final, the perfect crime.
"..than the ninety-nine.." is the ninety-nine real? Is there anyone actually in that category? Or it is just a mental state? Those who believe themselves, on account of pride or despair, to be merely the mass, the homogenised status quo, the religious foregone conclusion? Oh to be pitied infinitely, those whose sense of reality is so generic, whose cosmic identity is so static, so left behind, so everyday, so statistical. Being intractably a merely cultural Christian, noodling as a herd in a pluperfect tense, rehearsing the mere image of a thing, propounding an articulation of yesterday's faith which takes you on no journey, lifts you on no shoulders, effects no change in your outlook.
You are the one sheep. And now there is too much meaning on the edges of sight. You are in every single kind of trouble now. Because someone like the good shepherd exists.
Lk15v9-10 What is it to conduct a search? A search is systematic, with a sense of how things in the environment are connected. With an acute sense of time, causation and complexity it discerns possibilities and necessities, with wisdom, patience and decisiveness. A search treats the means and the ends with astonishing value. So too God, when God searches for us. The recent rescue mission to recover the 13 in Thailand's flooded caves has been a picture of Jesus' actions towards us, like lost sheep and lost coins. Jesus discerns where we are trapped, how we are trapped, what dangers we face, and what it takes to bring us home. With skill, patience and disproportionate self-sacrifice, he moves all the furniture to bring us home. And angels rejoice over us as we are found in the dark, as we lie on stretchers and are pulled through fearful waters, angels rejoice over our journey in which He brings us closer home, just as the ripples of joy spread from the caves to the nation to the world. We rejoice, as angels rejoice, for it is wonderful to witness the lost being found.
Lk15v11-12 "Father, give me the share of the property that is coming to me.." Coming to me when you are dead. When you are dead. I wish you were dead. God is dead. And we have killed him. As Oedipus before him, modern man has killed his father and married his mother. Jealous and infantile, narcissistic and perverse, as an entire culture we have seized a premature inheritance to spend on wanton prodigality. We are burning through natural capital, with reckless discontinuity. There will be no third generation, for generationality itself is withering on the vine. Capricious, impatient, patricidal, individualists all. How can we console ourselves? The murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?
Lk15v13-14 In the parable of the prodigal son and the good father we often note that the son is wishing the father dead by asking for his inheritance early. This is true in a way, but I think it is also more complex, in that it is a wish to have things both ways, as it were. If the son were braver or more committed to the logical conclusion of his desires, he would have murdered his father for his inheritance, but he doesn't. He both wants his father to be alive and doesn't want his father to be alive. He wants the bits of the father he wants and doesn't want the bits he doesn't want. He wants the security of a home to come back to but he also wants to be free to live recklessly. Adultery too is like this - a form of wishing your spouse dead by voiding your death-do-us-part vows, whilst still wanting the spouse to be there for the bits you still want. So too are we so often with God. I want God to be there. I don't want God to be dead, I want the security of God. But I don't want the responsibility, I want to be 'free' to live my own arbitrary way. So I don't own a murder of God, I just rob him and run away, and treat Him as a contingency plan. I am put in mind of Levinas' excellent diagnosis of 'the temptation of temptation', the mode in which we still want God, in some way, but we also want to be tempted, through experience, to all that we think God is withholding from us. 'The temptation of temptation may well describe the condition of Western man. In the first place it describes his moral attitudes. He is for an open life, eager to try everything, to experience everything...What tempts the one tempted by temptation is not pleasure but the ambiguity of a situation in which pleasure is still possible but in respect to which the Ego keeps its liberty, has not yet given up its security, has kept its distance.' (Nine Talmudic Readings, pp32-34). The younger son leaves to experience, to gain knowledge, but in doing so falls from the temptation of temptation to temptation to sin, which gathers force and compromises everything, as he realises on the other side of it. We cannot keep God on the mantelpiece for later without alienating ourselves from God. The desire for liberty must be brought to submission to the Father, which is where we will, in fact, find it, but this is a hard death to die.
Lk15v15-16 In so far as Jesus' parables are crafted and have endured as universally relateable myths written by a God who wished to disclose his perspective on humanity's perpetual recurrent condition. Do the incidental details of parables like this one have value in being treated as normative claims? What can be gained by extrapolating applications from this middle movement of the prodigal son's journey?
The salient points of the prodigal son story are typically preached from the beginning and the end, that is, the quitting-home and the being-restored, the tragedy and the happily-ever-after. Preach thus: You have quit, so you, now, be restored. The middle is merely a montage of misc misfortune, a descriptive of a general condition of being-away? Unless it's not so misc.
🗣 Jesus paints a picture of the middle condition in terms of very specific employment and in terms of specific unaided food poverty. I would argue that these details are not nothing, they are not merely ornamental narrative embellishments. The prodigal's predicament could have been other, and been not less poetically severe. He could for example fallen prey to violent attack Lk10v30, conscripted to make bricks Ex5v7-8, suffered bouts of mental ill-health Dn4v33.. I am inclined to press into the notion that the details of the story's middle are chosen and are not incidental.
🐖 1. Prodigal Employment
💸 2. Prodigal Inheritance
🐽💊 1. "he hired himself out..to feed pigs.." If you were to tell this story today, what proverbial job would you give the son? A role which is not only unfortunately underremunerated, nor merely unglamourously unskilled manual outdoors repetitive deadend and smelly, but further, it is job which conjures no pity, but only shame, in the minds of its religiose hearers. To feed pigs is to prop up a systemic and corrupt horror, in cahoots with an appalling mafia in coordinated rebellion against all that is good and true. The prodigal son, to my modern retelling, becomes a drug mule and attracts the antipathy of the Daily Mail's comments section.
🧟♂👨💻 Is this our condition? Am I a drug mule? Ontologically and vocationally, is our being-in-the-world-and-against-God on a spectrum of being-as-drug-mule metaphorically? So, what then, of your actual job, your actual coping mechanism for surviving financially in the world? For, we are living parables. We display sonship or we present as austerity Britain's mortgage zombies, wage slaves of grueling unadventure, utterly vulnerable whilst being unpitiably complicit in an horrific industry.
❓ What employment could you do that would display to the world the opposite image to that of pig-feeding? What the necessary and sufficient conditions that define pig-feeding and it's opposite, and how do you make that happen, for yourself and for others?
💸 2. "no one gave him anything.." The prodigal son is a trust fund tragedy, an ill gotten rich-young-man Mk10v22 It is hard to be wealthy, it is harder still to be only the second-hand beneficiary of another's wealth, it is harder still yet to have formerly been the second-hand beneficiary of another's wealth. With inherited wealth there is power without honour, momentary power, it is transparently dead capital, it is a lottery splurge, it conjures only transactional relationships and opaque shades of inautheticity everywhere. v30 the older brother goes on to accuse his sibling of spending the inheritance on prosititutes. Maybe he did. Certainly, paradigmatically he did. In whatever way he spent his inheritance, it was invested in no loyal or lasting relationships. I speculate that inherited wealth cannot fund durable relationships. And I would question what else is more important in life beside durable relationships?
🤒🏚 The housing market today is forcing a worst-of-both-worlds situation on inheritance, where atomised individuals suffer inter-generational dependence without qualitative relationship. The millennial precariat live in a land of famine ignobly suspended by the long tendrils of the bank of mum and dad. This inheritance conundrum is symptom of a problem, rather than the problem itself in isolation.
❓ Nevertheless, Jesus chooses this portrait of inheritance to portray the unChristian unKingdom. A prodigal culture rests on its laurels, spends its past, burns its future. This need not be. How should we then, as literal families and as churches and cultures at large, image inter-generational economies which represent the Kingdom? What is the opposite of the prodigal's inheritance? Perhaps an inter-generational co-labouring, a mutual and cooperative co-stewarding of working capital, the extension of united project.
Lk15v17-18 I am reading Augustine at the moment, a great complement to the story of the prodigal son, a detailed first-personal articulation of some of the what-it-is-like and why we so often leave the source of our life: 'I began to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to love something. I had no liking for the safe path without pitfalls, for although my real need was for you, my God, who are the food of the soul, I was not aware of this hunger. I felt no need for the food that does not perish, not because I had had my fill of it, but because the more I was starved of it the less palatable it seemed. Because of this my soul fell sick. It broke out in ulcers and looked about desperately for some material, worldly means of relieving the itch which they had caused.' (3.1) In order for the son to tentatively make his way home, (albeit with a pre-recorded narrative about his sub-status before the father) he had to 'come to his senses'. This in itself is an act of grace, a breakthrough, because alienation from God begets more alienation, the gravitational pull of distance from God is greater distance from God - Eph4v17-19, hardened hearts produce further distortion. The food of life seems unattractive from far away. The revelation, the 'sense' of the beauty of the Father's house is a work of the Holy Spirit, and something to pray for. We pray first and foremost that those we know (and ourselves included) would be 'brought to our senses' by the Spirit, seeing as an epiphany the reality of the spiritual squalour of our surroundings, and the desire, previously unattractive, for the father's house.
Lk15v19-20 Do Nature and Grace have genders in your imagination? They do to Malick and they did to the Jews. Kenneth Bailey suggests it might have been acceptable for a mother to run and embrace.. I'm enjoying Gawvi's recent Fight for Me. There is a lion-lamb fatherhood which fights for the prodigal. He's so connected to you, he could be your wifi.
Lk15v21-22 Here, in v21, in the presence of the father, the son recites and reinforces the story that he rehearsed in v19. This is his self-understanding: "I am no longer worthy" I might have qualified as a son or daughter once, but not any more. The story we tell ourselves, tell others and tell God: I think God probably will have me back in his household because I know He is kind and has resources, but I also know that I've betrayed our intimacy and can't come back in to the heart of the household. I profess faith, I am a Christian, but I exist in the peripheries of God's household. That's ok, I don't want to draw much attention to myself. I want to keep my head down, keep my shame pressed quietly away, and get on with some busy tasks. I am grateful just to keep afloat. I am grateful not to be in the gutter. I am okay with being a servant. And the reminder or suggestion that I was once a daughter is something I'd rather not look at because it just brings into the light the great fuck-up that I made of it, a disaster in my character that can never be fully forgotten or resolved. I will always be the one who ruined everything, and we all know it. I will take your kindness in taking me back as a servant and I'm really grateful. There is nothing more to be said.
v22 But. But The Father. But God.
Lk15v23-24 ⚰ "was dead.." The prodigal son returns to a village where law and tradition dictated he should die. Die of shame and stoning, for his assault on the family's name and standing. There is something kamikaze in his half-starved suicide mission, feigning repentance out of a reckless will to stagger on a little further. 🧟♂ When did he start dying? When did you?
How many people are waiting for death?
Mortals merely moping morbid
Steely nerved rigor mortis
Deadmen walking, good as dead
Signed on down the dotted mortgage
Orderly martyrs for no cause
🏥 And when does death begin?
All postnatal care is palliative
All life is death warmed up waiting
Because everything falls apart
There must be more to life that facing death
Being is more than the sum of sum moribundus
If. I am Lazarus.
If you believe this.
"..eat and celebrate .. celebrate."
🎂🥂🎉📣🎷🥧🌺🎆🎊
Celebrate, conspicuously to the point of controversy. (v25-32)
Lk15v25-26 Approaching the house, the house of all Being, trying to read it, trying to discern the semiotic meaning of its parts and sides and faces. I want to read the signs. What does the music mean? Who is playing it and why? What is encoded? Why do things look so astir today when yesterday they did not? I don't understand the silences and I don't understand the noise. What does it all mean? Am I interpreting too much or too little? And what does it mean for me? Where do I place myself in this scene? Should I go in or should I retreat? I'm straining here. This underexpected event is intruding on the day's events. I sure I'll sleep badly tonight. Who can I ask to help me interpret this scene? What advice do they have for how I should place myself in its meaning? Who can help me both understand what is happening and how to hold myself before it? I know my hermeneutic is one of suspicion and my sense of entitlement is well developed. I feel myself teetering on the edge of a rash decision. Where is wisdom to teach me the meaning of the song, the skill of the dance, the joy of othered celebration? This is a prayer. Amen.
Lk15v27-28 🛌 Yesterday I had two separate discussions about bespoke welcome, and the structure needed, as well as the discernment needed, in various households we know.
🆓 Some older brother older guests are so neurotically conscientious that the hard-conversation that has to be had is to forbid that they try to pay for their stay. They need to know it is imperative that they enjoy to dwell richly, and to know that by their very storied dazzling unique human presence they have supplied abundantly more than the value that justifies the trivial cost of hosting. Moreover, a guilty transactional paying-for rarely reflects the actual market value of what has been received and so sullies the exchange to the diminution of an otherwise priceless transaction - in this way the grace of the commons is undermined.
💱 Some younger brother younger guests are so low in trait conscientiousness that the hard-conversation that has to be had is to signpost them towards their under-realised ability to participate in a reciprocal appreciation that there is a cost and there is a benefit; that their fullest humanness would be found in the joining the dance of cohosting in all of life. Freeloading is a form of inert being, a dull death by passivity, a nuclear narcissism that must be prised open ~ as such, an allergy to submission and an aversion to structure is constitutive of immaturity which vandalises the commons.
👨👦👦 The father heart of God comes out to meet both forms of rebellion, he ministers to both immaturities in his sons, he pays it forward, he initiates, he has bespoke grace for these two pathologies. So we, dynamically, responsively, proactively, diversely must likewise love a heterogeneously dependent world to whom we minister a fatherheart through a home's hospitality, through the nuanced structure of office management, through the decisive leadership of church life.
Lk15v29-30 Just as the Father is not the narrative that we tell ourselves as younger brothers (v19, 21) so too the Father is not the narrative that (older brother) others speak over us, by their words or deeds, omissions or commissions, their one-sided theology or their own unresolved emotions or insecurities. Others will declare us 'squanders' as the last word about ourselves, one way or another, which will re-enforce the 'not worthy' loop. (And as older brothers we are guilty of speaking untruths about others and God by our deeds, even if not our words).
But God, still. But the Father. Luckily he can v32 out-repeat us with a different story, with the resurrection after death, the Word after the last word.
Lk15v31-32 👨👦 "Son, you are always with me.." JP likes to adjure maritals to never say never, never say always - it's always hyperbole, it always escalates. But God. God is always always with me, no hyperbole, he is permanently there, God's relentless dogged just-thereness is for always, hell or high water, God is very withness, he is total wherewithal, he is inconveniently in-all and through-all. Cosmically pervasive Eph 4v6 hello, Col1v17 still here, Rm11v36, Ps139v8 God is there for you.. like the Soft Border Patrol (see 27:00-28:30)
🌌 "..all that is mine is yours." Is it? How is it? What is this "all" of which you speak, and how exactly it is mine? What does God have, and how do I experience having-it-too? Because, in this life, it doesn't feel like I have all things. In dichotomising the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the profane, the worthy and the everyday, I tend to think of God's omnipotent provision extend to a range of spiritual good and services only, as God possesses a great storehouse of all the secondary things, warm-fuzzies, twinkly key-changes, vague encouragement, recreational communing. But the primary things? Food, shelter, sanitation.. those are all privatised, subject to availability, subject to market conditions, subject to the lottery of your own very great capacity to wreck and waste yourself.
Not so.
💯❌💯 At 41, we [seek to] operate on the basis of abundance, rather than squabbling over scarcity. The allness of all-you-need, the right amount, at the right time, it is certainly available, and more than available and more than enough, and is only ever multiplied by sharing. All that pertains to life, all that leads to flourishing, it is all ours.
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