Εδώ μπορείτε να διαβάσετε (στα αγγλικά) τις πρώτες 16 σελίδες
του βιβλίου "The Prodigal God" του Tim Keller,
όπου μας παρουσιάζεται η παραβολή του σπλαχνικού (άσωτου) Πατέρα με
έναν πολύ εμπνευσμένο, "φρέσκο" τρόπο.
του βιβλίου "The Prodigal God" του Tim Keller,
όπου μας παρουσιάζεται η παραβολή του σπλαχνικού (άσωτου) Πατέρα με
έναν πολύ εμπνευσμένο, "φρέσκο" τρόπο.
prod-i-gal / adjective
1. recklessly extravagant
2. having spent everything
the
Parable
Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32
(Based on the New International Version, with some verses
translated by the author.)
1 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.” 3 Then Jesus told them this
parable. . . .
11 Jesus continued, “There was a man who
had two sons. 12 The younger one said to his
father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’
So he divided his property between them.
13 “Not long after that, the younger son got
together all he had, set off for a far country
and there squandered his wealth in wild living.
14 After he had spent everything, there
was a severe famine in that whole country, and
he began to be in need. 15 So he went and
hired himself out to a citizen of that country,
who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. 16
He longed to fill his stomach with the pods
that the pigs were eating, but no one gave
him anything. 17 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. 23
Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have
a feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine
was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is
found.’ So they began to celebrate.
25 “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field.
When he came near the house, he heard music
and dancing. 26 So he called one of the servants
and asked him what was going on.
27 “ ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and
your father has killed the fattened calf because
he has him back safe and sound.’
28 “The elder brother became angry and refused
to go in. So his father went out and
pleaded with him. 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. 30 But when
this son of yours who has squandered your
property with prostitutes comes home, you
kill the fattened calf for him!’
31 “ ‘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.’ ”
Chapter One
The People Around Jesus
“All gathering around to hear him.”
Two Kinds of People
MOST readings of this parable have concentrated
on the flight and return of the younger
brother—the “Prodigal Son.” That misses the real
message of the story, however, because there are two
brothers, each of whom represents a different way to
be alienated from God, and a different way to seek
acceptance into the kingdom of heaven.
It is crucial to notice the historical setting that
the author provides for Jesus’s teaching. In the first
two verses of the chapter, Luke recounts that there
were two groups of people who had come to listen
to Jesus. First there were the “tax collectors and sin-
ners.” These men and women correspond to the
younger brother. They observed neither the moral
laws of the Bible nor the rules for ceremonial purity
followed by religious Jews. They engaged in “wild living.”
Like the younger brother, they “left home” by
leaving the traditional morality of their families and of
respectable society. The second group of listeners was
the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law,” who were
represented by the elder brother. They held to the
traditional morality of their upbringing. They studied
and obeyed the Scripture. They worshipped faithfully
and prayed constantly.
With great economy Luke shows how different
each group’s response was to Jesus. The progressive
tense of the Greek verb translated “were gathering”
conveys that the attraction of younger brothers to
Jesus was an ongoing pattern in his ministry. They
continually flocked to him. This phenomenon puzzled
and angered the moral and the religious. Luke summarizes
their complaint: “This man welcomes sinners
and [even] eats with them.” To sit down and eat with
someone in the ancient Near East was a token of acceptance.
“How dare Jesus reach out to sinners like
that?” they were saying. “These people never come
to our services! Why would they be drawn to Jesus’s
teaching? He couldn’t be declaring the truth to them,
as we do. He must be just telling them what they want
to hear!”
So to whom is Jesus’s teaching in this parable
directed? It is to the second group, the scribes and
Pharisees. It is in response to their attitude that Jesus
begins to tell the parable. The parable of the two
sons takes an extended look at the soul of the elder
brother, and climaxes with a powerful plea for him to
change his heart.
Throughout the centuries, when this text is taught
in church or religious education programs, the almost
exclusive focus has been on how the father freely receives
his penitent younger son. The first time I heard
the parable, I imagined Jesus’s original listeners’ eyes
welling with tears as they heard how God will always
love and welcome them, no matter what they’ve done.
We sentimentalize this parable if we do that. The targets
of this story are not “wayward sinners” but religious
people who do everything the Bible requires.
Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders
as with moral insiders. He wants to show them
their blindness, narrowness, and self-righteousness,
and how these things are destroying both their own
souls and the lives of the people around them. It is
a mistake, then, to think that Jesus tells this story
primarily to assure younger brothers of his unconditional
love.
No, the original listeners were not melted into
tears by this story but rather they were thunderstruck,
offended, and infuriated. Jesus’s purpose is
not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories.
Through this parable Jesus challenges what nearly
everyone has ever thought about God, sin, and salvation.
His story reveals the destructive self-centeredness
of the younger brother, but it also condemns the elder
brother’s moralistic life in the strongest terms. Jesus is
saying that both the irreligious and the religious are
spiritually lost, both life-paths are dead ends, and that
every thought the human race has had about how to
connect to God has been wrong.
Why People Like Jesus but Not the Church
Both older brothers and younger brothers are with us
today, in the same society and often in the very same
family.
Frequently the oldest sibling in a family is the
parent-pleaser, the responsible one who obeys the
parental standards. The younger sibling tends to be
the rebel, a free spirit who prefers the company and
admiration of peers. The first child grows up, takes
a conventional job, and settles down near Mom and
Dad, while the younger sibling goes off to live in
the hip-shabby neighborhoods of New York and Los
Angeles.
These natural, temperamental differences have
been accentuated in more recent times. In the early
nineteenth century industrialization gave rise to a
new middle class—the bourgeois—which sought legitimacy
through an ethic of hard work and moral
rectitude. In response to perceived bourgeois hypocrisy
and rigidity, communities of bohemians
arose, from Henri Murger’s 1840s Paris to the
Bloomsbury Group of London, the Beats of Greenwich
Village, and the indie-rock scenes of today.
Bohemians stress freedom from convention and
personal autonomy.
To some degree the so-called culture wars are
playing out these same conflicting temperaments and
impulses in modern society. More and more people
today consider themselves non-religious or even antireligious.
They believe moral issues are highly complex
and are suspicious of any individuals or institutions
that claim moral authority over the lives of others.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the rise of this secular
spirit there has also been considerable growth in conservative,
orthodox religious movements. Alarmed by
what they perceive as an onslaught of moral relativism,
many have organized to “take back the culture,”
and take as dim a view of “younger brothers” as the
Pharisees did.
So whose side is Jesus on? In The Lord of the Rings,
when the hobbits ask the ancient Treebeard whose
side he is on, he answers: “I am not altogether on
anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my
side. . . . [But] there are some things, of course, whose
side I’m altogether not on.”3 Jesus’s own answer to
this question, through the parable, is similar. He is
on the side of neither the irreligious nor the religious,
but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly
deadly spiritual condition.
It is hard for us to realize this today, but when
Christianity first arose in the world it was not called a
religion. It was the non-religion. Imagine the neighbors
of early Christians asking them about their faith.
“Where’s your temple?” they’d ask. The Christians
would reply that they didn’t have a temple. “But how
could that be? Where do your priests labor?” The
Christians would have replied that they didn’t have
priests. “But . . . but,” the neighbors would have
sputtered, “where are the sacrifices made to please
your gods?” The Christians would have responded
that they did not make sacrifices anymore. Jesus himself
was the temple to end all temples, the priest to
end all priests, and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.4
No one had ever heard anything like this. So the
Romans called them “atheists,” because what the
Christians were saying about spiritual reality was
unique and could not be classified with the other religions
of the world. This parable explains why they
were absolutely right to call them atheists.
The irony of this should not be lost on us, standing
as we do in the midst of the modern culture wars.
To most people in our society, Christianity is religion
and moralism. The only alternative to it (besides some
other world religion) is pluralistic secularism. But from
the beginning it was not so. Christianity was recognized
as a tertium quid, something else entirely.
The crucial point here is that, in general, religiously
observant people were offended by Jesus, but those
estranged from religious and moral observance were
intrigued and attracted to him. We see this throughout
the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life. In
every case where Jesus meets a religious person and a
sexual outcast (as in Luke 7) or a religious person and
a racial outcast (as in John 3–4) or a religious person
and a political outcast (as in Luke 19), the outcast is
the one who connects with Jesus and the elder-brother
type does not. Jesus says to the respectable religious
leaders “the tax collectors and the prostitutes enter
the kingdom before you” (Matthew 21:31).
Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious
while offending the Bible-believing, religious
people of his day. However, in the main, our churches
today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders
Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary
churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We
tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic
people. The licentious and liberated or the broken
and marginal avoid church. That can only mean
one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the
practice of our parishioners do not have the same
effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not
be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our
churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they
must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like
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