Part 5 (1/2)

Pierre Grelot, on the other hand, has pointed out that the figure of the second brother is quite crucial, and he is therefore of the opinion-rightly, in my judgment-that the most accurate designation would be the parable of the two brothers. This relates directly to the situation which prompted the parable, which Luke 15:1f. presents as follows: ”Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, 'This man receives sinners and eats with them.'” Here we meet two groups, two ”brothers”: tax collectors and sinners on one hand, Pharisees and scribes on the other. Jesus responds with three parables: the parable of the lost sheep and the ninety-nine who remained at home; the parable of the lost drachma; and finally he begins anew, saying: ”A man had two sons” (15:11). The story is about both sons.

In recounting this parable, the Lord is invoking a tradition that reaches way back into the past, for the motif of the two brothers runs through the entire Old Testament. Beginning with Cain and Abel, it continues down through Ishmael and Isaac to Esau and Jacob, only to be reflected once more in a modified form in the behavior of the eleven sons of Jacob toward Joseph. The history of those chosen by G.o.d is governed by a remarkable dialectic between pairs of brothers, and it remains as an unresolved question in the Old Testament. In a new hour of G.o.d's dealings in history, Jesus took up this motif again and gave it a new twist. In Matthew there is a text about two brothers that is related to our parable: one brother says he wants to do the father's will, but does not actually carry it out; the second says no to the father's will, but afterward he repents and carries out the task he had been given to do (cf. Mt 21:2832). Here too it is the relations.h.i.+p between sinners and Pharisees that is at issue; here too the text is ultimately an appeal to say Yes once more to the G.o.d who calls us.

Let us now attempt to follow the parable step by step. The first figure we meet is that of the prodigal son, but right at the beginning we also see the magnanimity of the father. He complies with the younger son's wish for his share of the property and divides up the inheritance. He gives freedom. He can imagine what the younger son is going to do, but he lets him go his way.

The son journeys ”into a far country.” The Church Fathers read this above all as interior estrangement from the world of the father-the world of G.o.d-as interior rupture of relation, as the great abandonment of all that is authentically one's own. The son squanders his inheritance. He just wants to enjoy himself. He wants to scoop life out till there is nothing left. He wants to have ”life in abundance” as he understands it. He no longer wants to be subject to any commandment, any authority. He seeks radical freedom. He wants to live only for himself, free of any other claim. He enjoys life; he feels that he is completely autonomous.

Is it difficult for us to see clearly reflected here the spirit of the modern rebellion against G.o.d and G.o.d's law? The leaving behind of everything we once depended on and the will to a freedom without limits? The Greek word used in the parable for the property that the son dissipates means ”essence” in the vocabulary of Greek philosophy. The prodigal dissipates ”his essence,” himself.

At the end it is all gone. He who was once completely free is now truly a slave-a swineherd, who would be happy to be given pig feed to eat. Those who understand freedom as the radically arbitrary license to do just what they want and to have their own way are living in a lie, for by his very nature man is part of a shared existence and his freedom is shared freedom. His very nature contains direction and norm, and becoming inwardly one with this direction and norm is what freedom is all about. A false autonomy thus leads to slavery: In the meantime history has taught us this all too clearly. For Jews the pig is an unclean animal, which means that the swineherd is the expression of man's most extreme alienation and dest.i.tution. The totally free man has become a wretched slave.

At this point the ”conversion” takes place. The prodigal son realizes that he is lost-that at home he was free and that his father's servants are freer than he now is, who had once considered himself completely free. ”He went into himself,” the Gospel says (Lk 15:17). As with the pa.s.sage about the ”far country,” these words set the Church Fathers thinking philosophically: Living far away from home, from his origin, this man had also strayed far away from himself. He lived away from the truth of his existence.

His change of heart, his ”conversion,” consists in his recognition of this, his realization that he has become alienated and wandered into truly ”alien lands,” and his return to himself. What he finds in himself, though, is the compa.s.s pointing toward the father, toward the true freedom of a ”son.” The speech he prepares for his homecoming reveals to us the full extent of the inner pilgrimage he is now making. His words show that his whole life is now a steady progress leading ”home”-through so many deserts-to himself and to the father. He is on a pilgrimage toward the truth of his existence, and that means ”homeward.” When the Church Fathers offer us this ”existential” exposition of the son's journey home, they are also explaining to us what ”conversion” is, what sort of sufferings and inner purifications it involves, and we may safely say that they have understood the essence of the parable correctly and help us to realize its relevance for today.

The father ”sees the son from far off” and goes out to meet him. He listens to the son's confession and perceives in it the interior journey that he has made; he perceives that the son has found the way to true freedom. So he does not even let him finish, but embraces and kisses him and orders a great feast of joy to be prepared. The cause of this joy is that the son, who was already ”dead” when he departed with his share of the property, is now alive again, has risen from the dead; ”he was lost, and is found” (Lk 15:32).

The Church Fathers put all their love into their exposition of this scene. The lost son they take as an image of man as such, of ”Adam,” who all of us are-of Adam whom G.o.d has gone out to meet and whom he has received anew into his house. In the parable, the father orders the servants to bring quickly ”the first robe.” For the Fathers, this ”first robe” is a reference to the lost robe of grace with which man had been originally clothed, but which he forfeited by sin. But now this ”first robe” is given back to him-the robe of the son. The feast that is now made ready they read as an image of the feast of faith, the festive Eucharist, in which the eternal festal banquet is antic.i.p.ated. To cite the Greek text literally, what the first brother hears when he comes home is ”symphony and choirs”-again for the Fathers an image for the symphony of the faith, which makes being a Christian a joy and a feast.

But the kernel of the text surely does not lie in these details; the kernel is now unmistakably the figure of the father. Can we understand him? Can a father, may a father act like this? Pierre Grelot has drawn attention to the fact that Jesus is speaking here on a solidly Old Testament basis: The archetype of this vision of G.o.d the Father is found in Hosea 11:19. First the text speaks of Israel's election and subsequent infidelity: ”My people abides in infidelity; they call upon Baal, but he does not help them” (Hos 11:2). But G.o.d also sees that this people is broken and that the sword rages in its cities (cf. Hos 11:6). And now the very thing that is described in our parable happens to the people: ”How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel!...My heart turns itself against me, my compa.s.sion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am G.o.d and not man, the Holy One in your midst” (Hos 11:8f.). Because G.o.d is G.o.d, the Holy One, he acts as no man could act. G.o.d has a heart, and this heart turns, so to speak, against G.o.d himself: Here in Hosea, as in the Gospel, we encounter once again the word compa.s.sion, compa.s.sion, which is expressed by means of the image of the maternal womb. G.o.d's heart transforms wrath and turns punishment into forgiveness. which is expressed by means of the image of the maternal womb. G.o.d's heart transforms wrath and turns punishment into forgiveness.

For the Christian, the question now arises: Where does Jesus Christ fit into all this? Only the Father figures in the parable. Is there no Christology in it? Augustine tried to work Christology in where the text says that the father embraced the son (cf. Lk 15:20). ”The arm of the Father is the Son,” he writes. He could have appealed here to Irenaeus, who referred to the Son and the Spirit as the two hands of the Father. ”The arm of the Father is the Son.” When he lays this arm on our shoulders as ”his light yoke,” then that is precisely not a burden he is loading onto us, but rather the gesture of receiving us in love. The ”yoke” of this arm is not a burden that we must carry, but a gift of love that carries us and makes us sons. This is a very evocative exposition, but it is still an ”allegory” that clearly goes beyond the text.

Pierre Grelot has discovered an interpretation that accords with the text and goes even deeper. He draws attention to the fact that Jesus uses this parable, along with the two preceding ones, to justify his own goodness toward sinners; he uses the behavior of the father in the parable to justify the fact that he too welcomes sinners. By the way he acts, then, Jesus himself becomes ”the revelation of the one he called his Father.” Attention to the historical context of the parable thus yields by itself an ”implicit Christology.” ”His Pa.s.sion and his Resurrection reinforce this point still further: How did G.o.d show his merciful love for sinners? In that 'while we were yet sinners Christ died for us' (Rom 5:8).” ”Jesus cannot enter into the narrative framework of the parable because he lives in identification with the heavenly Father and bases his conduct on the Father's. The risen Christ remains today, in this point, in the same situation as Jesus of Nazareth during the time of his earthly ministry” (pp. 228f.). Indeed: In this parable, Jesus justifies his own conduct by relating it to, and identifying it with, the Father's. It is in the figure of the father, then, that Christ-the concrete realization of the father's action-is placed right at the heart of the parable.

The older brother now makes his appearance. He comes home from working in the fields, hears feasting at home, finds out why, and becomes angry. He finds it simply unfair that this good-for-nothing, who has squandered his entire fortune-the father's property-with prost.i.tutes, should now be given a splendid feast straightaway without any period of probation, without any time of penance. That contradicts his sense of justice: The life he has spent working is made to look of no account in comparison to the dissolute past of the other. Bitterness arises in him: ”Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed one of your commands,” he says to his father, ”yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Lk 15:29). The father goes out to meet the older brother, too, and now he speaks kindly to his son. The older brother knows nothing of the inner transformations and wanderings experienced by the younger brother, of his journey into distant parts, of his fall and his new self-discovery. He sees only injustice. And this betrays the fact that he too had secretly dreamed of a freedom without limits, that his obedience has made him inwardly bitter, and that he has no awareness of the grace of being at home, of the true freedom that he enjoys as a son. ”Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Lk 15:31). The father explains to him the great value of sons.h.i.+p with these words-the same words that Jesus uses in his high-priestly prayer to describe his relations.h.i.+p to the Father: ”All that is mine is thine, and all that is thine is mine” (Jn 17:10).

The parable breaks off here; it tells us nothing about the older brother's reaction. Nor can it, because at this point the parable immediately pa.s.ses over into reality. Jesus is using these words of the father to speak to the heart of the murmuring Pharisees and scribes who have grown indignant at his goodness to sinners (cf. Lk 15:2). It now becomes fully clear that Jesus identifies his goodness to sinners with the goodness of the father in the parable and that all the words attributed to the father are the words that he himself addresses to the righteous. The parable does not tell the story of some distant affair, but is about what is happening here and now through him. He is wooing the heart of his adversaries. He begs them to come in and to share his joy at this hour of homecoming and reconciliation. These words remain in the Gospel as a pleading invitation. Paul takes up this pleading invitation when he writes: ”We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to G.o.d” (2 Cor 5:20).

On one hand, then, the parable is located quite realistically at the moment in history when Christ recounted it. At the same time, however, it points beyond the historical moment, for G.o.d's wooing and pleading continues. But to whom is the parable now addressed? The Church Fathers generally applied the two-brothers motif to the relation between Jews and Gentiles. It was not hard for them to recognize in the dissolute son who had strayed far from G.o.d and from himself an image of the pagan world, to which Jesus had now opened the door for communion with G.o.d in grace and for which he now celebrates the feast of his love. By the same token, neither was it hard for them to recognize in the brother who remained at home an image of the people of Israel, who could legitimately say: ”Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed one of your commands.” Israel's fidelity and image of G.o.d are clearly revealed in such fidelity to the Torah.

This application to the Jews is not illegitimate so long as we respect the form in which we have found it in the text: as G.o.d's delicate attempt to talk Israel around, which remains entirely G.o.d's initiative. We should note that the father in the parable not only does not dispute the older brother's fidelity, but explicitly confirms his sons.h.i.+p: ”Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” It would be a false interpretation to read this as a condemnation of the Jews, for which there is no support in the text.

While we may regard this application of the parable of the two brothers to Israel and the Gentiles as one dimension of the text, there are other dimensions as well. After all, what Jesus says about the older brother is aimed not simply at Israel (the sinners who came to him were Jews, too), but at the specific temptation of the righteous, of those who are ”en regle,” at rights with G.o.d, as Grelot puts it (p. 229). In this connection, Grelot places emphasis on the sentence ”I never disobeyed one of your commandments.” For them, more than anything else G.o.d is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d and in that relations.h.i.+p they are at rights with him. But G.o.d is greater: They need to convert from the Law-G.o.d to the greater G.o.d, the G.o.d of love. This will not mean giving up their obedience, but rather that this obedience will flow from deeper wellsprings and will therefore be bigger, more open, and purer, but above all more humble.

Let us add a further aspect that has already been touched upon: Their bitterness toward G.o.d's goodness reveals an inward bitterness regarding their own obedience, a bitterness that indicates the limitations of this obedience. In their heart of hearts, they would have gladly journeyed out into that great ”freedom” as well. There is an unspoken envy of what others have been able to get away with. They have not gone through the pilgrimage that purified the younger brother and made him realize what it means to be free and what it means to be a son. They actually carry their freedom as if it were slavery and they have not matured to real sons.h.i.+p. They, too, are still in need of a path; they can find it if they simply admit that G.o.d is right and accept his feast as their own. In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, encouraging us too to convert truly and to find joy in our faith.

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:1931) This story once again presents us with two contrasting figures: the rich man, who carouses in his life of luxury, and the poor man, who cannot even catch the crumbs that the rich bon vivants drop from the table-according to the custom of the time, pieces of bread they used to wash their hands and then threw away. Some of the Church Fathers also cla.s.sed this parable as an example of the two-brother pattern and applied it to the relations.h.i.+p between Israel (the rich man) and the Church (the poor man, Lazarus), but in so doing they mistook the very different typology that is involved here. This is evident already in the very different ending. Whereas the two-brother texts remain open, ending as a question and an invitation, this story already describes the definitive end of both protagonists.

For some background that will enable us to understand this narrative, we need to look at the series of Psalms in which the cry of the poor rises before G.o.d-the poor who live out their faith in G.o.d in obedience to his commandments, but experience only unhappiness, whereas the cynics who despise G.o.d go from success to success and enjoy every worldly happiness. Lazarus belongs to the poor whose voice we hear, for example, in Psalm 44: ”Thou hast made us the taunt of our neighbors, the derision and scorn of those about us.... Nay, for thy sake we are slain all the day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter” (Ps 44:1523; cf. Rom 8:36). The early wisdom of Israel had operated on the premise that G.o.d rewards the righteous and punishes the sinner, so that misfortune matches sin and happiness matches righteousness. This wisdom had been thrown into crisis at least since the time of the Exile. It was not just that the people of Israel as a whole suffered more than the surrounding peoples who led them into exile and oppression-in private life, too, it was becoming increasingly apparent that cynicism pays and that the righteous man is doomed to suffer in this world. In the Psalms and the later Wisdom Literature we witness the struggle to come to grips with this contradiction; we see a new effort to become ”wise”-to understand life rightly, to find and understand anew the G.o.d who seems unjust or altogether absent.

One of the most penetrating texts concerning this struggle is Psalm 73, which we may regard as in some sense the intellectual backdrop of our parable. There we see the figure of the rich glutton before our very eyes and we hear the complaint of the praying Psalmist-Lazarus: ”For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs; their bodies are sound and sleek. They are not in trouble as other men are; they are not stricken like other men. Therefore pride is their necklace.... Their eyes swell out with fatness.... They set their mouths against the heavens.... Therefore the people turn and praise them; and find no fault in them. And they say, 'How can G.o.d know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?'” (Ps 73:311).

The suffering just man who sees all this is in danger of doubting his faith. Does G.o.d really not see? Does he not hear? Does he not care about men's fate? ”All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I have been stricken, and chastened every morning. My heart was embittered” (Ps 73:13ff.). The turning point comes when the suffering just man in the Sanctuary looks toward G.o.d and, as he does so, his perspective becomes broader. Now he sees that the seeming cleverness of the successful cynics is stupidity when viewed against the light. To be wise in that way is to be ”stupid and ignorant...like a beast” (Ps 73:22). They remain within the perspective of animals and have lost the human perspective that transcends the material realm-toward G.o.d and toward eternal life.

We may be reminded here of another Psalm in which a persecuted man says at the end: ”May their belly be filled with good things; may their children have more than enough.... As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with beholding thy form” (Ps 77:14f.). Two sorts of satisfaction are contrasted here: being satiated with material goods, and satisfaction with beholding ”thy form”-the heart becoming sated by the encounter with infinite love. The words ”when I awake” are at the deepest level a reference to the awakening into new and eternal life, but they also speak of a deeper ”awakening” here in this world: Man wakes up to the truth in a way that gives him a new satisfaction here and now.

It is of this awakening in prayer that Psalm 73 speaks. For now the psalmist sees that the happiness of the cynics that he had envied so much is only ”like a dream that fades when one awakes, on awaking one forgets their phantoms” (Ps 73:20). And now he recognizes real happiness: ”Nevertheless I am continually with thee; thou dost hold my right hand.... Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides thee.... But for me it is good to be near G.o.d” (Ps 73:23, 25, 28). This is not an encouragement to place our hope in the afterlife, but rather an awakening to the true stature of man's being-which does, of course, include the call to eternal life.

This has been only an apparent digression from our parable. In reality, the Lord is using this story in order to initiate us into the very process of ”awakening” that is reflected in the Psalms. This has nothing to do with a cheap condemnation of riches and of the rich begotten of envy. In the Psalms that we have briefly considered all envy is left behind. The psalmist has come to see just how foolish it is to envy this sort of wealth because he has recognized what is truly good. After Jesus' Crucifixion two wealthy men make their appearance, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who had discovered the Lord and were in the process of ”awakening.” The Lord wants to lead us from foolish cleverness toward true wisdom; he wants to teach us to discern the real good. And so we have good grounds, even though it is not there in the text, to say that, from the perspective of the Psalms, the rich glutton was already an empty-hearted man in this world, and that his carousing was only an attempt to smother this interior emptiness of his. The next life only brings to light the truth already present in this life. Of course, this parable, by awakening us, at the same time summons us to the love and responsibility that we owe now to our poor brothers and sisters-both on the large scale of world society and on the small scale of our everyday life.

In the description of the next life that now follows in the parable, Jesus uses ideas that were current in the Judaism of his time. Hence we must not force our interpretation of this part of the text. Jesus adopts existing images, without formally incorporating them into his teaching about the next life. Nevertheless, he does unequivocally affirm the substance of the images. In this sense, it is important to note that Jesus invokes here the idea of the intermediate state between death and the resurrection, which by then had become part of the universal patrimony of Jewish faith. The rich man is in Hades, conceived here as a temporary place, and not in ”Gehenna” (h.e.l.l), which is the name of the final state (Jeremias, p. 185). Jesus says nothing about a ”resurrection in death” here. But as we saw earlier, this is not the princ.i.p.al message that the Lord wants to convey in this parable. Rather, as Jeremias has convincingly shown, the main point-which comes in the second part of the parable-is the rich man's request for a sign.

The rich man, looking up to Abraham from Hades, says what so many people, both then and now, say or would like to say to G.o.d: ”If you really want us to believe in you and organize our lives in accord with the revealed word of the Bible, you'll have to make yourself clearer. Send us someone from the next world who can tell us that it is really so.” The demand for signs, the demand for more evidence of Revelation, is an issue that runs through the entire Gospel. Abraham's answer-like Jesus' answer to his contemporaries' demand for signs in other contexts-is clear: If people do not believe the word of Scripture, then they will not believe someone coming from the next world either. The highest truths cannot be forced into the type of empirical evidence that only applies to material reality.

Abraham cannot send Lazarus to the rich man's father's house. But at this point something strikes us. We are reminded of the resurrection of Lazarus of Bethany, recounted to us in John's Gospel. What happens there? The Evangelist tells us, ”Many of the Jews...believed in him” (Jn 11:45). They go to the Pharisees and report on what has happened, whereupon the Sanhedrin gathers to take counsel. They see the affair in a political light: If this leads to a popular movement, it might force the Romans to intervene, leading to a dangerous situation. So they decide to kill Jesus. The miracle leads not to faith, but to hardening of hearts (Jn 11:4553).

But our thoughts go even further. Do we not recognize in the figure of Lazarus-lying at the rich man's door covered in sores-the mystery of Jesus, who ”suffered outside the city walls” (Heb 13:12) and, stretched naked on the Cross, was delivered over to the mockery and contempt of the mob, his body ”full of blood and wounds”? ”But I am a worm, and no man; scorned by men, and despised by the people” (Ps 22:7).

He, the true Lazarus, has has risen from the dead-and he has come to tell us so. If we see in the story of Lazarus Jesus' answer to his generation's demand for a sign, we find ourselves in harmony with the princ.i.p.al answer that Jesus gave to that demand. In Matthew, it reads thus: ”An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the Prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt 12:39f.). In Luke we read: ”This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah became a sign to the men of Nineveh, so will the Son of man be to this generation” (Lk 11:29f.). risen from the dead-and he has come to tell us so. If we see in the story of Lazarus Jesus' answer to his generation's demand for a sign, we find ourselves in harmony with the princ.i.p.al answer that Jesus gave to that demand. In Matthew, it reads thus: ”An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the Prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt 12:39f.). In Luke we read: ”This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah became a sign to the men of Nineveh, so will the Son of man be to this generation” (Lk 11:29f.).

We do not need to a.n.a.lyze here the differences between these two versions. One thing is clear: G.o.d's sign for men is the Son of Man; it is Jesus himself. And at the deepest level, he is this sign in his Paschal Mystery, in the mystery of his death and Resurrection. He himself is ”the sign of Jonah.” He, crucified and risen, is the true Lazarus. The parable is inviting us to believe and follow him, G.o.d's great sign. But it is more than a parable. It speaks of reality, of the most decisive reality in all history.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

The Princ.i.p.al Images of John's Gospel INTRODUCTION: T THE J JOHANNINE Q QUESTION.

Thus far, in our attempt to listen to Jesus and thereby to get to know him, we have limited ourselves for the most part to the witness of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), while only occasionally glancing at John. It is therefore time to turn our attention to the image of Jesus presented by the Fourth Evangelist, an image that in many respects seems quite different from that of the other Gospels.

Listening to the Synoptics, we have realized that the mystery of Jesus' oneness with the Father is ever present and determines everything, even though it remains hidden beneath his humanity. On one hand, it was perceived by his sharp-eyed opponents. On the other hand, the disciples, who experienced Jesus at prayer and were privileged to know him intimately from the inside, were beginning-step by step, at key moments with great immediacy, and despite all their misunderstandings-to recognize this absolutely new reality. In John, Jesus' divinity appears unveiled. His disputes with the Jewish Temple authorities, taken together, could be said to antic.i.p.ate his trial before the Sanhedrin, which John, unlike the Synoptics, does not mention specifically.

John's Gospel is different: Instead of parables, we hear extended discourses built around images, and the main theater of Jesus' activity s.h.i.+fts from Galilee to Jerusalem. These differences caused modern critical scholars.h.i.+p to deny the historicity of the text-with the exception of the Pa.s.sion narrative and a few details-and to regard it as a later theological reconstruction. It was said to express a highly developed Christology, but not to const.i.tute a reliable source for knowledge of the historical Jesus. The radically late datings of John's Gospel to which this view gave rise have had to be abandoned because papyri from Egypt dating back to the beginning of the second century have been discovered; this made it clear that the Gospel must have been written in the first century, if only during the closing years. Denial of the Gospel's historical character, however, continued unabated.