After all, isn’t the parable just about the way humanity walks away from God, taking with us all our inheritance as God’s creation, only to squander it, and when we’ve exhausted that inheritance and ourselves, we turn back to lay ourselves on God’s mercy in order to be restored? Isn’t just reminding us that we don’t appreciate the inheritance that we have, but that God will always welcome us home when we come to our senses? And those of us who don’t wander and squander must be the elder brother, jealous and vindictive, unaware of the inheritance we enjoy because we’ve never known what it was to lose it. Isn’t it just another parable about God’s great mercy—just like the parable of the fig tree we had last week. And that’s a good orthodox, Christian reading, and an important reminder about the nature of God but it’s not the only way of reading the story. It’s not the only way of reading the story.
Even Karl Barth, the great Swiss Reformed theologian from the middle of the 20th century, thought so. In his magnus opum, his great work, the Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth, uses the story of the Prodigal Son to unpack the doctrine of reconciliation—the understanding of the work of Christ. And in that unpacking, the Prodigal Son is understood by Barth, not as humanity but as Christ. Barth writes:
That Jesus Christ is very God is shown in His way into the far country in which He the Lord became a servant. For in the majesty of the true God it happened that the eternal Son of the eternal Father became obedient by offering and humbling Himself to be the brother of man, to take His place with the transgressor, to judge him by judging Himself and dying in his place. But God the Father raised Him from the dead, and in so doing recognised and gave effect to His death and passion as a satisfaction made for us, as our conversion to God, and therefore as our redemption from death to life (Ch. XIV, Section 59, Abstract).
Jesus as the Prodigal Son—that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense! Isn’t the Prodigal, the disparate, dissolute, desperate wanderer, squandering his inheritance?
For Barth, the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the story of the Son of God in all his inheritance entering into our world, God’s creation, and being in utter solidarity with us—fully divine, fully human. Jesus entered into our depravity in order that he might bring us back with him into the Father’s estate. For Barth, the parable is about Jesus the Judge entering into our Judgement in order that we might receive God’s mercy. Barth, in the tradition of Anselm of Canterbury from the Middle Ages and much of the Reformed and Evangelical traditions since the Reformation, Barth is following the line of thinking about the doctrine of reconciliation, the doctrine of atonement, the way to understand what Jesus achieves for us which has been called the objective or substitutionary or satisfaction theory of the atonement. In this theory, God’s judgment on humankind must have justice, must have satisfaction, and Jesus takes our place in receiving that judgement. Maybe that’s how some of you understand the way redemption or reconciliation or atonement is achieved between God and humanity. It’s an orthodox, Christian way of understanding what it is that God has done for us in Christ; but it is not the only way of understanding the mystery of God’s reconciliation with humankind. Because while all Christians agree that God saves, reconciles, redeems our world through Jesus, we do not all agree on how that happens. We don’t all agree on the mechanism of the atonement. While all Christians agree the God reconciles the whole Creation with God’s self, we do not all agree on how that happens.
But back to the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and let’s, for interest sake, and because we just might learn something, let’s continue with reading it at least partially through Barth’s lens. Let’s think about the Prodigal as Christ.
Firstly, we understand that Jesus is fully God. He carries the full inheritance of the divine. He is not a lesser part of God or a lesser being. Secondly, we understand that as the fullness of God, Christ enters Creation—a far country to the divine. The Creator enters Creation receiving the hospitality of the world—the hospitality of its citizens and its pigs. Think about the stories of Jesus being judged because he shared food with sinners, because he was seen as a drunkard and a glutton, because he was found in the company of lepers and prostitutes, the outcast. Jesus lived the life of humanity. He knew our joys and our pain; lived our life and died our death. Nothing that we know as humans was Jesus shielded from. He entered fully into humanity. He was fully human. And in this fullness of humanity, he experiences the desolation of our separation from God. Think of his cry on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—a recitation from the Psalms. But the worst of human experience cannot defeat the Christ, for he is not separate from God, he is God. And having experienced all that is to be human, he turns his face towards God and returns to his estate, taking us with him and thereby reconciling the whole of creation with God. Having experienced all that is to be human, he turns his face towards God and returns to his estate, taking us with him and thereby reconciling the whole of creation with God.
The story is a story of reconciliation—that is clear—and like the parable of the fig tree, we will discover that that message of reconciliation guides us in our playing with the parable and confirms for us the possibilities that our play provokes.
In the particular reading of the parable that I’ve just given you, the person and work of Christ are very closely associated. The very act of incarnation is part of the process of reconciliation. This was important for Karl Barth too; and it is an important part of Christian theologians trying to think through just what’s going on in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus; but, in the end, understanding the mechanism of reconciliation is not very important. Rather accepting God’s love, God’s mercy and the reconciliation offered to us is the key. For the Son did journey to a far country, and in the end, it was all for us, and so no-one might be left behind.
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