One of the passages that I have probably spent the most time with is the prodigal son. Given its deep familiarity, I have long argued that whereas common readings have led to some problematic theologies.

Those common readings tend to make the central character/subject the prodigal son, when I believe, when placed in proper context and in its world, the primary character is in fact the older son. Why does this matter? Because it impacts how we apply the parable into our present context. If we see the prodigal as the primary subject, we will then tend to see the parable as being about soteirology, meaning how it is that we are saved. Part of the issue then becomes who we place in the role of the prodigal as modern readers. This has been behind some tendencies to make the prodigal Gentiles and the older son the Jews. It also then places, in our modern day, those whom we percieve to be unsaved persons, in the role of the prodigal. What’s clear is that these two tendencies are inconsistent in their own right. If one sees the older son as a representation of the Jews or Jewish religious leaders and sees the prodigal as the gentiles, the former being the antagonist and the latter being the protagonist. Then later what often gets assumed is a reading that makes the prodigal a portrait of unsaved persons, then the natural conclusion should then be that those of us who see ourselves as saved people are now in the role of the Jews we have

Now, if we played out the story of the prodigal son with the older son as the central character, meaning the audience that is directly in front of Jesus and the one needing to hear the lesson, and then we place the parable back in its proper context, here is what changes.

1. The direct context are relgious leaders who are criticizing Jesus for eating with those whom they call sinners
2. Those whom they called sinners are Jews whom they believed have, through association, tied themselves to the world by way of their work, who they eat with, or other such matters which have placed them outside of Gods call to holiness and obedience
3. What Jesus is in fact evoking is a divided and still exiled Israel which has found itself mired in the question of faithfulness to Yahweh. The relgious leaders are the forefront of a Reformed movement, calling Israel back to necessary faithfulness and believing that the fulfillment of Gods promise, meaning the renewal of Israel and through this the renewal of the whole creation, is imminent and at hand in the face of the Roman Empire. Thus to participate as faithful followers of Yahweh was in a very real sense a preparatory work in light of this expectation (see John the Baptists words about preparing a way).
4. The parable then is about, in a very real sense, the expected renewal of Israel, calling out their tendency to see sin, which they looked at as having a communal effect, as something that excludes the other. Sin being seen through defintion of a polluted individual by nature of their association with certain feasts and pagan rituals. It is a direct response to the problem of an exiled Israel.

With this in mind, if we then move to place this into our own context, what might we find? How does this translate for us. The first thing I think it says is that the Fathers heart is for a divided Israel, meaning the story of their covenantal failure and exile. The second thing it says is that God is true to His promise. The prodigal son has returned. The true feast has started. As Paul would say in Romans, this is good news for the Gentiles because Israel’s story proclaims Gods faithfulness and the arrival of the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

The third thing it says it’s that the result of this should be that the feast welcomes us all. This is the good news that Israel’s covenatal failure did not leave creation enslaved to Sin and Death. God has acted and has done what He said He would do.

Some thoughts from inspired by this podcast sermon I listened to this morning on my way to church (yes, I am that guy). Well worth a listen

(Watermark Tampa Audio Podcast: Self Emptying Father)

“To whitewash our deeds simply by maintaining our innocence is to defy God, who hears the cry of the guiltless.”

• Abraham Joshua Heschel (Toward a Just Society)

Notice how this phrasing does not suggest that the people he is speaking to are in fact guilty. Heschel goes on to point out that one of the most compelling things about the Jewish scriptures is the sheer number of times that it makes associations between doing nothing and having blood on our hands. He notes the failure of modern society to instill horror in the simple fact that death and suffering exists in this world, and that this simple fact speaks to our necessary responsibility.

Sadly, what we often find in the Church is an emphasis on responsibility that reduces the larger reality to me and my salvation. We reduce Sin and Death to human action and make responsibility a means of being saved. Such thinking, in my opinion, stands a long ways apart from what we find in the Biblical narrative. Worse yet, trying to reform such approaches and understanding within the Church is often met with resistance by way of two common responses. Either people believe we were all sinful and thus inherently deserving of death because of our actions, or people believe that we are not the sinners who are responsible for it, therefore it should not be blame that is placed on us. Both tend to end up in the same place- claims of innocence that turn our responsiblity to death and suffering in the world towards merit of the self and our salvation.

This is why the whole intentional and unintentional sin thing is simply not in line with the Biblical vision and narrative. Over and over again we read of Israel giving themselves over to pagan practices at the expense of what? The suffering that lies outside their gates. The reality of Sin and Death that rules the world they share and which defines their hope for God to bring such a reign to an end. This is what is being called out.

I’ve said this in the past, but we have two primary questions we can ask when we walk out our front doors in the morning. One is to see a world where Sin and Death reigns inspite of anything we have done, and for that to compel us towards both our hope and our responsibility. The other is to see ourselves and our own sinful state and for our observation of a world where Sin and Death reigns to point us back to our salvation.

The former is, I believe, closer in line with what we find in the Biblical narrative. While the latter has a place, but if it’s our starting point or our ending point then I do not believe it accurately reflects the Gospel.

“To grasp all that God is trying to tell us in Scripture, we need to undo the Christianese.

Consider (the word) glory… Although we can be misled by our Christianese to think glory is purely about heavenly splendor (or power), glory in the Bible is bound up with reputation, regard, honor”
Matthew Bates (Why the Gospel)

Bates goes on to unpack this by touching on why glory matters in this way. So often God’s glory is used in certain subsets of Christianity to establish necessary distance between the creator and the creation and to evoke Gods ultimate control or power over the creation. It’s used to say that God can do what God wants and that our role is not to question but to give Him the deserved “glory”.

And yet, we cannot read through scripture and miss the fact that people questioned God left and right. What makes these same segments uneasy is the idea that such questions could actually influence God. Which is precisely where a proper understanding of the word glory in its world can help.

For glory to be bound up in Gods reputation is for Gods name to be bound to the way God acts in and for the world. The uncomfortableness with the idea of our questions influencing God is often attached to the idea that God is unknowable, or that we cannot know the hidden ways of God. Accusations are often made of those who protest, saying that God is knowable and in fact revealed His true name by way of His action in and for the world. In other words, Gods reputation is tied to God acting in the way that He said He would act. To act contrary to His revealed name makes God untrustworthy. And we see this all over the scriptures where people come to God and say, wait a minute, you said you were this, so if you do this you are going to show yourself as someone who cannot be trusted. Your reputation will be maligned. And we also see God changing His action in line with these protests.

Some scholars believe that this belongs to the motif of “testing”. For example, Richard Middleton makes a solid argument in his book Abraham’s Silence that God did not desire the sacrifice, He desired the pushback. He desired Abraham to learn that even though this is how the other gods act, his expectations of Yahweh should be different.

The ultimate point of concern for Gods reputation then is Jesus. As it says in 2 Tim 2:10, “Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in the Christ, Jesus (or Jesus the Christ), with eternal glory.” Another way to translate the phrase eternal glory would be “established reputation”. God revealed His true name, which is attached to the way God acts in and for the world. Jesus becomes the true fulfillment of what God said He would do, the measure of His faithfulness or reputation.

Notice too that salvation in this verse is not attached to individuals but to Jesus. One doesn’t obtain their salvation through some means of faithfulness. Rather salvation is already there to obtain. It is a work that has already been done. And if you read more closely, that work is not individual salvation. That would be collapsing this verse in on itself. Rather, in line with the whole story of scripture, it is the establishing of a king and a kingdom. It is God doing what God said He would do.

Considering Pauls letter to the Romans, N.T Wright writes in his book The New Testament In Its World,

“Romans gives us a vision of what Paul thought he was trying to achieve by his apostolic labours. He was not an itinerant philosopher out to make a quick profit. Nor was he selling a kind of messianic faith as a “Judaism-lite” option for gentiles looking for a new religious path. He certainly not trying to add one more deiry to the already overcrowded pantheon of Roman gods and goddesses. No, Paul believed that it was his vocation, a very Jewish vocation, rooted in Israel’s scriptures, to announce that the promises and purposes of Israel’s God had been fulfilled, overcoming the dark powers of evil (elsewhere named the Powers of Sin and Death) and thus enabling idol-worshopping, sexually immoral, and ritually impure gentiles to come into the transformative obedience of faith. Thus by fulfilling Israel’s scriptures, the gentiles might glorify God for his mercy, while Jews like Paul himself could celebrate the world changing achievements of Israel’s true Messiah.”

He then goes on to articulate where the Jews, or Israel, sits in this letters concern.

“Was not Israel called to be the means of putting the world right (2:17-20)? Yes, indeed, but the prophets themselves declared (and virtually all second temple Jews would have agreed) that Israel had failed in this vocation, suffering the ongoing exile spoken of in Daniel 9 and referred to by many writers in the period (2:21-24l)… if God were to create a new covenant people whose hearts had been softened so that they were able to do do the Law (Deuternonmy 30) in a whole new way- then that would fulfill scripture (the covenant promise of Gods faithfulness) in a whole new way, even redifing the word Jew in the process (2:15-29)..This however, might seem to call into question Gods faithfulness.”

This question is what Romans is concerned about. The idea that “God has done what he promised” within Israel’s covenental failure and according to Israel’s story by fulfilling that story is what makes God faithful and thus trustworthy.

Wright goes on.
“This leaves Paul in a situation no Jew had faced before: what happens when God fulfills his promises, sending his Messiah to fulfill the ancient promises, and Israel as a whole looks the other way? This is where the incipient Roman anti-Jewish sentiment might kick in: supposing God has changed his mind… No Paul says.”

He goes on to explain how and why the gentile story is good news for Israel. But this point is crucial for understanding Romans. It is a letter dealing with a divided community, and addessing both sides of the divide through the faithful articulation of the Jewish story and its fulfillment in the Messiah.

In Gail R. O’Day’s article titled I Have Called You Friends, she writes about the subject of friendship. She notes two dimensions of friendship in antiquity that can help us make sense of Jesus’ understanding of friendship—
“the gift of one’s life for one’s friends and the
use of frank and open speech, (both) informed the way that the Gospel of John and its readers understood language about friendship.”

She goes on to say that “the Christian vocation is to give love freely and generously without counting the cost or wondering and worrying about who is on the receiving end of our limitless love…. Jesus gave everything to his friends—his knowledge of God and his own
life. Jesus is our model for friendship—because he loved without limits—and he makes it possible for us to live a life of friendship because we have been transformed by everything he shared with us. Through friendship we come to know God and through friendship we enact the love of God. We
can risk being friends because Jesus has been a friend to us.”

If our beginning assumption is that Jesus makes such friendship conditional, that Jesus withholds friendship from some on the basis of those conditions, that Jesus chooses some to be friends while discarding the rest, then we are seriously missing a key aspect of who God is.

When Jesus says in John 15:12, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command”, He is not limiting the scope of His friendship towards us, He is attaching our actions and words- our willingness to be a friend to God- to the command to love. The quesion at hand is whether we are being a friend to God by loving each other.

To say to someone, we cannot be friends or you are not my friends or I am not interested in friendship with you, is to instead call that person my enemy. And if we are to take the above verse seriously, this is akin to saying to God, you, then, are my enemy.

Jesus’ love has no bounds, no limits. Jesus does not make friendship conditional, He makes it necessary. More than this, He embodies it in His death and resurrection. We are, each of us, called to walk the same path without condition.

“And when now in our enlightened age, where all anthropomorphic and anthropopathic conceptions of God are deemed inappropriate, it is none the less not considered inappropriate to think of God as a judge, like an ordinary magistrate or a superior military judge…”

• Soren Kierkegaard (The Sickness unto Death)

I have a nephew who has been in university getting his degree in criminology. This semester he is taking a philosophy class, studying the existentialists. He is not a believer in God, but we have plenty of great conversation when it comes to religion and philosophy. He inspired me to dive back in to the existentialists, just to ensure I can be a better conversation partner. I forgot how much this stuff speaks my language.

In particular, Kierkegaard, our resident existentialist, has a whole lot to to say about the relationship between things like despair and our conceptions of God. I really appreciated the broader implications of the above quote to this end, especially in context of the book itself. One of the questions the quote begs is this; there are tendencies within Christianity to conceive of God as wholly (or holy) other, and subsequently to resist anthropomorphic depictions and to actively distance the creator from creation.

With one exception- the judge. There seems to be very little hesitancy in these same theological leanings to parlay human conceptions of justice on to the character of God, even to the point of assuming that certain societal constructs and systems are direct reflections of how God does and would act when it comes to justice. We (a generalized we) say, if we would act this way, then God must act this way. And often this way includes ideas such as a God who must punish to be just and/or who must punish with death to be just.

I wonder if this is a point of great inconsistency when it comes to such theological approaches.

I believe that Romans is commonly misread and misapplied due to prior allegiances to the idea of law as “works that save” and grace as “imputed righteousness”, or unmerited favor/grace. This understanding of the law versus faith/grace paradigm also lends itself to particular understandings of other terminology and ideas inherent in the text, such as defining righteousness as “moral righteousness” or seeing in Paul’s letter an in interest in the progression of salvation within an individual. Romans has long been fertile ground for Protestants to see in its pages arguments for divine election and predestination.

All of these things, in my opinion, are readings that fail attend for both Paul’s audience and the context for which he is writing, often ignoring these things outright in favor of upholding particular doctrines, which of course get imposed back on to our readings of Romans effectively pulling the text out of its context and failing to ask the appropriate questions of the text in its world.

So how might I make this case? I think one way would be to appeal to the arc of Pauls story as it develops and forms within actual history. If we begin at the start, meaning if we look at the earliest writings that we have from him chronologically speaking, this is a good way to see the seeds of his ideas taking shape against the larger backdrop of the Jerusalem council, recorded in Acts 15. This is where we see an agreement being reached with the “pillar apostles in Jerusalem (Wright, The New Testament in its World) regarding the primary issues facing the early church amidst Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles.

So where do we begin chronologically? With Paul’s letter to the Galatains. It doesn’t take long to note that the same issues regarding Law and Gospel are present here, if in an earlier state of formation. Wright even suggests that “this letter is sometimes percieved as the angry younger sibling of the more composed and reflective letter to Rome.”

Right from the start, its important to see in Galatians an assumption within certain segments of protestant writings that Paul is “saying Farewell to his Jewish heritage”. This is where we find the seeds of the age old Christainity versus Judaism storyline. That is worth noting because that’s a massive obstacle one would need to overcome in order to even begin to reconsider common readings of Romans. It is that ingrained into our thinking. To change course would feel like losing a grip on the Gospel (I know this because this is what I went through). And yet this is actually intended to get us closer to the Gospel.

To dig a little deeper, one of the things that seems to bolster such views of us versus them is the presence of certain opponents in Galatains. It would be the seeds of these opponents that Paul references in Romans 15 and 16, meaning that the division that we find in the Roman Church is the fruit of these seeds taking root. But as Wright suggests, “if we are to avoid making Paul a proto-Marcionite, if we are going to refuse temptations to project our own theological disputes into the letter, then we need to read Galatains very carefully, attentive to both its context and content.”

So who are these opponents? “Paul writes this letter to the Galatians after learning that certain agitators or intruders have gained a foothold in these churches, urging the male gentile believers to be circumsized.”

For reference, the issue dividing the Roman Church following the gradual return of Jews to Rome after being purged, was a “majority gentile church arguing over whether gentile converts need to be circumsized in order to follow Jesus.”

Wright notes the complicated political and theological backdrop behind this concern. Often what gets assumed by specific protestant readings focused on those conceptions of law and Gospel in conflict is that the Jews assumed that works of the law are the things that saved a person whereas Jesus demonstrated that it is only by grace through faith that one is saved, grace anchored in the death of Jesus as the free gift imputed to us by way of His moral righteousness. But, in my opinion and according to my studies, this is not an accurate reflection of what is going on within the text in its world. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls opened up a window into the ancient Jewish world that turns this idea of Law and Gospel on its head, sparking a movement of reform in relationship to that whole Jews versus christianity narrative that had crept into the western, protestant church.

In Galatains, Paul is opposing two things:

1. The agreement reached by the Jerusalem council being undermined

2..A departure from the Gospel

What is the Gospel in Galatains. In line with Paul calling it “the Gospel of Jesus” in Romans, here in Galatians it is simply “the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ”. As Wright suggests, “the choice that Paul puts to the Galatian believers is whether or not Jesus is Israel’s Messiah.” This has to do with “whether he brings people into the promised new exodus by his own faithfulness to the (covenant promise), or whether he simply adds to and enhances the old dispensation of Moses.”

In simple terms: did Jesus fulfill the promise by ushering in the promised new age, or did he not. And if he did not, what are we left with but the reality of a still persisting exile. That is what concerns Paul. For the objectors, the failed promise is rooted in Israel’s failure to be faithful to the covenant by way of participating in pagan worship and idolatry. This is why circumsicion mattered to them, because it meant that one was being called out of their old life and set apart for particpation in the new. It was the counter to exile. For Paul though, “if righteousness, that is, the status of being forgiven and possessing a right standing within the covenant, could be gained or validated by means of observing Torah, the Jewish Law”, then not only did “the Messish die for nothing”, but the story of Torah has no way of making sense of itself. The story of Torah, which is the proper understanding of the law (not moral works) ended with exile. Therefore this is what circumcision binds them to. Paul’s argument in Galatains, which sets the stage for his dramatic rendering in Romans, is that Jesus invites this community into the remainder of this story, proclaiming the arrival of a new exodus as the true answer to the exile. Something that arrives in line with the story of Torah and the ensuing reality of messianic expctation. Therefore, Law is not understood here as works that save. It is understood as the story of exile, through which the story of enslavement and liberation looms large in the background. It is reflective of a story that says something about their present reality. The Gospel breaks into this not as an altrernative portrait of salvation, but as a way of finding in this story the very thing that allows salvation to come about and be proclaimed- the good news that, according to the scriptures (the covenant promise and messianic expectation), God has at long last did what He said He would do, demonstrating His faithfulness and ushering in the new age. As Wright puts it, he has rescued creation from the grips of “the Evil age”, which Romans describes as the “reign of (Sin) and Death”. Gods “new world has dawned”, and for both the Galatains and the Roman communities, Paul is speaking to those who have already heard this Gospel and who have been met with and responded to the subsequent invitation this brings (the exodus comes first, Sinai follows) towards living as a people of the newly established kingdom, and who are dealing with seeds that threaten to undermine this story and erode their hope in the truth that Jesus is who He says He is and did what He said He did as the fulfillment of Gods covenental promise. It’s on this basis that Paul looks to faith, or faithfulness (allegiance to the kingdom of God) as the thing that cuts through both stories and demonstrates the true point of the Gospel as invitation to particpation, the story of Israel and that of the Gentiles, binding them together under this singular act of Gods faithfulness to acting in and for the world.

In N.T. Wrights book The New Testament in His World, he writes of the process of canonization stating that “the New Testament canon was shaped and developed, in the first three centuries, because the leaders of the early church were determined to keep alive, and present afresh, the news that in Jesus the one true God was setting up his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.”

It’s a statement that on its face pushes back against liberal attestations that suggest the canon is tied to later politics and highly corruptible processes. And yet, at the same time, the statement arrives with clear push back against certain conservative conceptions about the canon and why it matters. Wright also insists that, in the world that gave rise to the process of canonization, by which he means the world that formed nearly immediately after Jesus’ ascension, “there was openness to a variety of Christian writings” in the “culture of the developing Church. If the diverse set of criteria used to determine the canon, for which despite the varied differences between East and West retain a strong sense of catholic cohesiveness, emerged from the convictions of these centuries, these same centuries reflect both a willingness to use, reference and read beyond the canon we have today as well as reflect a willingness to shape this into confessional liturgy regardless of, or in concert with, much dispute and disagreement.

A key aspect of canon formation that perhaps we have lost side of its adoption.

I was listening to an interview with author Cole Arthur Riley on her book This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us

In it she says that “the truest stories are rarely the ones that get told”. By this she means the stories we tell about ourselves, about others, and about the world in which we live.

She locates the primary reason for this in the fact that such stories are shaped primarily by external forces. We are, others are, the world is, the stories those external forces tell about us. And it is often the forces with the most power that determine which of those stories get told. This is as true for those of us who exist in a group like this, as it is for the ways the stories we can tell about the world shape how we see the world and act in the world. What makes this more problematic is that, be it in theology or in the world, we tend to take such stories and turn them into propositional truths which then bind one or the world or an idea to that proposition. The stories not only define us, but ones interpretation of that story defines us.

This had me thinking of another book that I recommend quite often- Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology by James William McClendon Jr.

In this book McClendon makes a case for biographical theology as the antidote for propositional theology, which has run rampant through much of the modern theological landscape. Biographical theology is really just a reconstitution of narrative theology given a personalized and relational twist. Such an approach dares to wonder about this- if an existent God tells a story about Himself, about us, and about this world, how would this reshape who we are, how we see the world, and who we see God to be, if we gave this story the same sort of defining power over our world and over our lives? Which of course begs the further observation- which story is in fact being told, and how do we genuinely hear the story of God without our own stories getting in the way?

We can, I believe, say this with confidence: the stories we tell, or the stories another tell about us, matter deeply, and perhaps matter most of all. Because they determine who God is, who we are, and how we see the world. The challenge of biographical theology then is to pay attention to the ways we find ourselves in those stories and who precisely has the power to place us in them in particular ways. If we can begin with that question, we can then begin to ask how it might look different to belong to a different story.

And then, as it just may be, we might also be confronted with the truth that we have the power to shape another’s story based on how we tell it. And we can begin to think about how our own words and actions place others in the stories we have determined to tell. Which of course, is something that matters greatly.

I was listening to an interview with new testament scholar John Dominic Crossan (titled The Other Gospels) on how it is that we understand the nature of the four Gospels and their adoption as liturgy in the life of the early church given that they emerged in a world where there were many gospels in existence.

He notes that it would be a mistake to simply discard and ignore the other Gospels using blanket terms like gnostic, for example. It would be much better to recognize that these gospels emerge in a world shared by the synoptics and John, they have a history, a theology and a polemic that can help us understand that world,.and they can point to the larger conversation that did exist at the time.

He also talks about how understanding the nature of the four gospels adopted into the NT can allow us to see how they don’t function apart from that larger conversation. For example, if, as it is often suggested, Mark was written first, and if, as is often suggested, Matthew and Luke (and even John) borrowed from Mark, what this then tells us about tradition of Matthew, Luke and John is that they had some of these other gospels and in fact incorporated them into their own retellings of Mark with intention. Crossan makes the interesting observation that the gospel (or gospels) they incorporate are in fact apocalyptic traditions, whereas something like the gospel according to Thomas is functioning as a polemic against the apocalyptic tradition. This suggests a shared world with two different viewpoints, likely determined by context.

Perhaps the most important point comes from his assessment of the 4 gospels shared genre/tradition being one of the primary reasons they got primacy- they are narrative gospels, or belong to the narrative tradition/genre. Meaning, for these gospel writers, telling the story was necessary. In fact, it is this narrative function and characteristic that binds them more directly and intentionally than any other known gospels to Judaism.

I was then listening to a podcast episode from the historical Jesus. It was titled Interpreting the Visitation. In it the host leans into the necessary place of the theophany in Jewish and Christian history. Meaning, telling the story of God. He cites Ezekiel as an example, noting how in Ezekiel 34 it begins with the promise to send a shepherd, followed by the statement that “I will be your shepherd”. Eveything that follows the proclamation of what this shepherd will do is defined as Gods work. So when we get to the story of Jesus and Jesus is applying the words of the shepherd to Himself, the story comes alive as theophany. Same with the way John the Baptist is depicted as leaping in the womb when he encounters the infant Jesus in Mary, langauge that is pulled directly from David dancing (leaping) before the ark. The theophany comes alive.

A reminder of how the Christain Tradition is anchored in the art of storytelling. This is how we encounter God, through the shared story. Crossan calls this the art of gospeling. News is information, but good is an act of interpretation. And the good news becomes the gospel according to you and me when we tell the story within our own contexts.