Recently, I have been a bit out of contact as the internet in East Africa is somewhat spotty. So, there has been a lot of catching up to do, including reconnecting with family and old friends.
One regular Zoom partner is a distinguished Rabbi whose worldview as a Canadian Jew, living in New York, is so different from mine that every conversation with him is an adventure.
True to form, during our last conversation, out of the blue, Larry asked me if I had ever read Annie Dillard’s An Expedition to the Pole. While I know her work and am in the process of rereading her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I have never read that essay. Larry has read it dozens of times but has no idea what it is about. I read it the next day and empathized with him.
Dillard’s writing style has been described as fearless, unbridled, and intense. Some reviewers have voiced their admiration but also admitted that, at times, they don’t know what she is talking about. One even wondered if she took hallucinogenic drugs when writing.
An Expedition to the Pole is a riotous affair, a theological farce juxtaposing a Catholic Mass in hootenanny style—it was written in 1974—with tales of dangerous treks to the North and South Poles. It’s like a mystical stream of consciousness, filled with images of ice floes and shipwrecks, congregants as clowns, adorable penguins, and bungling clergy, ultimately confirming the absurdity of Catholic worship.
Dillard writes:
“On the whole, I do not find Christians … sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke [in worship]? … The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats … to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
In the chaos of Dillard’s mysticism, I found some hope for preaching today’s so-called parable of the prodigal son, which, in this umpteenth retelling, had me stumped.
Agreed, Luke was not on hallucinogens. Yet this bizarre tale of insults and indiscretions, family meltdowns and communal shunning, a bonkers father and an invisible mother, anticipates the fractured mysticism of Dillard.
We’ve heard the tale and references to it thousands of times. Arguably Jesus’ most celebrated parable, it has inspired uninspiring music, prompted paintings from the mundane to masterpieces, and birthed dozens of films about wayward sons and lost fathers. But here is where familiarity, if not breeding contempt, at least engenders complacency.
Part of Luke’s brilliance is his creating an apparently straightforward tale that isn’t. A bored son asks for his inheritance, squanders money in record time, ends up on a pig farm in Iowa, comes to his senses, responds to a Craigslist job ad from his father, and returns by Greyhound bus, humiliated and depressed. His father is waiting with a marching band outside the bus station, puts the son on a float to parade home to an extravagant bash that his brooding big brother shuns. And except for the grumpy firstborn, happy endings for everyone. Morality tale delivered, loving God affirmed, preacher sits down. Through Christ our Lord … but no!
The hidden complexity of this tale is revealed in the innumerable titles that counter the off-target Parable of the Prodigal Son headline. There is the well-known Parable of the Prodigal Father, but also The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family, The Parable of the Missing Mother, The Parable of the Fuming Neighbors, and my favorite—The Parable of the Jogging Patriarch.
Let’s start with a few fun facts:
- Asking for your inheritance while Dad is still alive announces you want him dead.
- Inheritance is land; taking one-third of the ancestral farm and selling it forever diminishes the economic and social standing of the family.
- Squandering wealth on fast living publicly humiliates both the family and the village that had helped raise him.
- Since there are no kosher pig farms, working there means bunking with Gentiles.
- Finally, it is shameful for any patriarch to run in public; akin to Elon Musk being caught by the paparazzi dashing across the White House lawn only in his SpaceX jammies—what would that do to Tesla shares?
Then there is the looming Kezazah ceremony1: on returning home, the prodigal likely faced the prospect of angry villagers ambushing him on the town outskirts, smashing pottery at his feet, and effectively excommunicating him.
The plot thickens. Not only does the kid abscond with a huge chunk of ancestral wealth, have a rehearsed apology designed to remedy his stomach, not his conscience, and journey home in disgrace, but his lunatic father, who should be secluded at home in dignified lament appropriate to a family patriarch, instead launches himself out into public like a reckless schoolboy.
Dad intercepts the boy before the villagers, protecting him from not only ritual excommunication but possible mob violence. And instead of publicly beating the child as an appropriate warning to other errant children, Dad calls for his best Armani suit, Burberry socks, Prada shoes, and a huge diamond nose ring that makes the kid sneeze. Then he demands the staff whip up a surf & turf banquet for 200, including the mob still standing outside with fresh crockery ready to shatter at the son’s feet.
And then, the oldest son arrives in his own clown car, packed with family dysfunction and other explosives, publicly humiliating the father again. Sons here are batting two for two in the humiliate-Dad contest, as villagers eavesdrop on the insolence of the firstborn, who reveals himself as a greedy, disloyal wretch. Also batting two for two is Dad in his flagrant foolishness, bargaining with the oldest instead of beating or banishing him.
Is it Luke on hallucinogens, Jesus spinning an outrageous tale, and God driving the clown car of the irredeemable, the shameless, the broken into a reserved parking spot on Redemption Street? Or just gospel—godspell—radical and authentic good news?
I recently finished a fascinating book: The Intelligence Trap, subtitled Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes. The book first narrates the development of IQ tests but then examines the difference between intelligence and wisdom, documenting the limited use of IQ tests. They are useful for predicting how well someone will do in school, but not in life. Like the girl with an IQ of 192, who had read 1,400 books by the age of ten and dreamt of being a sculptor and writer. She ended up dabbling in real estate with her husband’s money. Her story is not unusual.
The antidote to the intelligence trap is practical wisdom: a set of skills and dispositions that help us understand not what is right but what is good, not what leads to success but to justice, not what enables deal-making but dignity-embracing.
By virtually every measure, the prodigal, undignified, lax, indulgent father foisted upon us by Luke was not a smart guy. He allowed the family to be manipulated and swindled out of ancestral wealth by a selfish offspring who humiliated the family on so many levels that public excommunication was a looming threat. Yet the father cast caution and dignity to the wind, sprinting out to welcome him like some crazed lover, violating every cultural norm, setting himself up for fresh humiliations by his firstborn.
Not smart, like a God who spends most of the Hebrew Bible sprinting after an unfaithful people, wagers on the virtue of an untested 13-year-old virgin named Mary, has a penchant for the unwashed at every level, and allows His own offspring to be brutally humiliated then executed.
No place in the Bible is God called “smart”—a crafty entrepreneur, a gifted dealmaker, a top-notch organizer—only a smitten, sometimes heartbroken, ever-faithful lover who never gives up, never relents in pursuing wayward humanity and lukewarm Christians.
May this Lenten journey be a necessary and welcome vision adjustment, to see the world and all its lost children not through the eyes of worldly intelligence, but instead through the eyes of Annie Dillard and a wise yet foolish God.
And with that wisdom, might we summon the courage to throw our dignity to the wind and chase after those debilitated, marginalized, shunned, announcing in our abandon the hope of survival, even resurrection, through the Christ we call Lord and God forever and ever.
- Kenneth Bailey, The Cross & the Prodigal: Luke 15 Through the Eyes of Middle Eastern Peasants, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), p. 52 ↩︎