One of missiologist Lesslie Newbigin's central insights was that our reading of the Bible is conditioned by the cultural lenses we view it through. Our particular langugage and history bring with them assumptions that can both help and hinder our understanding of scripture. It's when we read the Bible alongside Christians of other languages and cultures that those lenses become apparent to us, and vice versa. Absent that corrective, to get outside my cultural assumptions is like trying to push the bus that I'm riding in. Reading anything from Kenneth Bailey is to get off our particular bus and be taught by someone intimately familiar with the language and customs of the Middle East. Bailey has lived and taught in the Middle East for most of his life, and studying Luke 15 through Middle Eastern eyes has been a big part of his life's work. Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel's Story—published in 2003—is one of the results.
This is a fantastic book. Read it and I guarantee you'll never look at this trilogy of parables (lost sheep, lost coin & lost son) quite the same way again. Through his knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, and long-neglected Syriac and Arabic texts Bailey demonstrates how Jesus casts himself in the role of three personal metaphors for God found in the Psalter (i.e. shepherd, mother/woman and father) climaxing with his skillful retelling of the saga of Jacob found in Genesis chapters 27-35 which his scholarly listeners (scribes and Pharisees) would have been intimately familiar with. The story of Jacob was their story after all! But Jesus reshapes their story into another with himself at the center. Here Jesus transforms an account of an inept Oriental patriarch and his two scheming and fractious sons into an astonishing picture of sin, compassion, and costly grace, and in the process redefines what it means to be lost and what it means to be found. In this parable one sees the clearest picture of the motivation for Jesus' ministry: "to seek and to save the lost."
A text as familiar as this one acquires what Bailey terms "interpretive barnacles."
One of the realities of the history of interpretation of Scripture is that the more familiar a passage becomes, and the more central it is to the life and faith of the church, the more interpretive "barnacles" it acquires. . . . This process has perhaps proceeded further with the great parable of the prodigal son than with any other New Testament story. (p. 99)
Bailey sees at least "fifteen points in the story that need to be clarified in the light of the cultural world of Jesus." Here's one of them. I had the joy of teaching on this parable in our Sunday school class yesterday, and I introduced this point by saying we need to think of the setting as a crowded traditional Middle Eastern village not "Gone With the Wind". Bailey writes:
Too often this parable is seen as a story about three people and no more. The family home is imagined as a great house on the top of a hill standing in grand isolation. Such is not the case. Agricultural land is scarce in the Holy Land. In both Old and New Testament times the average village was about six acres. Farmers rarely lived on their farmland, residing instead in tightly compacted villages. This was and is because of the need to reserve every bit of land for farming, but people also gathered in small villages for reasons of security. The parables of Jesus are stories about people living in communities that are nearly always mentioned or assumed.
In each of the first two parables in this trilogy the community is called to gather for a celebration. In this particular story an inheritance is sold to the community. At the end of the tale, a father runs down the village street in full view of the community. After embracing his wayward younger son at the edge of the village, the father turns to address his servants (who have run after him). Like the shepherd and the woman, the father invites the community to a festive banquet. Anticipating a crowd, he orders the butchering of a calf rather than a sheep or a duck. Community-based professional musicians are hired for the occasion. The older son has a circle of friends who live nearby and could attend a party for him. In short, this is a parable about three people living in a community, a community that is just offstage throughout the parable. Each twist and turn of the story expects the reader/listener to be aware of that offstage presence. (p. 100)
As I said that's just one of fifteen clarifications that Bailey offers. These don't change the fundamental meaning of the story as its been understood by the church down through the centuries, but they scrape off the "barnacles" and allow us to see it like a newly restored painting. This book has done that for me.
Later in the week I'll share one or two more of Bailey's exegetical vignettes.
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