Merit or Maturity?

Ken Bailey’s exposition of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15), which he more accurately titles “The Two Lost Sons”, contains some great criticisms of merit theology.

The younger son off in the far country does not repent (in Jesus’ definition of repentance) when he decides to return – he espouses a merit theology that plans to earn enough money (set me up as a skilled craftsman) to pay back to his father what he has squandered then he thinks he can restore the relationship. Of course when he meets his father, the old man has already forgiven him, humiliated himself, run the gauntlet on his behalf, and is offering full restoration! He is a son, not an employee…

The older son, angry when he hears why the party is being thrown, refuses to come in, and complains to his father (who, once again, humuliates himself publicly on behalf of one of his sons – the neighbours would have expected severe discipline if not disinheritance for the firstborn’s rudeness here) that he has always “served” him. This is the word for what a slave does. He conceives of the relationship to his father as master-slave, a relationship where the currency is merit. But Jesus wants us to see God in a relationship of love to his children, not distance from his employees…

The Woman at the Well

Ken Bailey’s lectures on Jesus Interprets His Own Cross brushed past John 4 and he made some great observations that got me thinking about social practice and typology…

The woman is clearly a loose woman. She comes alone, in the middle of the day and when she sees Jesus at the well she does not wait for him to get up and stand aside, as etiquette demanded, but comes close enough (possibly even climbing on the stones herself) that Jesus can say to her, “Give me a drink”.

She doesn’t come to the well at midday (when it’s far too hot to be working outside and the water is not as nice) because if she went at dawn the respectable women would shoo her away – yes – but also because she would be more likely to find men there and be able to ply her trade uninterrupted.

Jesus asks for water from the defiled bucket of a despised Samaritan, something a first century Jew would never do. He also cuts across Rabininc tradition and conservative social mores by speaking to a woman in public. That’s one in the eye for Islamic (and any extreme Christian) practices of gender segregation. Meeting a member of the opposite sex one-to-one in private is usually unwise, sure, but the public realm does not need fencing and hedging in order to wrap women up and mute them. Jesus ignores unhelpfully restrictive social constructions of space, privacy, ‘ownership’ of women, etc.

And here we see Israel’s King put in a position of temptation by a foreign woman. Just as Bathsheba (presumably a Hittite like her husband) bathed on the roof knowing full well that David would see her, so the Samaritan woman approaches Jesus as a potential client. And while David folded without much resistance, grasped and murdered, leading to great sorrow and more death, David’s greater Son refuses to play the game. He offers life, demonstrating costly love for a fallen human being, that leads to transformation and joy.

not from round here

We’ve seen it satirised in Hot Fuzz, where the local community dresses up like the Gloucester Klan and does away with any unruly or interfering blemishes to their village. But the satire has more than a grain of truth to it:

The freedom of country life is an illusion of the city dweller. It is real to him only as long as he doesn’t belong to the village community. That community demands strict adherence to its laws and customs. (1)

Kill a child before you kill adat (tradition) (2)

The coercive power of local community sentiment is remarkable. Jesus’ parable on the “friend” at midnight, as recorded in Luke 11 relies upon this. I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his αναιδεια he will rise and give him whatever he needs (verse 8, ESV). Ken Bailey argues that αναιδεια needs to be translated ‘avoidance of shame’ – the neighbour does not want to be known as tight-fisted and since the local community can all hear the guy shouting up to him in the middle of the night he will certainly come and give him what he needs. (3) Ostracism by the local community that would be consequent on such shame, and would increase shame, is not something to be desired!

The purpose of that parable is to point out by contrast the tremendous generosity of God, unconditioned by such local community coercive sentiment, who delights to hear his people’s prayers and answer them. Nonetheless it wholly relies upon the prevalence of that sentiment and to a certain extent relies upon our approval of the coercive function.

This kind of local community traditionalism, enforced with ostracism and even violence is not part of the mindset of the urban Westerner but it is a reality across much of the world. It would be all too easy to point to Muslim communities as exemplary in this case. Even though they do display much of this conservatism and bring it to bear on religious questions (what an affront to the privatised religion of the Rationalist Secular West when it bothers to think about such subjects!) as well as ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ ones (having correctly recognised that such distinctions are fairly artificial) they are not alone in that. Prakke finds remarkable examples in the rural Netherlands persisting into the early 20^th century – shopkeepers driven out of business, people carried bodily out of the local area, individuals completely shunned for not keeping local traditions or for leaving the ‘parish’ church in order to join a seccessionist church or house church. This was one of the reasons for the emmigration of hundreds of people from Drenthe to Michigan in the mid 19^th century. (4) This was happening in a majority Christian country whose legal system was shaped by the Christian faith and was taking place largely among professing Christians. Perhaps that explains why there are not records of people being killed for shaming the community or for forsaking their religion, things which do still happen in Muslim communities from Africa to the Philippines (including Britain) today…

But pointing the finger is not a simple matter. There are social mechanisms for restraining behaviours in almost every group one can think of, even the unselfconscious evangelical churches of the UK… ;-) There is much to think about here concerning degree, legitimacy, agency and several other –cy words, I don’t doubt.

(1) P. W. J. van den Berg, Het Karakter der Plattelanssamenleving, p.74, quoted in H. J. Prakke, Drenthe in Michigan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983 [Dutch 1^st edn 1948]), p.62.
(2) Malay proverb
(3) Bailey, Poet and Peasant: A Literary-Cultural Appraoch to the Parables in Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), pp.119-133.
(4) Prakke, Drenthe, pp.62-65

Ken Bailey enthusing

A bald middle-aged man, jacketed, shirt buttoned to the top but without a tie, sits at a desk in the corner of a tidy, but dull study. Long-fingered, sporting a large tasteless wooden cross round his neck and an unfashionable pair of large-framed plastic specs, a few books scattered in front of him, he speaks without eloquence or poise. Tears roll down my cheeks.

Get hold of this man’s teaching on Christ’s birth narratives. Get hold of him unpacking Jesus’ own words about the cross and about mission. Get hold of his magna opera on the parables in Luke’s gospel. It’s all on video and DVD (and his academic books on that particular subject are now available in one handy volume, thankyou Eerdmans). When you have heard the parable of the Prodigal Son as the Middle Eastern peasant audience heard it, you will not be the same again. Grace and repentance come alive in his hands. If you do not weep as you hear Jesus’ tender treatment of the former prostitute and sting at our Lord’s rebuke to Simon the Pharisee you are probably dead.