WISDOM FOM AMY-JILL LEVINE
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
March 31, 2019
Amy-Jill
Levine is a Jewish Scripture Scholar who has done a great deal of study and
writing on New Testament Christian Themes. She is funny and breezy in her
style.
She teaches
at a place called Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, TN, where she describes
herself as “a Yankee Jewish Feminist who teaches at a predominantly Christian
divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.”
I had the
pleasure to meet her at a gathering of inter-religious clergy at St.
Catherine’s University a couple of years ago, and our parting gift from the
gathering was her book titled “Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables
of a Controversial Rabbi.”
In that book
she takes up several of Jesus’s parables and tries to enlighten Christians
about how the original first century Jewish audience would actually have
learned and understood those stories, rather than how 21st Century
Christian preachers tend to presume they did.
I have
returned to that book often, as I did this week in reflecting on the so-called
parable of the Prodigal Son, which we have just heard from Luke’s Gospel.
Here are a
few of her summary comments at the end of the chapter:
“What are we to make of that younger son? It is neat and tidy
to see him as shattered by grace and fully repentant, but I doubt first-century
readers would have. I neither like nor trust the younger son. I do not see him
doing anything other than what he has always done – take advantage of his
father’s love. It’s hard to get much work done when one is filled with fatted
calf, and yet his father loves him, and he is a member of the family.
Therefore, he cannot be ignored, and to dismiss him would be to dismiss the
father as well.”
This
parable, she says, “provokes” us with simple exhortations. Recognize that the
one you love lost may be in right in your own household. Do whatever it takes
to find the lost and then celebrate with others, bot so that you can share the
joy and so that the others will help prevent the recovered from ever being lost
again. Don’t wait until you receive an
apology; you may never get one.
“Don’t wait until you can muster the ability to forgive; you
may never find it. Don’t stew in your sense of being ignored for there is
nothing that can be done to retrieve the past. Instead, go have lunch. Go
celebrate, and invite others to join you. If the repenting and the forgiving
come later, so much the better. And if not, you still will have done what is
necessary… you will have opened a second chance for wholeness. Take advantage
of resurrection – it is unlikely to happen twice.”
I love it
when I can quote the insight and language of people who are better at it than I
am. It makes homily preparation so much
less work.
There is
very much that unresolved in this parable that can seem to us to be so
familiar.
At the end
of it nobody has yet to utter the simple words “I’m sorry” or “can you forgive
me?”
We never
find out whether that angry older brother – the one who was truly lost –
showed up at the party. We don’t know whether he was ever persuaded by his
father, or reconciled with him. Or with his brother.
There’s a
lot that’s going to be determined by what happens next, whether in speech or in
action.
Any of us
who lives honestly understands the reality of being lost, whether it is we
ourselves who are there, or loved ones, or whole communities – even if we or
they may not even recognize it.
This holy
season of Lent is an opportunity, among other things, to pose the question,
“who’s lost? Why? And what can I and we do to at least start to create the
conditions for the lost to be found, for the dead to return to life?”
As Amy-Jill
Levine concludes:
“A father had two sons… the details can be filled in, and
filled by any among us. The scriptures of Israel give us hope for our own
reconciliations, from the personal to the international.
We need to take count not only of our blessings, but also of
those in our families, and in our communities. And once we count, we need to
act. Finding the lost… takes work. From those efforts there is the potential
for wholeness and joy.”
Today on
this fourth Sunday of Lent, our church observes what has been traditionally
called “Laetare Sunday,” or “Rejoice Sunday.”
From the
very middle of a season of penitence and reflection on sin, we are summoned to
remember what it’s all for in the end: wholeness and joy.
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