Profile of a Household

In my last post I wrote:

"I have realized that God makes nothings of the things he loves, and the things that love God strive to become nothings."

Such a statement must be justified, and in terms of trying to understand the gospels, the only substantive justification for such a statement is the statement's utility as the only conceivable upshot of some teaching of Jesus.  I have written of late about the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and it can be used to show the utility of my above statement.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is not really a story, insofar as the parable-fragment (condensed as) "younger son takes inheritance to a foreign land and squanders it" has as much moral dynamic as the entire parable.  The younger son pursue his interests, and then realizes his interests lie with his father's household.  That is the younger son--in his moral aspects--as he is.

The story can be stretched to include the father's reaction, but that is just the father being who he is.  The story can be stretched still further to include the elder son's reaction, but that is just the elder son being who he is.  The dynamic of what we know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son is merely the frame-setting (in moral terms) of the pregnant tableau of the festival scene as it will spill over (presumably) into the future of the household.

But what is the younger son to do?  He has been deprived, paradoxically, of even the hire-and-salary stature of the household's employees--those persons whose station he would have hoped gladly to share.  Certainly we are not supposed to surmise that he might hope for the eventuality of the position of prime inheritor upon the untimely demise of his elder brother.  All that the younger son can do, with his hope for recompense flowing merely from the prosperity of the household--with no formalized definition of that recompense--and with his stature in the household flowing merely from his moment-to-moment, situationally-determined ability to devote himself to its welfare--is to become as far as possible an organic component of the household.  The "something" that will comprise the ill-defined give-and-take of the younger son in the household will rely on the younger son making himself nothing.  His interests must become one with those of the household.

The same moral burden falls inescapably upon the elder son.  To be always with the father and to stand to inherit all is implicitly to internalize all responsibility for the household.  In the case of the elder son this duty of self-abnegation is plainly visible, in that his position is seen as being in subservience to the father--a position that is altered in no degree of substance in the eventuality of the father's death.  The elder son stands to inherit responsibility above all--if this is not so, then the entire moral framework of the parable falls.  It is the case, after all, that the father does not prescribe celebration for the prodigal's return because it is the father's whim, but rather because such rejoicing is the outcome of the organic functioning of the household.  The father is devoting himself to a good, not wallowing in a good--at least that is the message of the parable.  If the younger son makes himself nothing as against the functioning of the household, and if the elder son (even as he inherits) makes himself nothing as against the functioning of the household, then all will be well.  This is the set-up for a story, a story that Jesus does not tell.

Even the father, of course, is described in terms of self-abnegation--though the quality of that self-abnegation would be (in any fleshed-out telling of a larger story around the parable) entirely dependent on the father's true moral stature.  An earthly father could be seen as a pathetic figure in such a "story," slobbering over his undeserving rascal son and then scurrying to soothe the feelings of his surly, aggrieved elder son.  Only a father of truly majestic character (available to us, of course, under the presumption that the father is God) could carry off such behavior and not lose face.  Indeed, the scriptural depictions of God wounded and lamenting over his children's misdeeds bespeak a God who is not afraid to be seen in such moods--undiminished because of his majesty and secure in his majesty.

And so the Parable of the Prodigal Son gives us a God-figure who is unafraid to be seen as minimizing himself in pursuit of the best effects of his eternal moral statutes, and gives us a Jesus-figure whose function as an agent of perfect obedience involves implicit self-abnegation, and gives us an errant "everyperson" figure who must strive to become nothing in service to the household--conceptually the household of God--in which he (or she) can become a surprising something in spite of faults and failings.

In the larger workings of this household-metaphor can be seen to reside all interplaying elements of striving and mercy and validation and forgiveness (and backsliding and judgment and failure and damnation) that, unfortunately, are elements so often plucked individually from the larger universe of God's dealings with people and inserted into the theologians' rickety "salvation economies."  Jesus tells us to conceptualize ourselves in terms of diminishment and life-yielding nothingness, and the denominations tell us to conceptualize ourselves, in false modesty, as fault-labeled somethings over which humanly-fashioned salvation-labels can be applied.