Becoming the Father
One month out from being a dad.
There’s a baby on the way and two stories have been on my mind, one parable and one miracle. Wikipedia describes parables as short, didactic stories with a “single, unambiguous point”: this is nonsense. Parables in the New Testament are designed to be chewed on for a while, and they reward close reading. The Return of the Prodigal Son is the only parable I feel slightly qualified to discuss, and there’s still much I’m missing: it’s an astonishingly rich text.1
The story is pretty familiar even in secular circles: the younger son who demands his inheritance from his still-living father, wastes it all in a foreign land, and is reduced to eating the husks that farm pigs won’t touch. As the son returns home, humiliated, we’re told the father runs out to him and embraces him before he can say a word. The father throws a feast for the returning son, a move which is shocking and insulting to the older son, who has never moved against his father and feels overlooked. The father explains his decision: “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”
Jesus’s first public miracle is the turning of water into wine, at a wedding. It’s a miracle that exegetes love to pick apart for insight, the beginning of three years of journeying ministry that will end with him on a cross. Here’s the crux of it:
Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.
What’s going on thematically in this parable and in this miracle? The weird thing about the water-into-wine miracle is that no one knows about it except the servants, the lowest-status people there. For an event that marks Jesus’ entrance into public life, it’s remarkably private. None of the people for whom the event is for have any indication, until presumably much later, that they've received a gift, the bridegroom’s honor salvaged and the partygoers’ revels extended. Everything of importance happens in private, in the back room, in earthen jars, in darkness.
In the prodigal son parable, traditional interpretations identify the Christian listener with the two sons. At times we find ourselves in the role of the younger son, wishing our father dead, slaves to our own desires, fleeing relationship. Other times, we are implicated by the older brother, his pride and his resentment at rule-following without reward. In his book on the parable, Dutch priest Henri Nouwen talks about a third interpretive possibility: the Christian is called to move from exhibiting the characteristics of either son to exhibiting those of the father, to become the father.
The father’s behavior throughout the parable would have been almost unrecognizable for contemporary listeners. To be asked for an inheritance while one is still alive is to be wished dead: to provide that inheritance, in practical terms, would have meant selling off perhaps half of one’s possessions to create liquidity. When the younger son returns, the father runs out to him, yet another self-abasing act for an aged patriarch. It’s implied to be an incredibly awkward visual scene, the old man hacking and wheezing, hiking up his skirts, his sandals flapping on the dusty road. But it resolves into an image of homecoming, welcome and return.
In both of these narratives, there are things being unconditionally given, feasts that celebrate and sanctify central human interactions. In both cases the gift giver doesn’t magnify himself, but in some way retreats from the limelight, or accepts a socially inferior role. And, in some way, that self-abnegation enables a far deeper gift than would be possible otherwise.
Both of these parables are in some sense about “lordliness” in the Christian vision, and how different and weird it is compared to traditional views of it. In a recent essay, Susannah and Alastair Roberts describe the lordliness of Christian virtues, and the strange translation of values by which they become available to the weak. All the virtues of nobles: magnanimity, hospitality, lenience, lack of resentment, peacemaking, assurance – become both available to and in fact the hallmarks of this new people group, made up predominantly of women, slaves, and the poor. They cite Luther, who loves this paradox and puts it well:
A Christian man is the most free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone.
Anyone can become the father. You see where I am going with this.
Pregnancy has created an incredible sense of urgency to become the father in the sense Nouwen means, as well as in the obvious and concrete sense. As I wait for this kid to arrive, it seems that the virtues described above are the sort required to be a good father, to be a good parent, and that I display those virtues only in incredibly rare moments when I am not hungry or peeved or stressed or distracted or otherwise self-oriented. All this philosophizing is now set on a 9-month schedule, and at the end of that schedule I am now expected to be this person in perpetuity.
One of the hallmarks of this attitude is what we euphoniously call joviality, the laughing kingship the Romans attributed to Jove or Jupiter and that St. John Chrysostom is describing in his paschal sermon – “You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the table is richly laden!” The anonymous author of Gawain and the Green Knight is invoking something similar when he describes the young King Arthur holding court at a midwinter feast as “so joly of his joyfnes.”
The unnerving part about this call isn’t so much the “noble” virtues that derive from authority. It’s more that most of the things parents do don’t get recognized, or not until much later - I certainly didn’t notice most of them until much later. If they’re accepted with gratitude it may be well after the events themselves are forgotten, leaving only a sense that someone was there for one at the time and place needed. Babies don’t remember anything for years of their lives.
Years ago a friend of mine described how marriage is a case study or symbol of joviality:
But whereas a wedding is a pairing of equals, parenthood is a pairing with someone tiny, who in a very real sense you can’t explain yourself to or lean on. And the other interesting facet to me is that as you raise a kid you are both giving to them in this magnanimous, without-recompense way, and also ideally calling them into that mode of being as they grow and mature.
There’s probably something to say about habituation here – that the only way to become this kind of person is to do the things this person would do, day by day. When the kid shows up it’s quite possible all of this thinking about it will feel ridiculous, and only the doing or not doing will matter. I’ll know soon enough!
Kenneth Bailey’s Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes is a book-length treatment of the Near Eastern historical contexts of this parable and others, and an incredible resource if you’re interested in the social dynamic described in this text, as is the work of Tim Keller.
Well said Santi! Welcome to the wonderful mystery of parenting!
beautiful essay! Godspeed in your new journey