The Prodigal Was a Pagan

We, for our part, do not treat the parables as the source from which we invent our subjects. We treat the subject as the source from which we interpret the parables. So we are put to no hard labor twisting every detail into shape as we expound them, and at the same time we take care not to contradict ourselves. Why a hundred sheep? Why ten drachmas, of all things? And what is that broom doing there? The one who wanted to express how much pleasure God takes in the salvation of a single sinner had to name some definite total from which the one could be said to have gone missing. A man describing someone hunting for a coin inside a house had to furnish the picture properly, with a broom as well as a lamp. Fine-drawn readings of that kind not only throw suspicion on things; by the cleverness of their forced explanations they generally lead away from the truth. Some details are put in simply for the build and the arrangement and the weave of the story, so that it may be carried right through to the end the illustration was set up to serve. [a]

Naturally, then, the parable of the two sons is aiming at the same end as the drachma and the ewe. It was called out by the same occasion as the parables it stands with: the same muttering of the Pharisees at the Lord’s keeping company with pagans. And if anyone doubts that the tax collectors in Judea were pagans — the country having long since been brought under by the hand of Pompey and of Lucullus — let him read Deuteronomy: “There shall be no tribute-weigher among the sons of Israel.” Nor would the name “tax collector” have been so detestable in the Lord’s eyes if it had not been a foreign name, the name of men who put the very roads of sky and land and sea up for sale. And when the writer attaches “sinners” to “tax collectors,” it does not follow that he is showing them to have been Jews, though some of them may have been. He is setting one class, the pagans, level with itself and then drawing a line through it: some are sinners by occupation, that is, tax collectors, and some by nature, that is, men who are not tax collectors. Besides, the Lord would not have been criticized for sharing food with Jews. It was for sharing it with pagans, whose table Jewish discipline shuts its own people out from.

Now, in the case of the prodigal son, we must first take up the question of what is more useful; for no fitting together of an illustration, however finely balanced, is to be admitted if it turns out to do great harm to salvation. And the whole scheme of salvation, so far as it consists in keeping discipline up, we can see being pulled down by the reading the other side is pressing. For suppose it is a Christian who wanders far from his Father and squanders, by living like a pagan, the property he received from God his Father — the property, that is, of baptism, and of the Holy Spirit, and with it of the hope that lasts forever. Suppose that, stripped of the goods of his mind, he has actually hired his service out to the prince of this age — and who is that but the devil? — and that the prince set him over the business of feeding pigs, which is to say, of waiting on unclean spirits; and that he then came to his senses and went back to his Father. If that is the story, the result is that the people this parable lets settle their account with the Father are not adulterers and fornicators at all. They are idolaters, blasphemers, deserters, apostates of every class. And on that reading it is the whole substance of the sacred bond that gets truly squandered.

For who will be afraid of throwing away what he has the power of getting back afterward? Who will take care to keep forever what he is able to lose without losing it forever? Feeling safe in a sin is the same thing as having an appetite for it. So the apostate too will get his old robe back, the robe of the Holy Spirit, and a fresh ring, the sign and seal of baptism; and Christ will be slaughtered a second time; and the man will take his place on the very couch from which those who are badly dressed are commonly hauled off by the torturers and thrown out into the dark. And if that is what happens to the badly dressed, how much more to men who have stripped themselves bare. So it is one more count against the reading that applying the story of the prodigal son to a Christian is neither useful nor reasonable.

And since the figure of a son does not altogether suit a Jew either, our interpretation will simply keep its eye on what the Lord had in view. He had come, of course, to save what had been lost — a doctor needed by the sick more than by the healthy. That is what he was in the habit of picturing in parables and of stating outright. Who among men is lost, who has fallen out of health, but the one who does not know the Lord? Who is safe and sound but the one who does know him? Those are the two classes — brothers by birth — that this parable too will stand for. Ask yourself whether the pagan does not have in God the Father a property of his own: his origin, his wisdom, and a natural capacity for recognizing God. It is that capacity the apostle has in view when he remarks that “in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom” — the wisdom it had of course received from God in the first place.

That, then, is the property he squandered. His way of living flung him far from the Lord, among the mistakes and enticements and cravings of this age, and there, driven by hunger for truth, he hired himself out to the prince of this age. The prince set him over pigs, to feed the herd demons are so at home in, where he would have no supply of food to keep him alive and would at the same time watch other men busy in God’s work with heavenly bread to spare. He remembers his Father, God. He goes back to him once he has had his fill. He receives the original robe again — the standing, that is, which Adam had lost by his offense. The ring, too, he then receives for the first time, and with it, after being put to the questions, he publicly seals the agreement of faith; and from then on he feeds on the richness of the Lord’s body — the thanksgiving, that is. This is the prodigal son: a man who was never thrifty in the days behind him, a spendthrift from the start, because he was not a Christian from the start.

And it was over this man, coming back out of the world into his Father’s arms, that the Pharisees groaned, in the persons of the tax collectors and sinners. That, and only that, is what the elder brother’s envy fits: not that the Jews were innocent and obedient to God, but that they begrudged the nations their salvation, being plainly the people who ought to have been “always with” the Father. And of course what the Jew groans at is a Christian’s first calling, not his second restoration; for the first throws its light even as far as the pagans, while the second happens inside the churches and is not so much as known to the Jews. I think the readings I have put forward fit better with what the parables are about, with how things hang together, and with keeping the disciplines in force. But if the reason the other side is so eager to mold the ewe, and the drachma, and the son’s dissipation into the shape of the Christian sinner is that they mean to endow adultery and fornication with repentance, then either every other crime of equal weight must be conceded pardonable, or else their peers, adultery and fornication, must be kept unpardonable.

But the stronger point is this: no one is entitled to draw conclusions about anything except the subject that was immediately in hand. In fact, if it were permitted to turn parables to ends other than the ones they were made for, we would sooner point the hope these ones carry toward martyrdom. That is the one thing which, after all a man’s property has been squandered, is able to restore the son; which will announce with joy that the drachma has been found, even among the rubbish on a dung heap; which will carry the ewe back into the flock on the Lord’s own shoulders, however far she has run over rough and broken ground. But if it must come to that, we would rather be less clever in the Scriptures than clever against them. We are as much bound to keep the Lord’s meaning as his command. Breaking the rule in how you interpret is no lighter an offense than breaking it in how you live.

So the yoke that forbade discussing these parables with the pagans in view has been shaken off, and the necessity has been seen once for all — or at any rate admitted — of interpreting nothing except as the subject of the proposition requires. Their next contention is that the official announcement of repentance does not even apply to pagans, since their sins do not qualify for it: those sins are put down to ignorance, and ignorance is something only nature makes blameworthy before God. The cure, they say, means nothing to people to whom the danger itself means nothing, whereas the principle of repentance finds its matching place where sin is committed with knowledge and will, where both the offense and the grace can be understood — where the man who mourns, the man who throws himself on the ground, is one who knows what he has lost and what he will get back if he makes God the offering of his repentance; God, who of course holds that repentance out to sons rather than to strangers. [p]

Was that, then, why Jonah judged repentance unnecessary for the pagan Ninevites, when he shuffled out of the duty of preaching? Or was it rather that he foresaw the mercy of God poured out even on strangers, and was afraid that mercy would as good as destroy the credit of his announcement? And so, for the sake of an unhallowed city that did not yet possess any knowledge of God and was still sinning in ignorance, the prophet came within an inch of dying — except that what he went through was a foreshadowing of the Lord’s suffering, which was to buy back pagans as well as others when they repented. It is enough for me that John too, while he was laying out the Lord’s roads, announced repentance to men on military service and to tax collectors no less than to the sons of Abraham. And the Lord himself took it for granted that the people of Sidon and Tyre would have repented if they had seen the evidence of his miracles.

In fact I will argue further: repentance is more available to natural sinners than to deliberate ones. A man who has not yet used it will earn its fruit sooner than one who has already gone on to abuse it, and remedies work better on their first application than when they have been worn out. No doubt the Lord is “kind to the ungrateful” rather than to the ignorant! Merciful to men who have failed the test sooner than to men who have never been put to it! So that insults offered to his forbearance draw his caresses rather than his anger! And of course he does not more willingly hand out to strangers the forbearance he has thrown away on his own sons — seeing that this is exactly how he adopted the nations while the Jews made sport of his patience! But what the Soulish mean is this: that God, the judge of what is right, prefers the repentance of a sinner to his death — a sinner who has preferred death to repentance! If that is so, it is by sinning that we earn grace.

Come here, you tightrope walker over modesty and chastity and every kind of sexual purity. By a rule of this sort, well off the road of truth, you climb with an unsteady step onto a very thin cord, balancing flesh against spirit, steadying your animal nature by faith, keeping your eye in check by fear. Why is the whole of you taken up with a single step? Walk on, if you can find the power and the will, now that you are so safe and as good as on solid ground. For if some wobble of the flesh, some distraction of the mind, some straying of the eye should happen to shake you off your balance — “God is good.” It is to his own children, not to pagans, that he opens his arms. A second repentance will be waiting for you. You will go from adulterer back to Christian all over again! That is what you will put to me, you most obliging interpreter of God.

But I would give ground to you if the writing called The Shepherd — the one book that takes the adulterer’s side — had deserved a place among the divine Scriptures; if it had not been regularly ranked, by every council of churches, including your own, among the apocryphal and the false. The book is itself an adulteress, and so a patroness of her own set. It is from that book that you take your initiation in other matters as well, and perhaps it will find its patron in the Shepherd you paint on your cup — a shepherd who is himself a corrupter of the Christian rite, and who therefore makes a fit idol for drunkenness and a fit gadfly for the adultery that follows so quickly on a cup; a cup from which you sip nothing more readily than the ewe of your second repentance.

I, for my part, drink in the Scriptures of the Shepherd who cannot be broken. John hands him to me straight away, along with the washing and the duty of repentance, saying: “Bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not say, We have Abraham as our father … for God is able to raise up sons to Abraham out of these stones.” The worry, of course, was that they would once again flatter themselves in their wrongdoing on the strength of the grace shown to the fathers. So it follows that we too must count men who sin no more as the ones bearing fruits worthy of repentance. What ripens as the fruit of repentance more than actually getting mended? And even if pardon is rather the fruit of repentance, pardon itself cannot exist without a stop being put to the sin. Stopping the sin is that much the root of pardon — so that pardon may be repentance’s fruit.

So far as its bearing on the Gospel goes, the question of the parables is by now disposed of. But suppose the Lord issued some such announcement in favor of sinners by his actions as well. He allowed the woman who was a sinner to touch his own body, when she washed his feet with her tears, wiped them with her hair, and opened his burial with the perfume. He told the Samaritan woman who he was — not an adulteress by her sixth marriage now, but a prostitute — and told her as readily as he told anyone. Our opponents gain nothing by it, even if the people he pardoned in those cases had been Christians already. For our position now is this: the Lord alone may do it. May the power of his pardon be at work today! As for the years in which he lived on earth, we lay it down definitively that it settles nothing against us if pardon used to be conferred on sinners then — Jewish ones included. For Christian discipline dates from the renewing of the covenant and, as we said at the outset, from the buying back of flesh, that is, from the Lord’s suffering. No one was complete before the order of faith was brought to light; no one was a Christian before Christ was taken back up to heaven; no one was holy before the Holy Spirit was shown from heaven, who himself fixes what discipline is. [x]

Very well. These men received “another Paraclete” in the apostles and through them — a Paraclete whom they fail to recognize even in his own prophets, and whom therefore they no longer possess in the apostles either. Let them teach us, then, out of the apostolic documents themselves, that the stains of a body fouled again after baptism can be washed off by repentance. Do we not find in the apostles too the shape of the old Law where it demonstrates how great a crime adultery is — in case anyone should think it counts for less at this new stage of the disciplines than it did at the old? When the Gospel first thundered and shook the old system down to its foundations, while the dispute was still going on over whether the Law was to be kept or not, this is the first rule the apostles sent out, on the authority of the Holy Spirit, to those who were already beginning to gather to their side out of the nations: “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no heavier weight than the things it is necessary to abstain from: from sacrifices, and from fornications, and from blood. By keeping clear of these you do rightly, the Holy Spirit carrying you.” It is enough that here too adultery and fornication have kept their own place of honor between idolatry and murder — for the ban on blood we shall take to be very much more a ban on human blood. [aa]

In what light, then, do the apostles intend those crimes to be seen — the only ones they single out of the ancient Law as things to be carefully guarded against, the only ones they prescribe as necessarily to be abstained from? Not that they permit the rest; but these alone they put in the front rank, plainly as crimes that cannot be let off — they who, for the pagans’ sake, let the law’s other burdens off. Why do they release our necks from so heavy a yoke, except to lay on them forever this short summary of discipline? Why do they indulgently loosen so many bonds, except to bind us wholly and permanently to the ones that matter more? They untied us from the more numerous so that we might be tied fast to abstaining from the more harmful. The matter has been settled by a trade: we have gained a great deal in order that we may pay back something.

But the trade cannot be called off — that is, if it is to be called off, it will be by a repetition: a repetition of adultery, of course, and of blood and idolatry. For it follows that the whole weight of the law is incurred again if the terms of the pardon are broken. And the Holy Spirit did not come to terms with us casually. He came to these terms without even being asked, which is all the more reason to honor him. No one but an ungrateful man will dissolve the engagement he made. If it comes to that, he will neither take back what he has discarded nor discard what he has kept. The terms of the latest covenant are unchangeable forever; and of course the public reading out of that decree, and the decision embodied in it, will stop only when the world does. He has refused pardon plainly enough to the crimes he singled out and ordered carefully avoided; whatever he did not concede by implication, he claimed. This is why the churches grant no restoration of peace to idolatry or to blood. That the apostles should have departed from that final decision of theirs is a thing I do not think it is permissible to believe — or if some do find it possible to believe, they will be bound to prove it.