Bitter Grace

asakiyume kindly asked about the Christian adult ed I mentioned a couple of days ago. Here goes.

I recommend that you read the stories involved. They really are stories. If you can, try to read them freshly, as of gossip about actual people.

The first is a story of a sheep owner who, finding that one has gone stray from the other ninety-nine sheep, leaves them [undefended?] in the grassland and goes in search of the lost one, returns with it, and calls for community rejoicing-- what was lost now is found!

The second, a story of a woman who loses one out of ten silver coins, lights a lamp and sweeps her house until she has found it, then calls on her neighbours to rejoice with her-- she found her lost coin!

Luke, who chronically hopes to settle things by slapping on a tidy moral, says in each of those cases, that this is like the rejoicing of the heavenly host when a sinner repents.

But, says Levine, neither sheep nor coins sin or repent. She stresses, rather, that these are stories about counting. The one sheep among the hundred matters, counts, is cherishingly missed when gone. The one lost coin among the ten is sought though there are still nine.

And then we go to the story of the son who went away on separation terms, whose return was feted and whose elder brother was left out of the rejoicing. Here, noted Levine, the father apparently can't count to two. And the story doesn't end with the partying, but with the father telling his elder son in a field that he, the father, loves his less-inconvenient son. That's it-- no further resolution. The parable of the father who can't count.

Interestingly, Luke doesn't follow this up with anything about sin and repentance, nor about rejoicing thereafter.

So here are things I thunk in the wake of this.

1. Relationships are not the same as ownership. (Sheep being treated as property here, so far as I can tell.) Property is easier. So no wonder a lot of people want to treat their human connections as property.
2. I'm not big into sin, though I'm way into repentance. And to me, what the three stories have in common is the restoration of wholeness-- with that elder son being a very reasonable exception. But of wholeness being a core value, which I think is consistent with a bunch of other radical stories about Jesus's behaviour and teaching. (There's one of my hobbyhorses.)
3. One of my colleagues in the discussion talked about how her daughter has been angry with her, about her continuing love and support for her son who treated her badly. But that the same daughter exercises that same continuing love to her own daughter. And it occurred to me that it might be natural to children to think in terms of a fixed plate of goodies to be divided, and am-I-getting-what-I-deserve, but that a more parental view might be one in which continuing relationship, and productive functioning moving forward, has become a natural paradigm. (There's another hobbyhorse.)


* I acknowledge that my own interpretive King Charles's head features in my responses. Naturally, as one always does, I think that my interpretive lens is valid on its own little legs, well-grounded in the literature it addresses, and Not One Bit a King Charles's Head. Ahem.