Jacob & the Prodigal -or- Some Final Luke 15 Reflections

We just finished our series of messages exploring Jesus' teaching in Luke 15. Responding to a group of religious leaders Jesus shares three stories about a good shepherd and a lost sheep, a good woman and a lost coin, and finally (famously) a good father and a lost son. These stories come in response to these religious leader's anger/consternation at the company Jesus keeps.

The main text I used as a reference throughout the series was Kenneth E. Bailey's Jacob & the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel's Story. What an amazing book. I have had it sitting on my desk since December, 2007, when based on my love of narrative, Mike Kruse gave it to me with some of the following comments:

I mentioned Kenneth E. Bailey to you yesterday...He is retired now but spent forty years of his life living in Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, and Cyprus. He knows several ancient languages and has published as much in Arabic as English...His gift since at least the 1970s has been to take a cultural-literary approach to studying the Bible and opening up metaphorical theology to the world. If you look closely at the footnotes in some of N.T. Wright's stuff you will see Bailey referenced..."Jacob and the Prodigal" is the culmination of his life long love affair with Luke 15 and it is absolutely profound. He has a new book coming out in February called "Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes." I can't wait.

I finally started reading the book in June and this is what initially prompted me into the series. Here's the irony though: the teaching I did was simply the set-up for the main point Bailey is making is this book. The main point of the book is that in addition to all the other things he is doing in these stories (i.e., doing a theological midrash on Psalm 23, Jeremiah 23, and Ezekiel 34 when he tells the story of the good shepherd and the lost sheep), Jesus is reframing the story of Israel. He does this by re-narrating the famous saga of Jacob (whose named is changed to Israel), Esau, and Isaac, through the story of the prodigal son. It's mind-blowing. The back of the book describes it this way:

Israel, the community to which Jesus belonged, took its name from their patriarch Jacob. His story of exile and return was their story as well. In the well-known tale of the prodigal son, Jesus reshaped this story in his own way and for his own purposes. In this comparative study of the Old Testament saga and the New Testament parable, Kenneth Bailey unpacks similarities freighted with theological significance and differences that often reveal Jesus' purposes equally. Here Bailey offers a fresh view of how Jesus interpreted Israel's past, his present, and their future.

Obviously there is loads here to unpack, way more than the 32 verses of Luke 15 would lead you to believe. I thought I would be able to get to it all in a four week series, but we ended up at five weeks and didn't touch Jacob with a ten-foot pole. The thing that is cool though is that the Jacob story has always been one of my favorite stories in the Old Testament, especially since I read Frederick Buechner's fictional account of his life in the novel The Son of Laughter. It probably goes without saying that the name of our church is Jacob's Well. I have been wanting to preach a long narrative series out of the Old Testament. So I am thinking in the future we may engage the Genesis account of Jacob and when we get to the end of it, reconnect it to Luke 15 and how Jesus engages the story in order to re-narrate the imagination of Israel. Just a thought.

If you haven't ever interact with the Jacob narrative, you can find it in the book of Genesis, from chapter 25:19 to 50:14. Of course, the story veers into the life and times of Jacob's son Joseph - but what an amazing detour it proves to be.