Make No Bones About It: David Brooks Is Preaching

And unlike most in the preaching profession, he’s not talking to the choir. He even begins with a liturgical format: We take as our text today the parable of the prodigal sons. I assume you know the story about the father with two sons. The younger took his inheritance and blew it. And when the money was gone, he returned home. When his father saw him he ran out and embraced him. He offered the boy his finest robe and threw a feast in his honor—all to the profound chagrin of the highly responsible older brother. It’s the older brother’s responses that are fascinating. Brooks puts them front and center.

What you get from Brooks is a creative and imaginative Midrash in which he reinterprets the story as a lesson for modern social policy. The last three paragraphs are seminal.

The father teaches that rebinding and reordering society requires ...

an aggressive assertion: You are accepted; you are accepted. It requires mutual confession and then a mutual turning toward some common project. Why does the father organize a feast? Because a feast is nominally about food, but, in Jewish life, it is really about membership. It reasserts your embedded role in the community project.

The father’s lesson for us is that if you live in a society that is coming apart on class lines, the best remedies are oblique. They are projects that bring the elder and younger brothers together for some third goal: national service projects, infrastructure-building, strengthening a company or a congregation.

The father offers each boy a precious gift. The younger son gets to dedicate himself to work and self-discipline. The older son gets to surpass the cold calculus of utility and ambition, and experience.

The comments
By early Wednesday there were 450 comments on Brooks’ column. Brooks’ followers, unlike most who comment on blogs, are often positive. You do get some heady, thoughtful comments from very intelligent folk.

But as a guy with significant theological training in his background, some of the comments were gross misunderstandings of that appendix to the “Old Testament” which we normally refer to as the “New Testament.”

If you translate the biblical traditions of Genesis through Revelation with any sort of literary critical accuracy, it’s obvious that the center of its rather odd perspective is God. “Jahweh,” if you prefer the Hebrew. What’s intriguing is how many of the comments miss Jahweh’s real concerns: politics and economics.

Much of the American faith tradition (what I often refer to as “religion in general” or “the religious idiocracy”)  attempts to eliminate these two threats by making the gospel a matter of individual “spirituality,” whatever the hell that fuzzy term refers to.

Let’s be clear. The overall thrust of the Faith is inclusion.  And the direct critiques are about a diseased politics which asserts legitimacy for the powerful, all to the exclusion of the weak and marginalized. You can see that in today’s excessive claims of order which eliminate any insistence of distributive economic justice. The Koch Brothers and their ilk would not like to hear the authentic gospel. Nor would many politicians who reside in the back-pocket of business leadership.  And all the demands to keep religion out of politics is utter nonsense. Thankfully, Jahweh is not at all dead.

Thus, Brooks is quite correct in his Midrash. Literalistic readings and applications of the parable, as some commenters might desire, are not inherently required. There is not the slightest reason that a creative, innovative reading of the Prodigal Sons cannot be taken out of the realm of American individualism and applied thoughtfully to the body politic.

Flickr photo: +onlybygrace