A preface.

The next post deserves a preface, for all of the various inspirations that went into it.

First, as noted previously, we have a smaller replica of Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son in our home, and if you ever want to appreciate a painting, hang it in your living room and look at it for ten years.  Or for that matter, make sure you go to a church that likes to bring this parable up at every opportunity, from the pulpit, in bible studies, in Sunday School.

Second, I recently discovered David Ferry’s Bewilderment, an excellent collection of poems that won the National Book Award last year, and one of the poems he wrote was a powerful restatement of the Abraham and Isaac story.  It was really little more than an amplified translation of the biblical text, and yet he made the story fresh and more poetic than I had ever considered it to be.  I have lately appreciated reading and even crafting translations and restatements on several fronts (part of my various side studies of Eliot’s Waste Land and Sanai’s Walled Garden and Neruda’s A Poet’s Obligation, quoted in Thirty Birds), and I thought I would try my hand at restating my favorite parable.

Third, Dan, you have mentioned many times your thoughts of writing a book called “We the Pharisees.”  That seed, too, is in this poem.  I have been frequently shown how intricate this parable is, with its separable stories of the younger son, the father and the older son, and I had heard of course how the older son was likened to the Pharisees, but I had never appreciated how much Jesus drew them into the story from the start, confronting their mumbling and posing rhetorical questions and giving them premises that probably shook them to the core: Imagine you are a woman, or a field worker, or a decadent child.  And yet, as direct as he was, Jesus was inviting these Pharisees to his table too!  (This, younguns, is why we go to church - for those truths that impact us even after we’ve heard the story over and over.  Two weeks ago, that happened to me again when I was reminded of the faith of the thief on the cross: I’ve heard all the holy week elements repeatedly, but this year it jumped out at me that all this sinner had was a prayer, and it was enough!)

Finally, I approached this effort by relying most heavily on the King James Version, which is not my usual translation, but I have recently come to appreciate the stronger poetry in this text over, say, the NIV.  Try paralleling Psalm 23, for instance.   And while I gave Luke 15 a few enhancements, I tried to keep them as biblical as I could, often with the help of the annotations in my New Jerusalem study bible.  If anyone is interested I can give specifics, but generally you can check out Psalms 17, 23 and 149, Isaiah 40, Ezekiel 34, Zechariah 3, Matthew 18, Luke 2 and 14, John 10 and Revelation 21.

Read on!