Joking Father's Day

“When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.” 

― Mordecai Richler, "Barney's Version"

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"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

― The Gospel of Luke, "The Parable of the Lost Son"

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Dear Kate,

Being Father's Day and all, I am sure many in church will hear all over again many renditions of The Parable of the Lost (Prodigal) Son, the biggest Jewish joke Jesus has told in his otherwise short career as a stand-up (and walk-around) comedian.

To read a story of old without reading it out of and against our own cultural context when it is meant to be read that way for it to be spoken of as "living words" is to undermine the story's relevance to the "sons" of new.

Fundamental questions, let's begin with them.  What is the story about?  What does it actually speak about?

I think it is about God the Father--Dah!  But wait, what if we forget that?  Well, then we might think this is a blueprint for how to be a good human father, or at least God's preferred way of how a human father should behave to win a son back, jumping around at the end of a dusty road in his pajama (his "underwear" to people of this age), putting on a viral TikTok for the world to cringe at.

To miss the most basic point that the story is about God is to miss both butts of the joke and thus the point of telling it at all.  Jesus was challenging the ideas in his own culture of what God should be, first by caricaturing the deep-rooted, unassailable social understanding of family (and in particular, fatherhood) with the magnificent defeat of a humiliated father (which, I hope no Christian would miss, is to foreshadow how it is made available by the Son, Jesus' own magnificent defeat on the cross), then to humiliate, make fun of those who found the joke too crude, the father too ridiculous, the "moral" of the story too immoral to be told with impunity.  It is a killer joke that triggers the killer in us.

So, we say we want to tell it again, on Father's Day, no less, to a new generation of sons and daughters.  How?  How do we go for the kill again when God, with fatherhood, is already properly killed in our own culture?

What if we think not only it is no longer ridiculous for a father to behave this way--"loving" the sons, the "sinners," our frail humanity "just the way we are"--but for him to behave any other way is to prove what we all know to be true, about how "toxic" a man can be, how a father, any authority figure, is out to control us, belittle us, exploit us, and we should continue to undermine all such "systemic" aggressions until the root of them are properly chopped down.

On this Father's Day, let this father say, I have heard from this culture hell-bent on self-immolation everything that a father should not be, but frankly cannot recall the last time hearing anything about what I should be.  A father's identity is apophatic (definition obtained through negation) to the point of being completely nullified, that outside of an initial erection to start it all, the lesser of us is the better for all of us.  

Of course I was exaggerating, telling a sick joke.  Of course I was not.  Look around, see our land of desolation, fatherless families.  Look deeper, for those of us sticking around, where we are sticking our manhood in.  Being there without being anywhere at all, that's what the world wants from a father for him to keep his paper crown.

Objection: isn't the Parable of the Prodigal Son saying something positive about what a father should and could be?  My answer is, let's go back to the third paragraph and do this all over again.  Yes, the implication is that we should model after God the Father.  But, sadly, God is dead, killed by His own joke.  We, the sons and daughter, not only pick up after him to be "inclusive" and "compassionate," we out-ridiculous him to include everything by excluding him, shaming him back into his less-enlightened corner so that our humanity can shine in the darkness he perpetuated for millennia.

So, preachers, tell me the story again.  I want to know what is so funny about it.  Homer Simpson is funny and we love him to death.  He does everything to kill himself and people around him but never any real harm.  Now, that's funny!

Yours, Alex