Lost Sons
In 2012 I wrote a book published by SPCK, Lost Sons: God’s Long Search for Humanity. It looks at stories in the early part of the bible that tell of sons who are ‘lost’ to their parents in various ways. Abel is murdered, Canaan cursed, Ishmael abandoned in the desert and left to die, Isaac bound by his father Abraham for sacrifice, Esau supplanted by his younger brother, Joseph betrayed by his brothers, and Moses hidden away by his mother. Adam is the archetype of them all, the child who becomes lost by running away from God and hiding himself, and then finding himself exiled from paradise.
A son lost to suffering
The New Testament is also a story of a lost son. One way of reading it is to see Jesus as the Son of the Father who in His passion and death becomes ‘lost’. The entire gospel hangs on this. He was ‘lost’ in His suffering and dying in ways that echo the Old Testament stories, for like them He too was supplanted, betrayed, abandoned, bound, hidden, murdered and cursed. The first Jewish readers of the passion would have known these Old Testament stories intimately and perhaps brought their own associations from Genesis and Exodus into their reading of the passion narrative. (This is not to say that all these stories are ‘typological’ of the New Testament, though in some cases such as Isaac, the New Testament does allow such a reading. However it’s important not to claim more than that there are patterns in these narratives that are suggestive to the imaginative reader.)
A son found in the resurrection
The wonderful thing about God’s Lost Son, however, is that He is ‘found’ again in the resurrection. And this turns out to be true of many of the ancient lost sons. Ishmael is rescued from the desert. Isaac is not killed on the altar because an angel stays his father’s hand. Esau is reconciled to the brother Jacob as Joseph is with the brothers who sold him into slavery. Moses is discovered in the bulrushes and brought up in the royal palace. So the book is about resurrection as well as death, even if sometimes we have to go looking for it in dark and baffling places.
Finding the way back home
Throughout, I have had in my mind the one of the greatest and best-loved of all Jesus’ parables, The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). Perhaps we should call it the parable of the Lost Son and the Loving Father. The ‘far country’ to which the son travels (and surely his father travels with him in his mind and emotions?) can stand for all the different places where these children in the Hebrew bible find themselves to be ‘lost’ – and where we too lose ourselves and from which we need to find the way home. My book is an invitation to make that journey homewards and in doing so, enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s redeeming love revealed in the passion and resurrection of Jesus.