90 Ancient Ideals
more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-
nine righ teous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15.7). When
a man wanders from the Hebrew God, there is no assurance that
God will take him back into the fold. There are some second chances
in the Hebrew Bible (David gets about a half dozen), but the second
chance based on forgiveness is not the order of the day.
As Frye, writing in Blake’s spirit, puts it, Jesus “said that God
was a Father and that we should live the imaginatively unfettered
lives of children, growing as spontaneously as the lilies without
planning or foresight. The God of his parables is an imaginative
God who makes no sense what ever as a Supreme Bookkeeper, re-
warding the obedient and punishing the disobedient. Those who
labor all day for him get the same reward as those who come in at
the last moment. His kingdom is like a pearl of great price which it
will bankrupt us to possess. If we want wise and temperate advice
on living we shall fi nd it in Caesar sooner than in Christ; there is
more of it in Marcus Aurelius than there is in the Gospels” (80). The
God that Jesus is describing is a radically new version of the estab-
lished God. He is a deity who loves all equally, who cares dearly for
his creations, who is tender and mild—it is, in short, a God the
Father who is much like Jesus himself. The Gospels often serve as
a brilliant reconfi guration of the Hebrew God on the part of Jesus
Christ.
Of course Jesus never tells the people that this is what he is doing.
Jesus does not say, The God you have believed in up until this point
is not quite the real God. Rather, he begins with part of the standing
version of the deity: yes, God is power ful, God is a grand creator,
God is eternal. But gradually he shifts the portrait. God is also
tender, kindhearted, and merciful. He is much like the father in the
story of the prodigal son.
The tale of the prodigal son is a brilliant parable that reveals al-
most every individual to himself or herself. One does not so much