Fathers and Sons: Gifts and Grievances
Photo by Anna Hecker on Unsplash
President Joe Biden's recent issue of a full pardon for his son Hunter Biden’s actions got me thinking about fathers and sons. I have thought generally about fathers and sons, but also more precisely about my father August and my sons, Jim and John. I have thought about my mixed ways of being a son to August and my mixed ways of being a father to Jim and John.
First, I will reflect on the roster of fathers and sons that occur to me from scripture:
- Consider the case of old Isaac and his two sons, Esau and Jacob. Both the father and older sons, Isaac and Esau, assumed the practice of primogeniture in which the oldest son received the property, title, and blessing of the father. Their shared assumption, however, is upended and overridden in the narrative by the cunning of mother Rebecca who schemes and plots so that the younger son, Jacob, might receive the blessing and all that goes with it. Her plot works. Jacob, the younger, receives the blessing. The father and his older son are left bereft and disconsolate. When father Isaac discovered the theft of his blessing, he “trembled violently” (Genesis 27:33). He asks rhetorically:
Who was it then that hunted game and brought it to me, and I ate it all before you came, and blessed him (v. 33)?
But the father knows. He knows that he has lost the blessing for his older son and heir, and he cannot recall his blessing. He has failed in his primary responsibility as a father. The response of Esau, his older son, is no less filled with pathos and anguish:
Bless me, me also, father! (v. 34)
And then Esau asks wistfully:
Have you not reserved a blessing for me? (v. 36)
But he also knows. He will get only a second-rate blessing, but not the one to which he is entitled. The father and the son together have been robbed of their proper historical destiny. The sense of dread and loss ends with Esau’s grief:
Have you only one blessing, father? Bless me, me also, father!” And Esau lifted up his voice and wept (v. 38).
The father responds to his son as best he can. But his response is not the one he wanted to utter. He finds the family drama to be more and other than he intends, more and other than he can manage. Father and son are left together in their shared resourcelessness and their helplessness.
- Consider the case of Absalom, son of David. He appears in the narrative as the avenger of his sister, Tamar. That role requires him to kill his brother, Amnon, who has violated their sister. The avenging murder of his brother in turn requires that Absalom should flee for his life (v. 34). While we have not been forewarned of the king’s predilection, now we are told,
The king [...] also wept bitterly (v. 36).
It belongs to the father to weep. He wept for his murdered son, “day after day.” Finally he was consoled; but Absalom hid out for three years after he had murdered his brother and evoked the wrath of his father.
The destructive interaction between the brothers brings grief to the father.
Now the story turns to Absalom and his slow rehabilitation in the court of David. The trickery of Joab is required for that rehabilitation. Eventually he is admitted to the presence of the king. His admission is kept quite formal, between a king and a renegade subject. But Absalom, in his vanity, cannot refuse his public popularity. He foolishly sets up a court to rival that of his father (II Samuel 15:1). His success is nothing short of a conspiracy against his father (v. 12). The king must put down the rebellion. But he cares for his son Absalom: “Deal gently” (II Samuel 18:5). David is torn between his public role and his shattered familial connection. But of course, Joab does not “deal gently” with the renegade son. He, along with his armor bearers, “surrounded Absalom and struck him, and killed him” (II Samuel 18:15).
The king cares only about his son:
Is it well with the young man, Absalom? (18:29)
When he learned of the death of his son the grief of David echoed the sobs of Isaac:
Then the king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept. And as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom my son, my son!...O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (18:33, 19:4).
The pursuit of power had caused a deep irreparable rift between the father and the son. In the end, however, David cares no more about protocol than did Isaac. It is all about his son…but it is too late. He is left only with disconsolate grief. In response to Joab, David will perform his public duty (II Samuel 19:5-8). But his heart is toward his son, not his public role.
The scene changes, but the same tension recurs in the life of Jesus:
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me” (Luke 12:13).
It is not surprising that the family dispute concerns “inheritance.” Brothers (sons!) dispute one another about inheritance, property, title, and economic advantage. In the parable that follows, Jesus narrates a man with skewed values who has no social relationships, but only an insatiable drive for more property and more wealth.
It is not surprising that one of Jesus’ most potent parables concerns two sons. It is always two sons: Esau and Jacob, Amnon and Absalom, the two sons seeking intervention from Jesus. The sons are always in dispute about property and inheritance. In the parable, the younger son wants his share of family wealth now (Luke 15:12). And the father does not refuse him. The son squanders his inheritance and is left chagrined in his poverty. In his return home, he is welcomed as a long-lost son who is now restored. The father celebrates his homecoming jubilantly. But the celebration offends the elder son, his brother:
Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him! (Luke 15:29-30)
The son sees that his wastrel brother has “devoured our property.” The scene between the father and the elder son throbs with bottomless tension between property and familial connection. Thus the parable concerns the perilous either/or for the fathers and for his two heirs.
There is, no doubt a large company of sons—after Esau and Jacob, after Amnon and Absalom, the two sons in the dispute over property—who yearn for reconciliation. A defining claim in our common life, and therefore defining subject for gospel reflection, is the alienation and hoped-for reconciliation between fathers and sons.
It is undeniably the case that the Bible is cast in patriarchal terms, so that the struggle and possibility is one between fathers and sons. It is not difficult, however, to imagine that, mutatis mutandis, the same alienation and hope for reconciliation operates between fathers and daughters, and mothers and daughters, and mothers and sons. As I have pondered Isaac, David, the absent father, the receptive father in the parable, and the Father who was absent for an instant from his Son on the cross, I am moved to great pathos. I am, moreover, drawn to deep pathos and anguish as I consider my own sonship to August and my fatherhood of Jim and John, as I have been, over time, much too preoccupied with “other things,” with busyness and productivity, to be attentive in responsible ways. But for me, like Isaac and David, the moment passes and cannot be retrieved. It is often enough that fathers end in anguish about sons, even as sons end in anguish about fathers, and mothers with their daughters. We learn so late what we might have known at the outset. Thus our several fathers and mothers, sons and daughters constitute scarred and scarring enterprises that play out behind the curve of best cases.
It is not difficult at all to understand the readiness of Joe Biden to forgive his son Hunter. It is the overriding issue for fathers to forgive. There are of course the predictable critics of Biden who eagerly criticize every move he makes. In this instance and in my judgment, I cannot fail to appreciate Biden’s move as a father toward his son. One can imagine Biden—in the succession of Isaac, David and the parabolic father—wishing most of all to be well connected in affirming ways to his son.
And we must not disregard the narrative of Father and Son in the life of Jesus. Trinitarian casting makes the matter tricky and complex. But the utterance of Jesus in Matthew 27:46 is neither tricky nor complex:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
This is a bereft son in a moment of abandonment by his Father. It may be that Matthew intends that we should, with this citation, infer the entirety of Psalm 22 that ends in affirmation:
I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you;
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him (vv. 22-24).
Those verses, however, do not tone down the desperate voice of verse 1, the voice of one abandoned and alone, left without resources. Of this moment in the life of Jesus, Juergen Moltmann writes:
What happened on the cross of Christ between Christ and the God whom he called his Father and proclaimed as “having come near” to abandoned men? According to Paul and Mark, Jesus himself was abandoned by this very God, his Father, and died with a cry of god forsakenness…To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in Trinitarian terms. The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son (The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticisms of Christian Theology, 241, 243).
The Son, bereft of the Father, is resourceless. So it goes with fathers and sons, an unending drama of abandonment, need, and hope, a drama most often left unresolved because neither many fathers nor many sons have the capacity for reconciliation and restoration.
In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus poses two questions:
Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? (Matthew 7:9-10)
The obvious answer is, “No, there is no one among us who will give a stone. No, there is no one among us who will give a snake.” Except in practice the matter is often otherwise. There are very many fathers who give a son a stone or a snake instead of bread or a fish:
Instead of unconditional love, a father may give only high expectations;
Instead of limitless grace, a father may settle for quid-pro-quo bargaining;
Instead of generous self-giving, a father may be parsimonious concerning affection and forgiveness.
Jesus continues his instruction:
How much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him? (Matthew 7:11)
His teaching concerns the generosity or parsimony of human fathers; but it also concerns the endless generosity of our heavenly Father who gives good gifts to those who ask. The parabolic father of the two sons is exactly such a father:
Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found (Luke 15:31-32).
Isaac wanted to be such a father but could not resist conventional practice or immediate satiation. David wanted to be such a father, but his drive for power led him in destructive directions. And in the contestation of the family estate narrated by Jesus, the father is absent. Perhaps the father of the two disputatious sons had generously provided the family inheritance, but he has no role to play in this narrative. The sons are left ill-prepared to sort it out, and they fail awkwardly and completely.
May we be constantly astonished by the self-giving of God who as father begets the world in love, who as a mother sets a table of generosity before us as we receive the bread of life and the overflowing cup of blessing. It does not belong to this Father/Mother God to hold sons and daughters to abstract norms and standards, because our true life and wellbeing fall below such explanatory categories and claims. The Father/Mother God knows about us and our needs, and treats us with lavish generosity; we respond with all the gratitude we can muster.
