Lost Sons: God's long search for humanity
Michael Sadgrove
SPCK £9.99
(978-0-281-06214-0)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT602
)
"THIS book is about a disturbing theme: how children can be
lost." So begins Michael Sadgrove's eloquent exploration of eight
stories from Genesis and early Exodus, highlighting in each case
the motif of the lost son, and linking each story with an aspect of
the Passion of Jesus, the Son lost and found. "Abel is 'lost' by
being murdered, Canaan by being cursed, Ishmael by being abandoned,
Isaac by being bound for sacrifice, Esau by being supplanted,
Joseph by being betrayed, and Moses by being hidden. The first
primeval son, Adam, is lost by being exiled."
Lost Sons is an expansion of Holy Week addresses given
in Durham Cathedral, and its approach is persuasive, if
occasionally straining to accommodate within its paradigm such
disparate material as the cursing of Canaan - an ingenious recovery
of an Old Testament bit-player - and the novella-length saga of
Joseph.
But the author knows not to overstate his case, as he invites us
to see "how knowledge of these stories might subliminally colour
our reading of the Passion", and is nervous of the "typical
preacher's ploy to turn narrative into exhortation".
Sadgrove has clearly done his scholarship, aware, for example,
of the aetiological function of some of these archaic stories as
accounts of origins. But he wears it lightly, in a concern to read
each story on its own terms, to "step inside the horizon of the
narrative". He acknowledges his debt to a "reader-response"
approach, which focuses not on the inherent properties of the text,
but on the reader's interaction with it, and particularly with the
gaps and indeterminacies of the story, in which readers may find
room to actualise the text as their own.
This is especially fruitful as Sadgrove concludes by looking at
the inconclusive account of the resurrection in Mark, the most
reticent of the Evangelists. "Mark's Easter is about things not
seen: 'he is not here.' His faith is in the gaps, the silences, the
hints. . . Mark's great gift to the Church is to refuse to make it
too easy for us. The empty tomb is not the answer, but the
question."
The Revd Philip Welsh is Vicar of St Stephen's, Rochester
Row, London.
SISTER Beda Brooks OSB, in The Resurrection
Garden, considers
the resurrection and its power in 19 meditations. They have
different formats: some are written as poems, others in prose; some
ask questions; others tell stories (St Pauls, £7.95 (£7.15);
978-085439-772-3).