This is the second of three addresses that Fr. David Curry presented at the 2016 Lenten Quiet Day on 12 March 2016. The first is posted here and the third here. Audio files will be posted in the next day or two.
Into the Hands of the Father
The Prodigal Son: Rembrandt’s Painting and Henri Nouwen’s Reflections
Lenten Quiet Day sponsored by the PBSC NS/PEI
Saturday, March 12th, 2016
(Fr. David Curry)
Address # 2
“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.” Matthew’s familiar words illumine the nature of the pilgrimage of Lent. It is the way of the cross, the way of self-denial and sacrifice, the way that belongs to all of the many forms of Christian witness. One of the martyrs of the Christian Church, St. Perpetua, who died in the third century, is reported to have said in the face of her impending death that “another lives in me.” It captures at once the meaning of Christian witness and life. The words of Matthew’s Gospel and Perpetua’s martyrdom serve, perhaps, as a kind of commentary upon the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Throughout the centuries of Christian thought, that parable has been the occasion of many commentaries. Rembrandt’s painting is itself a kind of commentary on the parable and its significance with respect to the over-arching themes of repentance and reconciliation, themes which are specific as well to the season of Lent. Self-denial and suffering are features of Lent that draw us into the mystery of Christ’s passion, into the mystery of human redemption accomplished through the reconciliation between God and Man in Jesus Christ. The parable in the rich commentary tradition speaks to those themes explicitly.
We do not read the Scriptures in a vacuum. We read them as belonging to an interpretative community. The Parable of the Prodigal Son has been read liturgically at certain times of the Christian year in the different ecclesiastical traditions of the wider Church. It is read in our Canadian Anglican tradition at Morning Prayer in Year One of the two-year cycle of Office readings on The Second Sunday in Lent, for instance. In the traditions of the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, there is the Sunday of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in the pre-Lenten season which gives high prominence to this parable as preparing us for Great Lent.
The consequence is that there is a rich commentary tradition among what are commonly called the Fathers of the Church, meaning the Patristic period, comprising roughly the first six centuries of the Christian faith. Archbishop Chrysostomos, a contemporary Orthodox archbishop, notes that Henri Nouwen’s meditation on the Prodigal Son by way of Rembrandt’s painting reflects the patristic understanding of the parable even if there are no explicit references to the commentary tradition of the Fathers in Nouwen’s book. Our endeavor will be to highlight a few of the comments of the Fathers about the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
The Patristic Period is of great significance for our understanding of the Christian faith. Through the cauldron of controversy, confusion and conflict, the Fathers worked out two things which are of great significance for the Christian understanding. They settled on the Canon of Scripture – the texts that comprise what we ordinarily call the Bible – and they determined what the essential features of Christian belief are in the Creeds and the further explication of the creeds through the Great Councils. These two developments, Scripture and Creed, go together.
Their approach to the interpretation of Scripture is rich and varied but, in general, it is always about seeing patterns and connections that relate to the idea of the unity of Scripture and to the creedal principles of the Faith. Much of the Father’s observations may seem strange and arbitrary to us because of their use of allegory and symbolism but underlying this tendency is a strong sense of the Scriptures as having a purpose for us and as containing rich layers of meaning. It means a kind of focus on each detail as conveying a deeper meaning, deeper meanings, however, which usually relate directly to the creedal principles of the Christian Faith.
In the commentary tradition of the Fathers on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, there is an emphasis on the theme of the return, recognizing the son as “an exile and a fugitive from the life led under the Father” as Clement of Alexandria puts it, and who “has arisen and come to his Father”. The theme of being lost and found intensifies the sense of joy, the greater joy that belongs to redemption, to our being gathered back into the Father’s love, a love which we have squandered and denied but which ever remains as something greater than all our follies. Thus, Clement and others will highlight the theme of the return, albeit in different ways than Rembrandt’s painting.
Following upon the preceding two parables, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin, the Fathers emphasize the theme of rejoicing through the redemption of the lost. This means a focus on the details of the return in such things as the imagery of clothing. As Clement, for example, and he is followed in this by many others, the clothing the Father provides for the son who has returned is rich in symbolism. The best robe is “the robe of immortality”, the ring is “a royal signet and a divine seal”, the shoes are not “the shoes of the sinful soul” but the shoes which the Father bids the servant give to the repentant son “are buoyant, and ascending, and waft to heaven,” shoes that lead us to heaven. This is very different from the painting which shows us the shoes of the son who kneels before his father in his rags. His shoes are ruined and his soles scarred; he is a very poor man, indeed. But in the reconciling love of the Father he is raised into the real truth of his being as the Father’s son.
The fatted calf that is killed is likened to the sacrificial lamb, not literally as Clement says, but to make the connection in the parable to Christ’s sacrifice and to our sacramental life in Christ. “For He,” meaning Christ, “is both flesh and bread, and has given Himself as both to us to be eaten.” In this reading of the Parable we see the creedal themes of redemption and the sacramental application of those themes. We, too, come to the altar just as the Son returns to the Father, embraced in the Father’s love through the sacrifice of the heavenly Son who has gone into the distant land of human sin and death for us. Ambrose of Milan reminds us that “we were also in a distant land,” the land of “the shadow of death,” but now we live “in the shadow of Christ,” who is our light.
Augustine remarks that the “best robe is the dignity which Adam lost; the servants who bring it are the preachers of reconciliation.” That theme of reconciliation is a strong feature of Nouwen’s meditation, too. What he sees in the image of the Father’s embrace of the Son is the reconciling love that belongs to the deep compassion of God for us. Such is the Patristic view as well. Everything is resolved in the compassion of the Father.
But the commentary tradition also reflects on another aspect of the parable reflected in the painting as well, namely, the elder son. Here some of the older commentary tradition challenges us. Tertullian, for instance, sees in the elder brother “the Jews who envied the Christians for their ‘reconciliation’ with God the Father”. That sense of distinction and division between Christians and Jews may trouble us but for the Fathers it was an inescapable feature of their understanding that Christianity comes out of Judaism and therefore entails a criticism of certain aspects of Judaism. Yet the theme here also turns to something that belongs to the spiritual psychology of the soul, to the idea of envy, which will become one of the seven deadly sins and which wreaks such havoc in our lives and in our relations with one another. Ambrose, too, will draw the parallel between “the envy of the elder brother for the wayward son” and envy of the Jews for Christians.
The Gospel for The Second Sunday in Lent, of course, also presents us with a critique of one side of the Jewish understanding, the claim to a special relationship with God which excludes others rather than being for the sake of all. That is, I think, part and parcel of the difficult but amazing dialogue between Jesus and the Canaanite women. He is challenging the disciples and through them, Israel, precisely about the divine love that provides for all. Jesus acknowledges her words, “truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table,” as words of “great faith.”
The Patristic emphasis on the theme of reconciliation means that the Parable is also seen in relation to the other two parables which precede it. Ambrose captures this best, I think. He writes:
St. Luke has given three parables successively; the sheep which was lost and found, the piece of silver which was lost and found, the son who was dead and came to life again [note the explicitly creedal interpretation], in order that invited by a threefold remedy, we might heal our wounds. Christ as the Shepherd bears you on His own body, the Church as the woman seeks for thee, God as the Father receives you, the first, pity, the second, intercession, the third, reconciliation.
That theme of reconciliation embraces the elder son as well for the divine love seeks to overcome all of the forms of our alienation and separation from one another by recalling us to the Father’s love, reminding us that we dwell in the Father’s love always. “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” We forget this at our peril and when we forget it we are lost and dangerous in our envy. “It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost and now is found.” There is that idea of the greater joy for all in the return of the sinner, the return of the prodigal son.
The return depends on the extravagant and compassion love of the Father, a love which is total and unconditional. The challenge of our lives is to live in that love. It belongs to our witness and to our life. “Another lives in me”, Perpetua remarks. And that can only happen through self-denial and sacrifice, through the ways in which the life of Christ lives in us. Lent sets before us the pilgrimage of love; it is the way of the passion of Christ. “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit,” Jesus says on the Cross, words that shape our journey and our homecoming into the hands of the Father.