by CCW | 20 June 2010 14:57
Humility is the condition of our rejoicing, the condition of our redemption in Christ. Nothing could go down harder in our contemporary world than such a concept. Yet, nothing could be truer to the imperative of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
“God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble,” St. Peter tells us in his First Epistle General and certainly it is a lesson which he himself has learned. The Gospel reading from St. Luke complements it with a very powerful message about the nature of humility as the counter to human pride and about the paradoxical reality of the divine humility.
The context is animosity and hostility. Publicans and sinners draw near to Jesus; Pharisees and Scribes murmur because of the company which he keeps. They are scandalised and critical. Doesn’t he know with whom he is associating? How can he be a true religious teacher? Jesus response is revelatory and transforming. He tells two parables – actually, three. We have in the gospel for today two of the three, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The third parable of this triptych of divine humility is the tremendous parable of the lost or prodigal son.
The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke comprises these three parables, each told in sequence. It is a most powerful illustration of the message of the Epistle about God’s resisting pride and about his giving grace to the humble.
Humility is the counter to our pride which pretends to our self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and our self-centredness, on the other hand. Either we have it all and need nothing outside ourselves or we presume to think that we deserve what we presently don’t have but desire. The gospel of humility is precisely the counter to our pride.
The lost sheep, the lost coin. What do they teach us? Simply this. They teach us the humility of God which is given to shape our souls in the love of Christ. The lost sheep is precious; the lost coin is precious. The shepherd and the woman seek diligently – lovingly – for the one that is lost. Without them the community is incomplete; our humanity less than itself. God seeks the lost. In him we are found.
But it is the third parable that captures the full dynamic of the divine grace at work in bringing us home to ourselves. We cannot read these two parables without being aware of the third – or at least we shouldn’t. The last (and dare I say, longest) parable appears as the lesson in Year 1 at Morning Prayer for the Second Sunday in Lent, and is also appointed, significantly enough, as the Gospel reading ‘For a Parochial Mission’. It is, in other words, a most powerful and suggestive parable.
Henri Nouwen speaks profoundly about this third parable through his meditation upon Rembrandt’s great portrayal of the gospel story. Rembrandt’s painting[1] hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in Russia. The portrayal of The Return of the Prodigal Son is poignant and illuminating. The younger son who has taken his inheritance and squandered it completely has “come to himself” in a far-off land. He recognises his wastefulness – this is what prodigal means – and his sinfulness, “I am no more worthy to be called thy son,” he thinks and says. Yet, as he reasons, perhaps, he can at least have food and shelter by being in service to his father; in short, by returning.
Christ has gone into the land of our alienation and separation from God to bring us back to the homeland of the spirit. The motive force is the divine love. In a way, the parable of the prodigal son brings out the dynamic of the movement; the movement, at once, of divine grace, and the movement, too, of human conviction and humility. The prodigal son “comes to himself” and recognises in humility that he has “sinned against heaven” and before his father and is “no more worthy to be called your son.” He is willing to return to his father upon no other basis than as a servant.
The response of the father is wonderful. Seeing him “afar off” his love goes forth to meet him and embrace him. There is a celebration; the celebration is that of human redemption. The parable gives fuller meaning to the two truths of the preceding parables, that of the lost sheep and the lost coin. What is different is that in the parable of the prodigal son there is the aspect of the human will acting with the divine will. There is a dynamic.
Rembrandt has captured this marvellously. The son who thinks himself no longer worthy to be a son kneels before his father in his poverty and dereliction, “clothed,” we might say, “in humility.” The father embraces him with his two hands placed upon his shoulders. As Nouwen notes, the two hands are radically different. The one seems paternal, the strong hand of the father; the other maternal, the gentle hand of the mother. “Thy kings shall be thy nursing fathers,” as Isaiah notes. Even in the confusions of modernity and in our heightened, almost hyper-sensitivity to gender issues, we can contemplate the beauty of this moment captured by the imagination of Rembrandt.
The son does not presume to return on the same basis as he left. But in the eyes of the Father and, in truth, he remains and ever remains a son. Yet, the story does not end there. The Elder Son, the one who never left, feels hard done by in the return and in the fuss and celebration about his foolish Younger Brother. Thus the parable, too, touches upon the age-old dilemma. The goodness of mercy will often stir up the emotions of resentment. The response of the Father to the Elder Son is exemplary. “It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost and is found.” Found where? In the love of the Father. Found how? By his return in humility, on the one hand, and by the steadfast love of the Father, on the other hand. The Father’s love reaches out to us in the land of our dissimilitude, the place where we are not at home, in order to bring us “out of the land of the shadow of death” and into the homeland of joy and peace, embraced in the love of the God.
The gospel story in its rich fullness captures the theme of the Epistle, the theme of honest humility. Only so can there be rejoicing. Lost but now found, in love.
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity III, 2010, 8:00am
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/06/20/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-after-trinity-800am-service/
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