Month: March 2012

This is the fourth in a series of four Lenten meditations on the Prodigal Son. The first meditation is posted here, and the second here, and the third here.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Feast of the Annunciation of Mary, more often than not, falls within the Lenten season and, indeed, often within Passiontide, as it does this year. Mary’s word to the angel Gabriel is, of course, Mary’s great ‘yes’ to God and reminds us of an important feature of the Christian faith. It is all God’s grace, we might say, but it also all about us, about our response and embrace of God’s grace and mercy. In a way, Mary’s fiat mihi is equally the measure of our Lenten journeying. It is altogether about our active and attentive acquiescence to God’s will and purpose for our humanity. Lent is the divine project for the renovation of our humanity, wounded and broken by sin, restored and renewed by grace.

Mary plays an altogether crucial role in that project. She is not only the Mother of God, the theotokos, as orthodox Christianity insists, the one through whom the Son of God becomes the Son of Man, becomes fully human while remaining fully divine, she is also the one who “mothers each new grace” in us, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. She holds “high motherhood/towards all our ghostly good/ And plays in grace her part/About man’s beating heart.” Lovely lines, I think, and ones which speak to our Lenten endeavours to ponder the mystery of Christ’s Parable of the Prodigal Son, perhaps better called the Parable of the Two Lost Sons, and to ponder that mystery, in part, through Henri Nouwen’s prayerful meditation upon the Parable and its artistic representation by Rembrandt in what is probably the last and, perhaps, greatest painting of Rembrandt, perhaps one of the greatest paintings ever, his Return of the Prodigal Son. As Nouwen suggests in his subtitle, it is the Story of Homecoming, the homecoming which speaks to all our souls.

We have had occasion to consider the two sons. There is a sense in which our attention is drawn, first, to the younger son and, then, to the elder son but what holds those moments together, what unites every moment in the parable itself, is something other than the two sons; it is the Father. More precisely, it is the love of the Father. In thinking about each of the sons we can hardly ignore the role and figure of the Father, to be sure. But our task tonight is to ponder the mystery of the love of the Father. It may seem paradoxical, but in so doing we are also, I think, pondering the mystery of the Mother of God, the one who embodies the very truth of our humanity considered simply in itself in terms of the true meaning of our life with God. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” Mary says. We behold her who says, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

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This is the third in a series of four Lenten meditations on the Prodigal Son. The first meditation is posted here, and the second here. Footnotes have been omitted in the following text. To download the complete text, including footnotes, as a pdf document, click here.

“Blessed are those servants,
whom their lord when he cometh shall find watching.”

It is commonly called The Parable of the Prodigal Son. Rembrandt’s painting is called The Return of the Prodigal Son. Henri Nouwen’s book bears the same title, The Return of the Prodigal Son, but provides as a subtitle, “A Story of Homecoming”. The missing indefinite or definite article before homecoming is telling. Why? Because the parable is very explicit. “A certain man had two sons.” There is more than one leaving and therefore the  possibility of more than one homecoming. In some sense the parable is universal; it is about the homecoming of our humanity which is, in some sense, too, about our abiding in the compassionate love of the Father as Bernard of Clairvaux’s Lenten sermons on Qui habitat, (Psalm 91, Psalm 90 in the Vulgate) suggest. “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide under the protection of the God of heaven.”

Two sons. We forget that the dynamic of the story is not just with respect to the younger son but also includes the elder son. Such is the subtlety and complexity of the parable, the commentary tradition upon it, and Rembrandt’s painting, itself a kind of commentary. And in very intriguing ways.

Rembrandt’s painting focuses, to be sure, on the return of the prodigal son but that is not the actual center of the painting. The iconic scene of the son’s embrace by the Father is off-center, to the left in the painting, actually. To the right is the elder son, his face illumined, like the scene of the embrace of Father and younger son, but the center of the painting is the space between the Father’s embrace of the younger son, and the stern and critical gaze, it is fair to say, of the elder son. Unlike the prodigal son, ironically, the face of the elder son and brother is visible.

The parable is really the parable of two lost sons as Nouwen suggests. In this he is hardly unique. The interpretation of Scripture does not happen in a vacuum. And among the more intriguing interpretations of the parable are those that deal with the elder son. It seems that you don’t have to go away to be lost. The distance between the Father’s embrace of the younger son and the elder brother’s gaze is most telling.

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