“In the Hands of the Father: Lenten Meditations on the Prodigal Son”
Fr. David Curry has compiled his four Lenten Meditations on the Parable of the Prodigal Son into a single pdf document, which can be downloaded by clicking here.
Day: March 28, 2012
Lenten Meditation IV: The Prodigal Son
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.”