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.”
The younger son in returning no longer even presumes upon his sonship. The elder son in the parable can no longer even speak of his brother as his brother but only as “this thy son”. And yet, it is the Father’s love which embraces both the returning son of repentance as well as the resentful son of duty. The Father’s love calls them both back to home. There can be no home without the Mother, too, I would suggest.
The preoccupations about gender have created a whole lot of sturm und drang for contemporary Christianity, especially the way the dignity of our humanity, as understood in the pageant of human redemption, has become dominated by the human rights agenda. Because the parable seems to be about a father and two sons, it might seem that mothers and daughters and women in general are somehow left out of the picture. This misses the point, it seems to me, and overburdens the reading of Scripture with a contemporary concern which gets in the way of the profounder meaning and teaching of the parable which speaks intentionally to the whole of our humanity. The parable is not about rights and privileges, expect perhaps in the person of the elder son, so much as it is about the deeper justice of God which is love.
The parable is closely associated with the two preceding parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. The parable of the lost coin is about the diligence of the woman, to use the Latin word for the kind of serious love and committed love that is shown in the actions of the woman who seeks diligently for the one lost coin. She is in her house, to be sure, but then the Father, too, is seen in conjunction with the home. The deeper point is that the diligence of the woman is the same kind of love as the Father’s love which embraces the younger son and entreats the elder son; the same kind of love, too, signified in the shepherd’s seeking the one lost sheep without which the homeland of the spirit is somehow incomplete. The joy in each of these three intertwined parables, it seems to me, is both about the return of the lost but also about the community that is incomplete without the return of the sheep, the coin and the son(s).
It is that greater sense of all things finding their truth and unity in the divine compassion that makes the Father’s love so profound and so important. The father of the parable is our heavenly Father; there is scarcely a commentary that does not see that as a central aspect of the parable; its overarching doctrinal and symbolical idea, if you will.
For the doctrinal point is important. In the Christian understanding of things, God is the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the sacred names which transcend human associations and connotations while yet being expressed through them. The Female Glory, to use a phrase from the title of Anthony Stafford’s remarkable 17th century devotional treatise, and one which is soundly doctrinal and creedal, is about humanity’s relationship to God which is nowhere signified more fully than in Mary, the blessed Mother of God.
The parable is, after all, just that, a parable, a story told for a purpose, a story with a moral and spiritual message. It is not about a literal and historical event. “A certain man had two sons,” it begins. The point of the story is about the Father’s love in which we find the true meaning of our lives as sons and daughters, as children of the Most High. The Father’s love is all-encompassing and unconditional. It is, we might say, extravagant in its generosity and sincerity. The Father’s love is truly prodigal.
Rembrandt’s painting captures the moment of the Father’s embrace of the younger son while the elder son looks on “askance and strangely” (Shakespeare, Sonnet CX). It is that moment of embrace that has so captured the mind of Henri Nouwen. The younger son is on his knees, a suppliant before the Father; he is, as we have suggested, a very poor man. His life has been turned upside down because of his folly in running away from the Father and, in effect, denying his own identity as his Father’s son. He has come to himself in that far away country. A beautiful moment, it marks a kind of awakening in the son. He returns but not upon the presumption of a worthy son but merely as a servant. There is no presumption in him any longer. That has been knocked out of him a long time ago. He is completely impoverished, lacking absolutely everything. He is poor and destitute.
Yet there he is in the painting not just kneeling before the Father but embraced by the Father whose two hands are placed upon his right shoulder and back. It is the hands that are especially arresting.
The scene recalls, to my mind, Isaac’s blessing of Jacob. That story, too, is a story about brothers: Esau, the elder son; and Jacob, the younger son. “Isaac was old and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see” (Genesis 27.1). He calls Esau, his eldest son and bids him go hunting and catch some game, (the King James Bible rather quaintly says “some venison”) that he may eat and, as he says, “that my soul may bless thee before I die” (Gen. 27.7).
Rebekah, the mother of Jacob, overhears Isaac and quickly sets Jacob in motion with her help to prepare a savoury meal for Isaac so that Jacob will receive the blessing before Isaac dies. Jacob recognizes that there is only one problem. “Behold, Esau my brother is an hairy man, and I am a smooth man” (Gen. 27. 11). How can he disguise himself? She has him put on Esau’s “goodly raiment” (Gen. 27.15) and, more importantly, she puts “the skins of the kids of goats upon his hands and upon the smooth of his neck” (Gen. 27.16). And so Jacob in disguise comes before his Father Isaac to steal the blessing of the first-born. The scene is exquisitely presented to us.
And Jacob went near unto Isaac his father; and he felt him, and said, The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. And he discerned him not, because his hands were hairy, as his brother Esau’s hands: so he blessed him. (Gen. 27. 23)
Jacob has effectively stolen his brother’s blessing, the father’s blessing of the first-born. He has done so with guile, with treachery and deceit. As Esau will say with great bitterness, “Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times. He took away my birthright [an earlier story where Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage]; and behold, now he has taken away my blessing” (Gen. 27.36). But the blessing that Isaac has conferred cannot be revoked; Jacob has, in effect, been made Esau’s lord.
This causes considerable tension between the two brothers. Later they will be reconciled, but only because of a kind of change that transpires in Jacob. In a later story, he wrestles with an angel, wrestles with God, and is renamed by God as Israel, one who strives with God. Gone is his deceit; he is defined instead by his single-minded service of God and this leads to an act of reconciliation between him and his brother Esau. “Behold, an Israelite indeed,” Jesus will say of Nathaniel, “in whom there is no guile” (John 21. 47), no trickery.
Rembrandt’s painting is not only about the embrace of the younger son by the Father but also about a blessing. Nouwen comments about the hands.
The two are quite different. The father’s left hand touching the son’s shoulder is strong and muscular. The fingers are spread out and cover a large part of the prodigal son’s shoulder and back. I can see a certain pressure, especially in the thumb. That hand seems not only to touch, but, with its strength, also to hold. Even though there is a gentleness in the way the father’s left hand touches his son, it is not without a firm grip.
How different is the father’s right hand! This hand does not hold or grasp. It is refined, soft, and very tender. The fingers are close to each other and they have an elegant quality. It lies gently upon the son’s shoulder. It wants to caress, to stroke, and to offer consolation and comfort. It is a mother’s hand.
As Nouwen points out, other commentators on Rembrandt’s painting “have suggested that the masculine left hand is Rembrandt’s own hand, while the feminine right hand is similar to the right hand of The Jewish Bride painted in the same period.” For Nouwen, the hands of the father open out a whole new world of meaning. As he puts it, “the Father is not simply a great patriarch. He is mother as well as father.”
To add to the poignancy of the interplay of these maternal and paternal images, Henri Nouwen recounts the observation of a young women friend upon looking at a large print of Rembrandt’s painting. Walking up to it, she placed her hand on the head of the younger son and said. “This is the head of a baby who has just come out of his mother’s womb. Look, it is still wet, and the face is still fetus-like.” As Nouwen put it, “all of us who were present saw suddenly what she saw. Was Rembrandt portraying not simply the return to the Father, but also the return to the womb of God who is Mother as well as Father?”
Earlier, Nouwen tells us, he had viewed the shaved head of the younger son more in terms of being like a prisoner in a concentration camp. Now another perspective is provided and one which connects to two themes: first, the theme of Christ’s Incarnation, the Word of God who became flesh at the Annunciation and nine months later is born into this world, a little child adored by angels, shepherds and kings; and, secondly, the theme of new birth, being born from above. It is all the grace of God. Grace is signified in the two hands of the Father even as the two hands illumine the total and unconditional love of God for us, a love which speaks to fathers and mothers, to brothers and sisters; in short, to all of us, a love which informs and shapes each and every form of human love. That love is the divine love symbolized in the total love of our heavenly Father. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him” (1 John 4.9). “For God so love the world that he gave his only-begotten Son” (John 3. 16).
God’s radical embrace of our humanity happens through the response of Mary to the divine purpose. We are embraced in the story. As one of our Anglican divines, John Hackett wonderfully and insightfully puts it, “Christ is man born of woman to redeem both sexes.”
The hands of the Father speak of the deep depths of God’s love for us. Isaiah captures this in a wonderful image that again relates to hand. “Can a mother forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet I will not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49.15).
Rembrandt’s painting focuses on the return of the prodigal son and as Nouwen understands, it touches upon the profound themes of rebirth and renewal. “I begin to see,” he says, “not only a father who ‘clasps his son in his arms,’ bit also a mother who caresses her child, surrounds him with the warmth of her body, and holds him against the womb from which he sprang. Thus the ‘return of the prodigal son’ becomes the return to God’s womb, the return to the very origins of being and again echoes Jesus’ exhortation to Nicodemus, to be reborn from above.” As Isaiah, too, puts it, capturing the rich interplay of these images, “Kings shall be thy nursing fathers” (Isaiah 49.23).
But the greater extent of that divine love and compassion imaged in the hands of the Father is shown in the words which reach out to the elder son and entreat him to come into the banquet feast of love renewed and restored. Ultimately, it seems to me, it is the Father’s compassion that compels our love. It convicts our hearts and moves us to repentance. And perhaps, it is another work of art, a poem by John Donne, which complements Rembrandt’s painting most wonderfully and signals to us with equal power, the nature of the reconciling love of God for our humanity. We can of course only take a hold of this love if we are like Mary and let God’s word define and guide us.
Donne’s poem is called A Hymn to God the Father. It speaks of the deep and compassionate love of the Father in relation to a profound awareness of the depths and nature of human sin. Knowing our sinfulness is equally about knowing the love of God which is greater than our sins and follies. The poem, like the painting, reminds us of that compassionate love in the form of forgiveness.
I
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For, I have more.
II
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
III
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.
The hands of the Father are the true center, as Nouwen notes, that is to say, the true center of our attention in the painting. They help us to glimpse something of the deep love of God for us in Jesus Christ, the deep love of the Father whose will the Son has come to do and who goes for us to the Cross. That deep love is greater than the folly of all our wastefulness and the greater folly of our envying and resentfulness. It overcomes our sin and restores us by grace. But it requires, too, our embrace of that love. It requires us to be Marian, to be like Mary and to say with her, “be it unto me according to thy word.”
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Annunciation (transf.)
Lenten Meditation: Prodigal Son IV
March 27th, 2012