Month: March 2012

This is the second of four Lenten meditations on the Prodigal Son. The previous meditation is posted here.

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself,
and take up his cross and follow me”

Matthew’s familiar words are complemented by Peter’s words from his First Epistle, “if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God in this name.” These scriptural passages are appointed to be read at the commemoration of a martyr; they speak of the meaning of our Christian identity and about the nature of the Christian pilgrimage. Tonight, in the week of The Second Sunday in Lent, we commemorate Perpetua and her Companions, third century martyrs. “Another lives in me,” Perpetua is reported to have said. It is another marvelous line that captures so much of the Christian witness and identity.

Somehow these readings also speak directly to our Lenten pilgrimage and connect to our meditation on the Parable of the Prodigal Son by way of Henri Nouwen’s reflection on Rembrandt’s 1668 painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son. Throughout the centuries of Christian thought, that parable has been the occasion of many commentaries. Rembrandt’s painting, we might say, 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, too, 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 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 of this 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 that work. Our interest tonight will be to highlight a few of the comments of the Fathers about the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

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“Truth, Lord; yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table”

“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” we heard last week. It was Jesus’ response to the first temptation of the tempter, the devil. It captures, really, an entire attitude and approach to the Scriptures, especially in our Anglican understanding. It belongs to an entire theology of revelation. It speaks ever so profoundly to the deeper meaning of our humanity as spiritual and intellectual creatures who are not and cannot be defined simply by the things of this world. This whole outlook and way of understanding is, of course, profoundly sacramental. Jesus will make the connection between bread and word ever so clear. “I am the bread of life”, he says, the bread of the Passover which he says is his body, “this sacrament of the holy Bread of eternal life” as the Prayer Book Eucharistic prayer so beautifully puts it.

This sacramental connection between bread and word is present in this Sunday’s Gospel, too. It tells the wonderful, though somewhat disturbing, story of the Caananite woman coming out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, seeking Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil”. Some of the same themes present themselves here as last Sunday. The ensuing dialogue is about the strength of this woman who is an outsider, we might say, but who has an insight into who Jesus is for the whole of our humanity. The dialogue, which is initially so troubling, serves to bring out a tension within Israel about God only to conclude that through Israel God in Jesus Christ is for everyone. But it is not cheap grace. The importunity or perseverance of this remarkable woman is like the insistence of the blind man on Quinquagesima Sunday. It belongs to a remarkable insight into the power of God’s unconditional goodness in Jesus Christ. But it testifies as well to the necessity of our seeking what God wants for us. As the poet John Donne puts it in a marvelous and super-intense sonnet, “salvation to all that will is nigh”. You have to want it, to will it. But you can only will what God gives.

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