“Rejoice with me”
Humility is the condition of our rejoicing, the condition of our redemption in Christ. Luke presents us with a very powerful message about the nature of humility as the counter to human pride and about the divine redemption of our humanity. The context is animosity and hostility. Tax Collectors and sinners, the despised and the outcast of the world, draw near to Jesus; Pharisees and Scribes, religious leaders, murmur in contempt because of the company which he keeps. They are scandalised. 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 today’s reading two of the three, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The third parable is the tremendous parable of the 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 about redemption and humility. 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 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.
The third parable captures most fully the dynamic of 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. It is the parable of the lost son or the prodigal son.
Henri Nouwen speaks profoundly about this third parable through his meditation upon Rembrandt’s great portrayal of the gospel story. Rembrandt’s painting 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 distant land. He recognises his wastefulness – that is what prodigal means – and his sinfulness, “I am no more worthy to be called thy son,” he thinks and says. Yet, 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 returns 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 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. The difference is that the parable of the prodigal son shows human will acting with the divine will. There is a dynamic.
Rembrandt has captured this marvellously. The son who regards 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. They complement each other.
The son does not presume to return on the same basis as he left. But in the eyes of the Father, he remains and ever remains a son. Yet, the story does not end there. The Elder Son, the one who never left, takes offence at all the fuss and celebration about the return of his foolish Younger Brother. Thus the parable, too, touches upon an age-old dilemma. The goodness of mercy often stirs up the emotions of resentment.
The response of the Father to the Elder Son is outstandingly clear. “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 distant land of our forgetfulness of God, the place where we are not at home, in order to bring us into the homeland of joy and peace, embraced in the love of the God.
Only so can there be rejoicing. Lost but now found, in love.
“Rejoice with me”
Fr. David Curry
AMD Service of the Deaf
June 2013