Day: March 15, 2016

This is the third of three addresses that Fr. David Curry presented at the 2016 Lenten Quiet Day on 12 March 2016. The first is posted here and the second here. Audio files will be posted in the next day or two.

Into the Hands of the Father
The Prodigal Son: Rembrandt’s Painting and Henri Nouwen’s Reflections
Lenten Quiet Day sponsored by the PBSC NS/PEI
Saturday, March 12^th, 2016
(Fr. David Curry)

Address # 3

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. 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.

As a parable of the lost and the found, a parable of human redemption, it has to deal with the more complex and less explicit dynamics of the elder son, too. He is the one who stayed, it seems, the one who was a faithful son, it seems, the one who never envisioned being freed of the Father at all, it seems, altogether unlike the younger son. And yet, he, too, is a lost son and in ways that are almost more disturbing and more disquieting. The commentary tradition finds ways to consider the elder son in relation to the younger son and reflects, although often rather obliquely, in my view, on the rich seam of biblical narrative that deals precisely with sibling rivalry. Nothing could be more a salient feature of the Pentateuch and beyond. What is The Book of Genesis but a recurring refrain of sibling rivalry and tension, of brother against brother? Cain and Abel, Abram and Laban, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers? “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says to Cain. The blood of brothers, a theme recently explored by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Not in God’s Name.

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This is the second of three addresses that Fr. David Curry presented at the 2016 Lenten Quiet Day on 12 March 2016. The first is posted here and the third here. Audio files will be posted in the next day or two.

Into the Hands of the Father
The Prodigal Son: Rembrandt’s Painting and Henri Nouwen’s Reflections
Lenten Quiet Day sponsored by the PBSC NS/PEI
Saturday, March 12^th, 2016
(Fr. David Curry)

Address # 2

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.” Matthew’s familiar words illumine the nature of the pilgrimage of Lent. It is the way of the cross, the way of self-denial and sacrifice, the way that belongs to all of the many forms of Christian witness. One of the martyrs of the Christian Church, St. Perpetua, who died in the third century, is reported to have said in the face of her impending death that “another lives in me.” It captures at once the meaning of Christian witness and life. The words of Matthew’s Gospel and Perpetua’s martyrdom serve, perhaps, as a kind of commentary upon the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Throughout the centuries of Christian thought, that parable has been the occasion of many commentaries. Rembrandt’s painting 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 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 Canadian 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 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 Nouwen’s book. Our endeavor will be to highlight a few of the comments of the Fathers about the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

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This is the first of three addresses that Fr. David Curry presented at the 2016 Lenten Quiet Day on 12 March 2016. The second is posted here and the third here. Audio files will be posted in the next day or two.

Into the Hands of the Father
The Prodigal Son: Rembrandt’s Painting and Henri Nouwen’s Reflections
Lenten Quiet Day sponsored by the PBSC NS/PEI
Saturday, March 12^th, 2016
(Fr. David Curry)

Address # 1

Maggie Ferguson’s article “How to Have a Good Death” in the Economist journal Intelligent Life canvasses the various aspects of contemporary culture about approaches to death and dying. Among those is a story told by Jane Millard, a canon in the Church of Scotland, about a woman who was dying.

She was very afraid of dying. “I don’t want to die. Him upstairs will get a big stick and shout at me, tell me to go to hell. I’m frightened. I don’t want to be shouted at.”
And I hugged her, bereft of anything theological to say that sounded real, and she snuggled in.
“Talk to me,” she whimpered.
“There was a man who had two sons…” and I told her the story of the prodigal son and loving father.
“Will you be with me when I die? Be sure and tell me that story”
So I did, about an hour ago, now we are waiting for the undertakers.

Such is the power of the parable of the prodigal son in the Lenten journey of our lives into the hands of the Father. For Lent merely concentrates for us into the span of forty days the whole meaning of the Christian pilgrimage which is about our homecoming, about our being gathered into the hands of the Father. Nowhere is that story better depicted in art, perhaps, than in Rembrandt’s great painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, the inspiration for Henri Nouwen’s thoughtful and reflective meditation on the parable. The painting hangs in the Hermitage in what was known then and is known now as St. Petersburg having been acquired by Catherine the Great in 1776, some one hundred and eight or nine years after Rembrandt painted what was probably his last painting before his death in 1669.

Rembrandt’s painting captures that intense and intimate moment of the son’s return to his father. It is the homecoming of the son. A powerful moment, it both conceals and reveals the larger story. As found in the 15^th chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, this parable is the third of three parables that are all about redemption, about being lost and then being found: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the lost son, the prodigal son. If we were to imagine these parables as being depicted in art, they would form a triptych, such as are found on many altars in Europe; in short, three panels with the two side panels framing the central panel. That central panel, it seems to me, would have to be a depiction of the prodigal son. It is the most intense, the most dynamic and the most compelling of the three parables. The homecoming of the Son to the Father is the very nature of the Christian pilgrimage, the journey of the soul to God, we might say. The wonder of the painting is the miracle of the parable. We have a God and Father to whom we may return. The painting captures the deep compassion of the Father for the wayward son. The truth of our humanity is ultimately to be found in the embrace of the Father’s love, no matter how far and wide we have strayed. Ultimately, we live in the total and unconditional love of the Father.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Feast of the Annunciation of Mary, more often than not, falls within the Lenten season. This year it coincides with Good Friday which it did as well in 1608 occasioning a marvelous poem by John Donne about that conjunction of themes: Christ’s coming to us through Mary’s great ‘yes’ to God and Christ’s going from us in his death at Calvary, “Th’ Abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one/(As in plaine Maps, the furthest West is East)/ Of the ‘Angels Ave,’ and Consummatum Est.”

Mary plays an altogether crucial role in the divine project for the renovation of our humanity, wounded and broken by sin, restored and renewed by grace. 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, 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.” Such words speak to our endeavours to ponder the mystery of Christ’s Parable of the Prodigal Son. It is the Story of Homecoming, the homecoming which speaks to all our souls. At the heart of all homecomings is the love of the Father.

Yet, as paradoxical as it might seem, it means to ponder as well the mystery of the Mother of God, the one who embodies the very truth of our humanity considered simply in itself in relation to 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 Father’s love embraces the returning son of repentance as well, as we shall see, the resentful son of duty. The Father’s love calls them both back to home. Yet, 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 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 so much as it is about the deeper justice of God which is love.

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