Month: March 2016

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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“Lazarus, come out”

Passion Sunday marks the beginning of what I like to call deep Lent in reference to an older term, Passiontide, where already there begins to be a more intense focus on the meaning and purpose of Christ’s Passion. The Cross is veiled in Passiontide. Why? Because we see, as it were, but in “a glass darkly”. We are like the mother of Zebedee’s sons. We think that we know what we want but in truth we don’t. We enter into the Passion of Christ so that we may be called out of our ignorance and folly and into what God seeks for us, the redemption of our humanity in and through the Passion of Christ. Our Lenten meditations this year have been on the Scenes of Bethany, looking at the significance of Bethany in the pageant of Lent and now especially in terms of the Passion of Christ.

We go up to Jerusalem by way of Bethany. Luke names it as the place of departure for Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem and the place of our Lord’s Ascension; the place, in fact, of the comings and goings of our salvation. Bethany presents, as well, the very character of our Christian lives in the forms of loving attention to God’s Word and Son and loving service in the Body of Christ. The work of Martha’s hands finds its true meaning in the collectedness of Mary’s heart.

John tells us that Bethany is the village of Mary and Martha; that Bethany is where Christ raised their brother Lazarus from the dead; and that Bethany is where Mary anointed Christ’s feet with the oil for his burying. The Passion and the Death of Christ, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Christ, and our life together in Christ are purposefully and profoundly signified in the scenes of Bethany. In short, Bethany plays the fugue of our salvation in the interplay of action and contemplation, in the counterpoint of Passion and Resurrection, the cross and the glory.

Bethany, quite simply, is the place of the preparation for the Passion. There we begin to see the point of the Passion. The point is the Resurrection in and through the Passion. The Resurrection is present in the Passion. Easter is not some sort of fairy tale ending to an otherwise tragic story, any more than our spiritual life is merely the icing on the cake of our everyday lives, something nice, perhaps, but not essential, an added dimension, an afterthought, as it were. No. It must be the essence of our lives if it is to be our life at all, the “one thing needful”.

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

What’s this? Have I got the wrong Sunday? Am I having a senior’s moment? Didn’t we have that Gospel story and text two Sundays ago? We did and no, I am not losing it – at least not any more than usual! It’s just that this text also speaks to our readings today. It illumines an interesting sacramental emphasis to the traditional Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays which culminates on this Sunday at the same time as today’s overtly sacramental Gospel reading catapults us ahead to Maundy Thursday, to the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, to Christ’s Last Supper. That event anticipates and inaugurates the sacramental life of the Church established through his sacrifice on the Cross.

The Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays anticipate the concentration of the Lenten journey in the events of Holy Week. There is, too, a sacramental focus to the readings which belongs to the form of our participation in Christ’s sacrifice. “We go up to Jerusalem” sacramentally, it seems to me, journeying in the wilderness and contending against temptation including the temptation to “turn stones into bread,” learning instead to live not “by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God,” as we heard on The First Sunday in Lent. Yet that is the basis for the sacraments, too. The Word of God made flesh takes bread, gives thanks and breaks it, saying “Take eat; this is my Body.” We are not to tempt God, to put him to the test, but to worship him and serve him. On The Second Sunday in Lent, we learn from the Canaanite woman precisely about the goodness of God in Jesus Christ through her incredible insight into how God provides for us through the struggles of our lives, learning through a kind of humility that even the crumbs which fall from our master’s table are enough to sustain us and to bring healing and salvation to our wounded and broken souls.

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