by CCW | 5 June 2019 04:00
The parable of the prodigal or lost son (or sons) was read in Chapel at the two last Chapel services. The parable is the third of three parables Jesus tells to counter the ugly spectre of self-righteousness, a quality by no means restricted to religion. The Pharisees and the Scribes murmur against Jesus for associating with “tax-collectors and sinners.” The three parables are all about repentance, about its power and truth, its significance and its necessity. The word in Greek is metanoia which offers a deeper and more profound understanding of repentance.
Metanoia is about our minds, literally a thinking after; in short, reflection upon our “thoughts, words and deeds”. In a way, it is very much about Chapel within the educational project of the School. The three parables are the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son or sons, the prodigal son and the elder son. “There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents,” Jesus says, “than over ninety and nine that need no repentance.” The phrase is ironic in that everyone in this view needs to repent, to reflect and to return to the principles from which we have wandered away. The further point is that the return of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost sons signals the redemption and wholeness of the whole community; hence joy.
What stands in the way of metanoia is ourselves, our ignorance of ourselves. This is why the third parable is so important. It shows us the dynamic of metanoia, reflection in action, as it were. And it counters the kind of gnostic moralism which appears in the various forms of self-righteousness in our own world and day, dividing the world into them and us; in short, demonizing others. ‘Others are bad and I’m good’ is the unmistakable assumption and by definition. Some have called this way of thinking neo-Marxist: extending Marx’s division between the proletariat (good) and the bourgeoisie (bad) to the ideologies of identity politics, for instance. An unhealthy dualism, to say the least.
The younger son demands his inheritance from his father and squanders it, wasting it in “riotous living” as the King James Version so colourfully puts it. He reduces himself to servitude and misery. But, in a wonderful economy of expression, Luke tells us that “he came to himself.” Such is metanoia, a kind of turn about in his mind about himself. “I will arise and go to my Father and will say unto him, Father I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.” He seeks to return not as son but as servant. Such is his awakening in a far country. Such is the beginning of his homecoming. But the wonder of the parable is that his awakening is really about the father’s love which goes out to him when he was a great way off and which gathers him into his love as son and not as servant. In his awakening to his sin, he is recalled to the father’s love.
The parable is about the active love of God which awakens us to ourselves. Yet, in contrast to the younger son, there is the envy and resentment of the elder son who refuses to rejoice in his brother’s return and to join in the celebration. In a way, he too journeys into a far country, far away from the deep love of the father. But as with the younger son, so the father goes out to the elder son to embrace him in his love. We are left hoping that there will be a similar metanoiafor the elder son as with the younger and prodigal son in the recognition of the father’s goodness and love.
Prodigal is about our wastefulness of whatever good things have been given to us; a powerful metaphor for our age, perhaps. In wasting his inheritance, the younger son has neither fully respected his father nor what he was given. His coming to himself is this self-realization. And yet, as the parables suggest, the truth and power of God’s love is greater than ourselves and awakens us to ourselves as embraced in that love. Repentance or metanoia is about our recognition of that love as essential for human life. In the going out and the return there is joy, even an increase of joy. Redemption recalls us to creation and to something greater, a recreation, in part through the renewing of our minds; indeed, metanoia.
“Know thyself” says the Delphic oracle in the culture of the ancient Greeks. That wisdom, itself a metanoia, is complemented in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding by “the fear of the Lord” which is “the beginning of wisdom.” That awakening to ourselves necessarily implies our relation to others, to God, to our neighbour, even our brother. The Bhagavad Gita which embodies the ethical teaching of the Upanishads in Hindu culture is about an awakening, the awakening of Arjuna by Sri Krishna about his dharma, about who he truly is. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, becomes the enlightened one through his encounter with suffering in the form of an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a guru who seems to have the face of contentment in the face of suffering. Confucius’ Analects offer wonderful moments of reflection about what it means to be ‘ren’, to be good and virtuous, as it were. Like Plato’s Meno, it requires metanoia, a change in our thinking and outlook, sometimes in a talk-it-through kind of way befitting institutions that are serious about learning and wisdom.
Repentance, which so often seems to have a negative sense, is actually profoundly positive. It is, as Lancelot Andrewes nicely puts it, a redire ad principia, a kind of circling around, to return to him from whom we have turned away. Education seeks our coming to ourselves, to an understanding of ourselves, of God, and our world, and of one another. It requires respect and honesty; it compels us to care and compassion.
I thank you for your attention and respect here in Chapel. I can only hope and pray that perhaps, just perhaps, a word, a passage from the Scriptures, or a line from a hymn will have perhaps stayed with you and worked its way into your hearts and minds and that you have begun to come to yourselves, becoming more reflective and thoughtful. My thanks to the servers and the readers, to our organists, Mr. Stephen Roe and Will Ahern, to Madeleine Killacky and Elizabeth Walsh for stepping in to play on occasion, and above all to the Chapel Prefects who under Maddy Barbour’s excellent guidance have provided such stellar and outstanding leadership. My prayer is that, in some sense or other, you have come to something of yourselves in our time together. May God bless you.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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