KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 1 June
The beginning of the end
There is a certain intensity and a frisson of excitement about the last weeks of the School year. In Chapel this week we have had the penultimate services for the Junior School and the Grade Tens and the last Chapels for the Grade 11s and the Grade 12s. On Monday and Tuesday, we read the last part of the parable of the Prodigal Son and on Thursday and Friday, the story of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Both are powerful stories that speak to an understanding of ourselves as individuals and as members of the human community but in intriguing and challenging ways.
The second half of Luke’s parable might equally be called the parable of the lost sons. It is not just the return of the younger son to the father but also the exchange between the elder son and the father. It is not just the one who goes into a far country who is lost and dead to the love of the father, it seems. We can be close at hand and yet be far removed from that same love. What remains remarkable in the parable is the father’s love which runs out to greet the returning younger son and also goes out to the elder son who is angry and hurt about the special treatment the younger son has received. Such is the destructive power of envy. The elder son can’t even acknowledge his brother as brother; he complains about “this son of yours”. It is his own brother!
This is sibling rivalry – a major theme in Genesis, for instance, that is about separation and animosity through resentment and the desire for exclusive attention. I often think about this in relation to graduation and prize day. Will you resent the accomplishments and awards of others or will you rejoice and be glad in what others have achieved? The first is destructive and harmful both to ourselves and to one another and to the community of which we are a part. Why? Because it is a refusal to see the good in others which is equally the good for us; a refusal of the good which unites us. “It was fitting,” the father says to the elder son, “to make merry and be glad for this your brother was dead and is alive, was lost and is found.” There is joy not only for the younger son in returning to the truth of his being in the father’s love which he had rejected; there is the joy of the whole community. This, too, is an important feature of the three related parables that Luke tells in chapter 15: the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost sons. It is not just rejoicing over the finding of the one lost sheep, the one lost coin, and the lost son; there is the rejoicing of the whole community which is not complete without them. We are part of something greater than ourselves. Will we be able to rejoice in that and find the good for ourselves?