Christ Church

“Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?”

The sixth chapter of The Gospel according to St. John is sometimes known as “the bread of life discourse”. It is a fascinating and complex chapter and one which challenges Jesus’ disciples and the people of Israel in general, and, for that matter, all of us. As today’s Gospel reading makes clear the overarching theme is about the provisions God makes for us in the wilderness journey of our lives. Taken with the epistle reading from Galatians, the food of our wayfaring is food from home, “the bread of heaven,” as Jesus later names it. Jerusalem, as Paul makes clear, is our spiritual home, our alma mater, our nursing mother, as it were. The Gospel passage is about how we are sustained, nourished and refreshed in the journey with spiritual food. The teaching is the feeding on this day which is variously known as Mothering Sunday, Laetare Sunday and Refreshment Sunday, terms which are all derived from the readings in one way or another.

The word, wilderness, is used twice in the chapter and in both cases refers to the Exodus journey of the Hebrews. The text from Psalm 78 reflects on the trials of that ancient wilderness journey. A critical feature of the psalmist’s reflection is the complaint of the people in the wilderness. The question, “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?” is a rhetorical question that challenges God; in short, puts God to the test. We are recalled instantly to the First Sunday of Lent, to the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations, too, belong to the wilderness, quite literally to the desert.

This Gospel story is the answer to the question but in such a way as to highlight our disbelief and distrust of the essential goodness of God. Here the Word by which we live and which nourishes and refreshes us is bread, food for our wayfaring souls. The bread in the wilderness is about the divine generosity from which we live; “twelve baskets” are taken up from “the fragments” of “the five barley-loaves that remain” a basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, we might say, a basket for each of the twelve apostles of the new Israel, the Church, too, we might add.

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“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God
hath come upon you.”

It is a terrifying and frightening picture, perhaps, the most terrifying and frightening picture of the human soul in the whole of the Scriptures. And, perhaps, this is where the ancient gospel with all of its perplexity and confusion about devils and demons meets the darkness and despair of contemporary culture. No set of readings, it seems to me, speaks more directly to our confusions and uncertainties.

There is far more to this picture than the postures of moralizing righteousness that, at first glance, we might think is the message of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians with his proscriptions against “fornication”, “all uncleanness”, “covetousness” which is idolatry, “filthiness”, “foolish-talking”, “jesting”, all of “which are not befitting”, and “whoremonger[ing]”, as he puts it, all of which are summed up as being “the unfruitful works of darkness.”

It seems like quite a list of the usual suspects of human sinfulness with more than a modicum of focus on sex which troubles our age so greatly. And yet, this list of “the unfruitful works of darkness” is based upon something deeper and more profound, and perhaps, most troublingly so. It will belong to the tradition of moral theology to rank and place the vices and virtues of the human soul in a kind of hierarchy, a kind of system, if you will, such as the seven deadly sins, for instance. And there is something right about that culturally, politically and socially. There is, we might say, the recognition that our peccadilloes, our little sins, as it were, are not to be compared with the ranker forms of evil potentially and actually in our souls and our communities and that are before us in the endless parade of injustices and violences in our world and day. But, be that as it may, there is also the deep spiritual insight that all our sins, from the least to the greatest, belong to the darkness. Paul claims that all of it must come to light.

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This is the second of four Lenten meditations on the Prodigal Son. The previous meditation is posted here.

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself,
and take up his cross and follow me”

Matthew’s familiar words are complemented by Peter’s words from his First Epistle, “if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God in this name.” These scriptural passages are appointed to be read at the commemoration of a martyr; they speak of the meaning of our Christian identity and about the nature of the Christian pilgrimage. Tonight, in the week of The Second Sunday in Lent, we commemorate Perpetua and her Companions, third century martyrs. “Another lives in me,” Perpetua is reported to have said. It is another marvelous line that captures so much of the Christian witness and identity.

Somehow these readings also speak directly to our Lenten pilgrimage and connect to our meditation on the Parable of the Prodigal Son by way of Henri Nouwen’s reflection on Rembrandt’s 1668 painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son. Throughout the centuries of Christian thought, that parable has been the occasion of many commentaries. Rembrandt’s painting, we might say, 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, too, 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 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 of this 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 that work. Our interest tonight will be to highlight a few of the comments of the Fathers about the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

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