What if I told you that when you walked into church this morning, you were one sort of person, but that when you walk out after the service, you’re going to be someone new? That you will be changed in a basic way? That’s the promise of the Gospel – that in Christ we enter a process of transformation that quickly or slowly changes who we are. St. Paul makes this clear in today’s epistle: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17). As one writer puts it, “That’s a description of earth-shaking change that goes right to the core of our being – something so fundamental that it changes the axis of our entire bearing.”1
"The Prodigal Son" at the altar of St. John's, AshfieldIn Lent we’re given forty days in which to look closely at the axis of our lives. Where do my thoughts, attitudes, and choices still revolve around my own small self and the anxious, defensive question, “What about me? What’s in it for me?” And where have I begun to find a new axis in the expansive, never-failing love of God and neighbor? Transformation is what we’re up to in Lent – inner transformation that de-centers and de-thrones our little ego and reconciles us to God and neighbor. As St. Paul cries out in today’s epistle: “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5: 20).
I can think of no finer story about reconciliation with God and neighbor than today’s parable from the Gospel of Luke. It’s often called the parable of the Prodigal Son, but of course that title isn’t quite accurate, since the parable is really about a loving father who has two sons. Some folks consider it the greatest short story in the world, and it’s certainly one of the best-known and best-loved parables that Jesus ever told.
This morning, I brought in a reproduction of part of Rembrandt’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, which was given to my husband Jonas and me by Henri Nouwen, probably around the time that he was writing his classic book, The Return of the Prodigal Son2 – a book that has inspired thousands of Christians and countless sermons, including this one. The poster is a bit frayed around the edges, since in the course of leading retreats, my husband and I have carried it to many different places, but you can still make out the basic scene: the father is a bearded, nearly blind old man in a red cloak who has placed his large hands on the shoulders of his returning son. The son – half-barefoot, exhausted, his head shaven like that of a prisoner or a survivor of a concentration camp, robbed of his identity – wears no cloak, only torn undergarments. He kneels before the father, and his cheek is nestled against the father’s chest, as if he were listening to the heartbeat of God.
The original oil painting hangs in the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, and it’s much bigger than this poster. In fact, it’s huge – 8 feet high and 6 feet wide – and it includes not only the scene that we see here, the embrace of the father and his wayward younger son; it also portrays the elder son and several other figures standing nearby. It was probably one of Rembrandt’s last works, painted when the artist was close to death.
The story starts like this: “There was a man who had two sons” (Luke 15:11). We don’t know why, but for some reason the younger son decides to go it alone. He’s itching to leave, to hit the road and do things his own way. He asks his father to give him his portion of his inheritance in advance – a quite presumptuous and irregular thing to do in that culture – and off he goes, money in hand, to what the story calls “a distant country” (Luke 15:13), where he squanders it all in “dissolute living” and eventually goes hungry. Desperate, he hires himself out in a job considered shameful: he feeds pigs, which are unclean animals according to Jewish law. Humiliated and close to starving, he wishes he could eat the very pods or corncobs that the pigs consume. That part of the story ends with the awful words that ring like a death sentence: “No one gave him anything” (Luke 15:16). He is entirely alone.
Let’s push the pause button and stop for a moment. I identify with this first part of the story and maybe you do, too. I know what it’s like – as maybe you do, too – to choose the go-it-alone path, the I-don’t-need-God path, the rebellious path that the Twelve-Step program calls “self-will run riot.” I’ve been there, done that, and maybe you have, too. We can do it for brief moments every day, and we can do it for long stretches of our lives. Whenever we choose that path, we leave our home in God – that place within ourselves where we feel seen and known and loved. Renouncing love, forsaking God and neighbor, we seize what we can for ourselves, and we do what we darn well please – the consequences be damned.
There are many ways to wind up in a distant country far from home, knowing we’ve betrayed our better selves. Somewhere along the way we took a wrong turn or made a bad choice, and now here we are, as isolated and desolate as the prodigal son with the pigs, feeling helpless and full of self-reproach. Lent is a good season for reflecting on how we as individuals have abandoned or rejected the God of love and squandered our inheritance – not to wallow in guilt, but to take a frank and fearless stock of our lives in the presence of the Holy One who heals. As it says in a poignant prayer of confession in the Book of Common Prayer, we know what’s it’s like to “[wander] far in a land that is waste.”3
But it’s not only we as individuals who can wander far in a land that is waste – whole societies can do that, too. The path that most of humanity has taken for the last two hundred years has brought us to a situation in which the web of life is unraveling before our eyes. Great populations of creatures – even entire species – have vanished. Global temperatures keep rising as we keep burning fossil fuels, and the current Administrations seems hell-bent on accelerating that deathly process, taking a chainsaw to the norms and laws that maintain democracy and keep the fabric of society knit together.
Is our society like the prodigal son, wandering far in a land that is waste? It sure feels that way. So how sweet it is to reach the story’s next line, its turning point: “When he came to himself…” (Luke 15:17). The young man comes to himself, he turns, and he starts to travel home. That’s such a great line: “He came to himself.” It’s as if he began to wake up, he began to break through the spell, he remembered who he was: someone created to love himself and his neighbor, to love the natural world, to love God. When we come to ourselves, we begin to make the journey home to God. Our basic nature, our truest nature, is found as we turn and head toward God, our divine Father and Mother, the lover of our souls and the source of all life.
What would it look like if we, as a society, “came to ourselves”? Maybe it would mean turning away from the illusion that we are separate from each other and must go it alone. Maybe it would mean taking hold of the truth that we belong to each other, that we belong to the Earth that sustains everything that lives, that we are made for connection and community. I can think of no more beautiful way to spend one’s life than to take part in what leaders like Joanna Macy and David C. Korten call the Great Turning, the epic transition from a deathly society to one that fosters life. That’s what philosopher Thomas Berry called the Great Work: our wholehearted effort to create a more just and sustainable world. And that’s what Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the “supreme work” of Jesus Christ: to reconcile us to God and to each other and to the whole of God’s Creation.4
In a time of such divisiveness and uncertainty, it’s powerful to remember that God loves it when we come to ourselves and begin the journey home to God. God gets happy when we make that turn, even if we’ve still got a long way to go. That’s what we see in the next part of the parable: The father, who seems to have been waiting eagerly for his son’s return, catches sight of him while he is “still far off.” “Filled with compassion” (Luke 15:20), he runs out to greet him. It’s completely undignified, this decisive moment when the old man hikes his robe above his shins and runs, breathing hard, sandals slapping and forehead perspiring, until he reaches his son and catches him up in his arms.
That moment of reunion is the one that Rembrandt portrays. It is a wordless moment, a moment of enormous stillness, in which the gentle arms of the father embrace the repentant son and draw him close. Can you imagine those kind hands on your shoulders? Can you imagine your face sheltered in the shadow of that warm red cloak, resting against the father’s loving heart? Our souls long for that experience of acceptance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. We may need to gaze at that scene for a long time until we can really take it in.
The repentant son tries to launch into his long apology, but the father will have none of it. He wants to throw a party. It’s all about joy – the father’s joy and the joy of the repentant son. Meanwhile, in the painting, the elder son, who resents his young and dissolute brother, stands in the shadows. He feels left out of the party, when – hey! – he was the brother who did everything right! He followed the rules! It’s not fair! But he, too, is deeply loved and invited to the table to share in the joy.
“My son,” says the father to the angry elder son, “you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Luke 15:31). “Come home,” the father is saying. “I have always loved you, and my love for your brother in no way diminishes my love for you.”
That’s the scandal of the father’s love – and the scandal of the Eucharist, as well – for everyone is welcome to the feast, prodigal and respectable alike, all of us equally needing and equally embraced by the unconditional love of God. It’s a meal that can transform our consciousness and shift the axis of the self, so that we discover our center, our true self, in the unmerited and boundless love of God.
So – as a Celtic prayer puts it – come to the table of Christ, “you who feel weak and unworthy, you who come often and you who have stayed away. Come, you who love him and you who wish you could. Come, you who are hungry for friendship or forgiveness. Come, you who long for meaning or a just world.”5
Come. The Father is waiting for you, arms outstretched.
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1. Ronald H. Love, “Are we willing to throw a feast?”, SermonSuite.
2. Henri J.M Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons (NY: Doubleday, 1992).
3. The Book of Common Prayer (The Seabury Press, 1979), 450.
4. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Foreword, The Green Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: HarperOne, HarperCollins, 2008), I-14
5. Ray Simpson, Healing the Land: Natural Seasons, Sacraments, and Special Services, The Celtic Prayer Book, Volume 3 (Suffolk, England: Kevin Mayhew, 2004), 154, based on a prayer of the Iona Community.
