By Sr. Constance Joanna Gefvert, SSJD
Joshua 5.9-12, Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5.16-21, Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32
The gospel this morning is so familiar that it’s easy to gloss over it and say to ourselves, yes, I know – the son squanders his inheritance and then comes back home when he’s desperate. The father, who stands in for the forgiving God the Father, accepts the son with unconditional love, while the older brother is a jealous jerk who’s too self-righteous to be able to experience that kind of love himself much less share it with his brother. And the father throws a big party to celebrate that he has his son back.
That’s all true, but it’s a relatively superficial reading of the parable. I find it helpful to revisit Rembrandt’s painting of the event. Did you know that Rembrandt painted an earlier version of this parable? In both of the paintings he portrays himself as the prodigal son, but in the early painting he shows the son as a smug, laughing, carousing young man with a woman on his lap and a drink in his hand. By the end of his life Rembrandt, who was once famous and rich, had lost everything – his family, his home, his friends, his money. Soon before he died a pauper, he painted this version of the son’s homecoming with himself still as the prodigal but now humbled and able to experience the deep intimate love of his father.
Once when I was having a retreat at Loyola House, my director gave me the assignment to pray with today’s gospel three times – once from the viewpoint of the returning son, once as his older brother, and once as his father. Since then I have often wondered about the mother. What did it mean to be a woman in those days, to share the suffering of the father and the older son and try to keep the family together in spite of the loss of her son? I used to assume her to be quiet, supportive of the men, staying the background, and maybe not able to share her own grief.
And when we look at Rembrandt’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son, that’s what we see. She is almost invisible, and we can’t even be sure she is there, but if you look closely there is a feminine figure way back in the shadows in the upper left corner. Rembrandt does show the father with a strong masculine left hand and a gentle feminine right hand, a much deeper image of God than would have been common in his time, recognizing that both male and female aspects of human beings are icons of God’s unconditional, ungenderized love.
But when I prayed with this passage, in the role of the mother, the feminine was much more predominant. I found myself racing out to the road, grabbing my son even before his father did, and weeping on his shoulder as I held him in my arms. Now I have never birthed a child, but I imagine the mother’s meeting with the son to be like a second birth. She might have said, along the lines that her husband is reported to have said, “My son, you were dead and now you are alive.” She would have clung to him, held him, fed him like a good Jewish mother would – probably right away, before the father and the elder brother organized the big feast. The father wanted a big celebration – the mother simply wanted to feed her son, like a nursing mother of a newborn, because he was at that moment a newborn.
This feeling was visceral for me, and as I look back on my prayer I wonder why Rembrandt kept her in the shadows. A real Jewish woman of the first century would not have stayed in the background. Perhaps the painting is actually showing us more of Rembrandt’s culture in 17th century Netherlands. In any case, my own experience with this parable really woke me up to the way in which God’s word speaks to each of us in the way we need to be spoken to.
In addition to Rembrandt’s earlier version, there are many renditions of this powerful parable of Jesus by artists both famous – like Leonardo de Vinci – and less well known. They all have a story to tell, in the way that the Word of God has spoken to each of them in their own lives and circumstances.
Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians can be experienced as a powerful reflection on this parable:
From now on, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.
We are not only a new creation ourselves, reconciled to God, but we are each called to be ambassadors of reconciliation. Today’s psalm strikes me as one “ambassadorial” response, something the son might have said or sung in response to the forgiveness of his father.
Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, *
and whose sin is put away!
Happy are they to whom the Lord imputes no guilt, *
and in whose spirit there is no guile!
While I held my tongue, my bones withered away, *
because of my groaning all day long.
For your hand was heavy upon me day and night; *
my moisture was dried up as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you, *
and did not conceal my guilt.
I said,” I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” *
Then you forgave me the guilt of my sin.
How do we become ambassadors of reconciliation in the kind of world we are living in? I have watched so many bodies on the evening news – of adults and children and yes even tiny babies, all wrapped in white, like the image of Jesus in swaddling clothes, that I can no longer look. It is too painful. I avert my eyes and just listen to the newscaster. I am angry and grieving.
Nevertheless, I am called to be an ambassador of reconciliation. I can confess my own sin, accept God’s forgiveness, and then try in whatever way I can to be reconciled to my sisters, my friends and family, and to share the urgency of forgiveness and reconciliation with others.
The prodigal son is re-birthed by his father in the parable. I like birthing as a word here rather than reborn, because birthing is a painful and a joyful experience. It is something that is ongoing and dynamic – a process rather than a one-off. If someone asks us Anglicans if we’ve been born again, we get embarrassed. Have I been? Do I live as if I’ve been reborn? Can I turn my anger into action for justice and mercy?
The answer is no if I’ve merely been born again, because my nice shiny soul will soon be rusted with new sin. But God’s unconditional love and forgiveness is not a one-time thing. It’s an intimate relationship in which we abide with God, as God continues to birth and rebirth us until, finally, we are born into the glorious light of the resurrection.
Until then, we continue to be birthed, loved, and forgiven. When we next say the confession, or see a priest for that beautiful sacrament of reconciliation, let’s remember these words: “This child of mine was dead and is alive again; she was lost and is found!” (Luke 15.24).
And then we must remember we don’t get to just bask in that forgiveness and newness. We’re directed to act: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” (2 Cor. 5.18-19)
