Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

March 27, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

One Parable, Many Names

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 32
Luke 15:1–2, 11–32

This well-known parable has been called a variety of names: the parable of the prodigal son, the parable of the loving father, the parable of the two sons. In her devotional this morning, church member Rebecca Dixon posits we could call it the parable of joy recovered. I love that. I once preached it here as the parable of the missing mother.

All of those possibilities are relevant, because we preachers employ a variety of approaches to help us all find our way through this familiar story every time it appears in the lectionary. Peter Gomes once wrote of a preacher who gave a sixteen-week sermon series on this parable. Apparently after the sixteenth sermon, a woman greeted the pastor at the door of the church and said, “I’m so sorry that poor boy ever ran away from home” (Peter J. Gomes, “It’s about the Father: The Prodigal Son,” in Strength for the Journey: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living, p. 236). I am sure the preacher was by that point too!

One of my favorite treatments of this parable, though, is one not based on words but one found in art. It is a painting done by Rembrandt, who near the end of his life painted “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” Perhaps some of you have seen it. I wish I had thought to use it as a cover for our bulletin today. In it the younger son is kneeling in ragtag clothes at the feet of his tired-looking yet lovingly focused father.Hhis father has two hands gently resting on the boy’s shoulders. One hand is calloused, aged, and muscular. The other hand, though, has thinner, elegant fingers and is clearly intended to look more feminine. We can see how Rembrandt was working out his understanding of who God is by the way he painted those two distinct hands.

I am far from the only one, though, who is drawn to that painting. Henri Nouwen wrote an entire book about his encounter with Rembrandt’s work and how it shaped him. The book is entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. Through studying both Rembrandt’s life and the painting, Nouwen discerned a call to leave his teaching position at Harvard University to become the pastor of Daybreak, a home in Toronto, Canada, for people with developmental disabilities who cannot live by themselves. Nouwen spent the last ten years of his life there, dying in 1996 at the age of sixty-four.

In the book, Nouwen writes that he recognized the painting as “the final statement of Rembrandt’s tumultuous and tormented life” (Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, p. 29). As he dove into learning more about Rembrandt’s life, Nouwen realized that in Rembrandt’s younger years he resembled the brash younger son who demanded his portion of his father’s property. In fact, at the age of thirty, at the peak of his artistic success, Rembrandt literally painted himself as the lost son in a brothel. Nouwen describes him in that painting as an arrogant partier, “glaring scornfully at those who look at his portrait as if to say, ‘Isn’t this a lot of fun!’” (Nouwen, p. 29). And yet, over the course of the next thirty years, like the younger son, Rembrandt would lose everything: three sons, two daughters, and his wife. His popularity as a painter plummeted, and in 1656 he went bankrupt. He watched as his house, his own art collection, and all his possessions were sold at a public auction to satisfy his debtors.

So with that knowledge of Rembrandt’s life journey, as Nouwen meditated on Rembrandt’s last image of the lost son who had come home, kneeling in rags before his father, he realized how much had changed in Rembrandt since his first self-portrait as the partier. Nouwen writes, “Instead of the rich garments with which the youthful Rembrandt painted himself in the brothel, he now wears only a torn undertunic covering his emaciated body, and the sandals in which he had walked so far have become worn out and useless.”

But Nouwen also saw something of Rembrandt in the elder brother, a figure who dominates the right side of the painting. Nouwen points out that in the years leading up to his bankruptcy, Rembrandt was a “a man lost in bitterness and desire for revenge . . . who wasted much of his time in petty court cases . . . constantly alienating people by his behavior.” Nouwen concludes, “Rembrandt is as much the elder son of the parable as he is the younger.”

But that is not all. Nouwen also saw Rembrandt in the face of the forgiving father. He bases that conclusion on the fact that in the decade following his economic collapse and ending with his death, Rembrandt’s paintings took on a character of great warmth and a sense of calm reflection. Though Rembrandt died poor and alone, Nouwen claims his suffering had “a purifying effect on his way of seeing.” He writes, “The father of the prodigal son is a self-portrait, but not in the traditional sense. . . . It is not Rembrandt’s face that is reflected, but his soul, the soul of a father who had suffered so many a death. . . . Rembrandt came to discover . . . the true nature [of] the image of a near-blind old man crying tenderly, blessing his deeply wounded son. Rembrandt was the son; he became the father.” I find that to be a powerful description of what we in the Christian faith call the discipleship journey towards sanctification, by which we mean being made more and more fully into reflecting the image of God, the image of pure Love.

Through the intersection of the painting and the parable, Nouwen saw Rembrandt as each of these characters at one time or another in his life. And Nouwen reflected a similar journey in his own life too. Nouwen saw himself as the younger brother who longed to come home. He saw himself as the older brother who had done all the right things for all the wrong reasons. And he understood himself called to become the father, to embody the love of the father. Nouwen felt called to not just be the one who is forgiven but to also be the one who forgives; to be not just the one welcomed home but also the one who welcomes others home; to be not just the one who receives compassion, but also to be the one who offers it as well. (I am deeply grateful for the Reverend Dr. Joe Clifford, who helped me to see these parallels and ruminated on Nouwen’s work as well.)

That is what this parable can do to us. This is its hidden power and why we preachers are always trying to excavate it. I imagine all of us see our own faces in at least one of the characters. Perhaps some of us have told our parents we wish they were dead and demanded our inheritance before they died, after which we squandered all of it by what we will just call “unhealthy” living, ending up broke among swine and hoping our parents would take us back as hired help.

And maybe others of us can see at least a slight reflection of ourselves in that younger son: a child who leaves home for a far-off country, driven by a search for something more, something different, even if we are not sure what exactly that “more or different” means. Perhaps some of us have woken up in the heaviness of the middle of the night wondering if there was any way we could get back to who we once were, if there was any way we could go home again.

And I would guess that many of us church people can see ourselves in the older son too. I certainly can. That seems to be at least part of the reason why Jesus tells the story in the first place. We heard the setup in the beginning. Jesus seems to aim this parable at the good religious folk who are more than irritated at the company he keeps—tax collectors and sinners. They do not understand and certainly do not approve of the various ways Jesus always breaks the rules, for they, like the elder brother, keep the rules. They do what is expected of them.

They are the ones who get up every morning and go to work, even if they do not particularly like what they are doing. They volunteer to go on youth mission trips. They fill out the pledge card every October. They say yes to making sandwiches on a Saturday morning for Meals Ministry. They make sure to follow Robert’s Rules of Order in every single church committee meeting. They, like the older son, do what is expected of them and rarely complain about it, at least not publicly, perhaps not even acknowledging it to themselves.

Again, Nouwen: “The lostness of the resentful son is so hard to reach precisely because it is so closely wed to the desire to be good and virtuous. There’s so much frozen anger among the people who are so concerned about avoiding ‘sin.’” So much frozen anger and resentment that when the opportunity comes to join in a celebration, to receive and experience pure and unexpected joy, those of us laboring in the field find ourselves unable to say yes; unable to come inside; unable to reclaim and reconcile with family or friends. Yes, I imagine at least some of us, myself included, definitely see a reflection of ourselves in the mirror of the elder son.

When Barbara Brown Taylor preached here at Fourth Church years ago, she actually called this story “the parable of the dysfunctional family—a story about a weak father with an absentee wife and two rebellious sons he seems unable to control”(Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family,” 18 March 2007 sermon preached at Fourth Church). And yet when Jesus is called on the carpet for his seemingly rebellious living, this is the story Jesus chooses to tell us. This parable of dysfunction; this story of hyper-rebellion offset by hyper-righteousness. And like Rembrandt, like Nouwen, we too are invited, cajoled, to see ourselves somewhere in this picture and to hear God say “Welcome home” to us. For like Rembrandt’s image with the two different hands, that is what we know God is all about.

God is all about finding God’s lost children, whether they are lost in sin or have forgotten who they truly are or if they are lost in self-righteousness or a deep desire for everything in life to be fair. God is all about coming out to meet us where we are, to embrace us, to compel us to come into the party. For according to Jesus, the kingdom of heaven, the household of God, is like a grand reunion of reconciliation and redemption, and it simply cannot be complete without you, whoever you may be in this story.

Again, Gomes: “This is the heart of the gospel and of Jesus’ message: no one is too far gone, too low, too abased, too bad to be removed from the unconditional love of [God] . . . and no one is too good, too dutiful, too full of rectitude, for that love. It is the nature of [our God] to love those to whom [God] has given life” (Gomes, p. 236).

This is what we call grace. What we could call prodigal grace. It is a grace who runs towards us and brings us home to a sense of peace in our own skin; a grace who runs towards us to offer a homecoming from the very heart of God; a grace who runs towards us to robe us in the warmest kind of love when we have been shivering in fear or ruminating on failure. This is the kind of grace that desires to take us by the hand and lead us home, back to ourselves, to whom we have always been—beloved and good. (Thank you to the Reverend Rebecca Messman, who inspired this phrasing).

One of my favorite rebellious Presbyterians, Anne Lamott, said it this way: “The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say, ‘Help,’ and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn’t leave you where it found you. And grace won’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you’ll get your sense of humor about yourself back. . . . And remember—grace always bats last.”

That is one of the promises we hear, we see, singing and shining from this parable. This promise that whether we stand more with the younger child or the older one depending on the day; whether we want to become more like the Father or assume that is an impossible feat, the truth is that we are always, always being welcomed back home into the embrace of our God, who misses us deeply and compassionately watches out for us every time we wander away. The promise that grace will always bat last. The promise that only God will have the last word on our lives. And that word will be Welcome. Always, nevertheless, welcome.