Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's July 24, 2005 Sunday worship service.

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Rembrandt and the Father

Psalm 91; Luke 1511-32

Bethel 7/24/05

The Reverend Marc Sherrod,ThD

The famous Dutch painter Rembrandt, in 1665, shortly before his death, completed a masterpiece entitled, “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” In this painting, which has been described as “one of the most moving pictures in all religious art” (Art through the Ages), the son kneels in weeping contrition and is tenderly embraced by his aged and half-blind father, even as three witnesses, including the elder brother, watch this tender scene from close proximity. Rembrandt, of course, is known for his use of light and shadows, and the light is focused on the spiritual face of the old man, but even more on the hands of this father, placed on top of his son’s shoulders. Even as we view the prodigal son’s back and his disheveled clothing and shoeless feet, we also see his head nestled into the chest of the stooping father, the son’s face half turned to us, a face twisted both by the weariness of a misspent life, but also deep relief at his homecoming.

It is a painting, and a story, that summarizes the gospel like no other. When we hear the story, it is easy to want to identify --- either with our own experience or personality or that of someone else -- to see ourselves or others in either the prodigal son or the elder brother. They are, in a way, universal figures that seem to speak truths about human nature, human experience and the challenge we all face to admit mistakes and to pursue forgiveness.

The younger son, in choosing to receive his inheritance prematurely, speaks to the outright betrayal of the treasured values of family and community. Ordinarily, in that culture, such a rude request would incite the anger and probably a physical beating of the son for being so presumptuous. In effect, this request means that he wants his father to die. It is an insult like no other.

But his father recognizes the folly of love without freedom. This younger son is, in a way, addicted to the pursuit of pleasure at everyone else’s expense, even if it means going away and living in a “distant country.” He is brash, overly self-confident, spendthrift, sensual, and very arrogant. He left with pride and money, determined to live his own life far from father and community, but he returns with nothing – his money, health, honor, self-respect, reputation – everything has been squandered

The elder brother, although he didn’t get lost in a faraway country like his brother, was equally a lost man. On the outside, he did all the things a good son is supposed to do, but inside, he wandered away from the way his father really wanted him to live. He did his duty, worked hard every day, and fulfilled all his obligations. But he became increasingly unhappy and unfree. He became bitter, resentful, angry, perhaps most of all, he became one whose envy toward his wayward brother sucked all of the joy out of his life. His life, it seems, had boiled down to a sense of joyless duty.

But neither son is the real focus of Rembrandt’s painting, nor I would argue, of the story Jesus told. For Rembrandt, it is the Father and particularly the Father’s hands resting on the shoulders of his son that tell it all.

Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest, popular author, and the one who has perhaps best understood and put into words the spiritual ennui and waywardness of my generation, was so captivated by a poster depicting Rembrandt’s painting that he traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, there to see for himself the masterpiece that Catherine the Great had acquired in 1766 and that continues now to be displayed there. Nouwen made several visits and spent many hours simply sitting and meditating on this painting, even as he prayerfully reflected on his life’s journey, particularly a decision he now faced about becoming a member of the L’Arche Community in Canada, a residence for the mentally handicapped where he had the opportunity to become a full-time member and staff person – representing a major vocational shift in his life from his teaching position at Harvard University. As he studies this painting, Nouwen realizes the times in his life when he has been both the younger son and the elder son, but that now, his journey is to become the father, a person full of compassion, non-judgmental, welcoming: it dawned on him that this community of the mentally handicapped “did not need yet another younger or elder son, whether converted or not, but a father who lives with outstretched hands, always desiring to let them rest on the shoulders of his returning children.” (137)

The old man, as I said, in Rembrandt’s painting, is nearly blind and Rembrandt himself was nearing death when he painted it, but the Father rendered by the artist sees with an inner spiritual eye as he clasps his son to himself. The true center of the painting is the Father’s hands – on them all the light is concentrated and on them the eyes of all the bystanders are focused. These hands are the embodiment of forgiveness, reconciliation, healing. The Father’s left hand touching the son’s shoulder is strong and muscular, with fingers outspread in a firm grip. The hand of a patriarch: authoritative and sure. But the father’s right hand in Rembrandt’s rendering is different: it is refined, soft and very tender, gently resting on the son’s shoulder as if to caress, stroke, to offer consolation and comfort.

Nouwen writes this about those hands: “Here is the God I want to believe in: a Father who, from the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting; never letting his arms drop down in despair, but always hoping that his children will return so that he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest on their shoulders. His only desire is to bless” (The Return of the Prodigal Son: a Story of Homecoming, 95.)

“There once was a man who had two sons.”

Some have described it as the perfect short story, a story that shows us not just the character of this remarkable father with the two very different sons, but a story that reveals the character of our heavenly father who refuses to compare his children and who refuses to judge one child to be more worthy of his love than another. While the younger son faces up to the shame and humiliation of his choice and is welcomed home and blessed by his father, the elder son’s dilemma is whether he will accept or reject his father’s love, which is not a love based on comparisons.

Luke makes clear that the father goes out to meet them both, and in the meeting, one is embraced just as surely as the other.

Henri Nouwen writes: “As the returned child of God, living in the Father’s house, God’s joy is mine to claim. There is seldom a minute in my life that I am not tempted by sadness, melancholy, cynicism, dark moods, somber thoughts, morbid speculations, and waves of depression. And often, I allow them to cover up the joy of my father’s house. But when I truly believe that I have already returned and that my father has already dressed me with a cloak, ring, and sandals, I can remove the mask of the sadness from my heart and dispel the lie it tells about my true self and claim the truth with the inner freedom of the child of God” (118).

For anyone who likes to ponder the father/son or parent/child relationship, I recommend to you an exquisite work of short fiction entitled, A River Runs Through It b Norman McLean. The father in the story is a Presbyterian minister. He has two sons. The elder one is named Norman and the younger one is named Paul. The story takes place among the spectacular mountainous region of western Montana. One of the primary activities that joins this father and his two sons together is their mutual love of fly fishing. As the author writes at one point: Fly fishing was for them a kind of secular equivalent of the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” For these three, the artistry and beauty of their fly fishing is a form of worship rendered to the creator.

Paul, the younger brother, mastered the art of fly fishing better than anyone else Norman ever knew. Yet Paul, almost like the prodigal son in Jesus’s story, ends his life at an early age in dissolute drinking and gambling and fighting. He was a masterful artist with a fly rod but a clumsy human being; a beautiful fisherman who could not live a beautiful life.

Norman, too, is good with a fly rod; yet, he is the dutiful, responsible one, the one who watches helplessly as his brother self-destructs, powerless to do anything about it. He is the one who goes to break the news to his parents of Paul’s untimely death. Why did Paul give in to evil, to darkness, to the sin of a wasted life? It is a mystery that the story never finally resolves because it is a mystery that, like the trout in those Montana Rivers, always stirs just beneath the surface of the human condition. In the end, we hear the bereaved father speaking to his only remaining son: “You can love completely, without complete understanding.” In other words, you must take the risk of loving without always understanding why the beloved does what he does.

One could argue that the real risk taker in this story told by Luke’s Jesus was the younger son who broke ties and set off on his own to make his way in the world. While we wouldn’t commend his reckless, selfish style, at least he went forth to try and carve out his own niche. And at least he had enough sense to come home when his luck and his pocket book ran dry.

On the other hand, one could argue that this elder brother also ventured out into the realm of the risky, the risk of becoming stagnant and predictable by playing the part of duty and obligation, by staying put as he watches his brother leave home for an unknown future. Perhaps, we wish he would take the risk of just simply getting over the past and the past of his brother’s foolishness, but most of us, deep down, probably think this elder brother has a valid point.

The ultimate risk taker in this story, however, is neither brother. The courageous one, the really courageous one here is the father, the one who dared to accept both of his sons for who they were, and who had to find a way to live within the pages of both of their stories. The father did so, I believe, by leaning into the winds of forgiveness, and welcoming grace. He was able to keep under control whatever urge he might have felt to display an anger he might later regret, to not let the wielding of the great power he certainly possessed become a hindrance to the relationship of love and trust he had with both his sons.

In the end, we cannot know the kind of relationship that ensues between either of these sons and his forgiving Father, or for that matter, the relationship between the two brothers. As with all good stories, we are invited to enter in and supply our own endings or better yet, our own succeeding chapters.

The father, of course, just might get burned again by the younger son and who knows if the elder son will ever stop pouting and come in out of the field? Yet, the enduring truth is that the forgiving father has his own way of embracing both, of meeting both just where they are.

Perhaps there is no more important lesson for all of us: to cultivate the practice of forgiveness and acceptance, no less than we need to receive it. And like the Presbyterian minister father in A River Runs Through It, to somehow be able to say: “I can love completely without complete understanding.”

There once was a man who had two sons.

A minister was spending the night at the home of a man he had met through his work. They were sitting on the front porch of this man’s house that night talking. At bedtime, as they prepared to go back into the house, this man reached into his pocket and took out a key and bent down and put it under the mat at the front door. He said, “This is for my son.” The minister said with surprise: “I’ve known you for several years and I never knew you had a son.” “Oh yes,” the man said, “I have a son. He left home years ago and we have never seen him since. We have sent messengers and messages to places where we thought he might be. We have tried everything we know to find him. Yet we haven’t found him and we haven’t heard from him. But when he was a boy, we always put the key under the mat at night so that when he came home late, he could get in. I still put the key under the mat every night, so that if he should come, he would find it there and know that he is still welcome and that he is still loved.

For all of us, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, whether we’ve wandered far from home or whether we’ve stayed close to home, the key remains under the mat. Amen.