Shaking my fist at the heavens

Julian Barker

(tw: suicide)

 This is the story of an incident which gave a fresh dimension to my understanding of the Christian faith. 

 In the late 1960s I was Chaplain of Clare College.  In place of evensong on the last Sunday of the Lent term, as Passion Sunday and Good Friday approached, I got together with the organ scholar (John Rutter) and we compiled a service of readings and music which led up to the crucifixion.  The structure was a bit like a Carol Service.  Starting in the Old Testament the readings led through to the predictions and finally to the awful reality of the crucifixion.  I chose the Bible passages and John chose the choral pieces and hymns to fit in with them. 

 That Sunday afternoon I felt that all was ready for the evening.  I had rehearsed the readers and John had the choir well prepared.  So I decided to go and call on my very close friends Jock and Pauley Burnet who lived in Selwyn Gardens, just off Grange Road.  Jock was Bursar of Magdalene and Pauley was, among other things, a trainer of Samaritans and churchwarden St Mark’s in Newnham.  On most Sundays in term they would give a lunch for a dozen or so undergraduates and other young people which led to the formation of many friendships. 

 When I arrived at the house it was in complete darkness so I thought they must be out.  However I tried the door anyway and it was unlocked, so I walked in and went into the drawing room where I found them sitting together in silent tears on the sofa as the light faded.  They had been out to lunch with friends and had come back to find that their son Martin had committed suicide.  What is there that anyone can say?  I sat with them, mostly in silence, for an hour or two until the time came when I had to get back to college to take the service. 

 As I walked down Sidgwick Avenue and along the Backs I felt a growing surge of fury at the Almighty.  ‘How could you let something so awful happen to people so good and caring?’  It was an outrage.  As I turned into the avenue up to Clare I was almost literally shaking my fist at the heavens and shouting with anger at the so-called God of love. 

 Then I robed and followed the choir into Chapel with the anger still surging.  It was one of those services in which the priest has little part to play apart from an introduction and saying prayers and a blessing at the end.  This meant that there was nothing at all to distract me from following the pattern of the readings and the music as it led on towards its climax in the crucifixion.  And as that drew nearer I became increasingly aware that the God at whom I was shaking my fist was there in human terms as the figure on the cross, sharing in all the worst that humans can suffer and dying of torture. 

 So my mental fist began to drop as I realised that it was wholly inappropriate.  The free will we have been given can lead to terrible things.  God doesn’t stop them but he shares to the utmost in our suffering.  That is one of the greatest truths we must understand as Passion Sunday and Good Friday confront us. 

The Overtakelessness of the Cross

Shanti Daffern

1.

 I don’t like talking or thinking or writing or praying about the Crucifixion. I find it awkward, alarming, affronting. But I keep coming back, insistently, to the foot of the Cross.

 I find it hard to keep my gaze here: on Christ crucified. My thoughts – if I try to grapple with the theology – tangle and overstretch and confuse themselves. My speaking turns to platitude. The emotion – if I feel it – is unbearable. More often, though, I want to ask with Christina Rossetti:

            Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

            That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

            To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

            And yet not weep?

 Much of the time, a sort of gentle evasion of the Crucifixion is possible – and I don’t think I’m alone in that. It’s less possible on Good Friday.  The Cross stands stark before us.

 I don’t like talking about the Crucifixion, I said, but the Holy Spirit likes to confront me – and knows I need my signs in billboard-huge, neon letters - so last year I found myself asked to preach at a parish in Oxford on Good Friday, my first Good Friday as a baptised Christian. An overlong, hour-long draft, some books, even a virtually delivered sermon later – and I was still stuck, even while I had spoken; fastened, even while I had fed. I was not just gazing on the Cross, or averting my eyes, but held in the gaze of the crucified and risen Christ.

 Writing this reflection, I found myself wanting to adapt last year’s meditation into five hundred coherent, reflective words, because those words, at least, were fixed on paper. It didn’t work. Something else came instead.  

 ‘Overtakelessness’ is a word the poet Anne Carson uses about grief is her elegy-thesaurus-artefact Nox. ‘Overtakelessness: from Das unumgängliche – that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts [or words] – it remains beyond them’.

 I have been a long time in collecting things at the foot of the Cross. I email out, daily, a collected painting, a poem and a piece of music for Lent and Holy Week. I walked down the Via Dolorosa with a group of Roman Catholics, singing and praying. I sought out art made for the fourteen stations of the Cross across fourteen churches in Piran, Slovenia. For a long time I wasn’t a Christian: I still collected poems and arguments about the Cross. The only crucial thing – to take the word’s older meaning, literally ‘cross-shaped’ – to say is that when I became a Christian, it was Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection that did it.

 The overtakelessness is all: that which cannot be got round.

 We cannot go from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday except via Good Friday. The Cross cannot be evaded – or seen to the back of. You can stop reading now, five hundred words end with this sentence: stay with that which cannot be got round.

2.

 ‘about which one collects [words] – it remains beyond them’*

 The overtakelessness is all: that which cannot be got round. We cannot go from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday except via Good Friday. Via Crucis. Crux probat omnia. What God did about human sin is extremely surprising. Christ’s death on the Cross is death’s undoing; Christ’s shame on the Cross is shame’s undoing. Meanwhile a silence on the cross as dead as we shall ever be. At the still centre of Good Friday, nothing is easy, nothing is sentimental, our faith is hard as nails. This death is huge and it is human-sized. Christ’s death shakes the cosmos and it is the size of a death. To live in the Mercy of God. The complete sentence too adequate, has no give. We do not single this agony out, from all, but God singles Himself out, to bear all. My life was the size of my life. Its rooms were room-sized, its soul was the size of a soul. We do not need to say that God suffers as God to affirm that He stands with us in suffering: because this is what He does, through the incarnation, in Jesus Christ on the Cross. Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long. But I did not understand why Christians would single out this one death among so many, or how a religion with a God who became man at its centre was anything other than patriarchal, anthropocentric wish fulfilment. Still falls the Rain. At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us. Anne Carson uses the word overtakelessness of any – of every? – grief. And yet not weep? God can be God without us, but he chooses to be God with us. God is love within His own three-personed self and He is love toward us as we see His action in the Son’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. The Cross is scandalous, offensive, un-aesthetic. What may I say? Here might I stay and sing. We still look up at this God, who became Man for us; this Cross, where Christ died for us; this God, who is never changing in His love for us, which is overflowing, which is endless, which is mercy. Because this is what the mercy of God looks like: the Passion of Jesus Christ: and this is simply too giving of itself to be adequate to our words. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.               

*Most of these words are mine, no longer strung together but left to scatter. Many aren’t mine: you might recognise some. I can give you the sources if you wish. Perhaps something gets stuck or sticks for you: for I cannot say in five hundred words something that gets around, that gets to the back of the Crucifixion.

The Agony

Richard Ames-Lewis

In this painting, the artist Giovanni Bellini has depicted the Biblical narrative of Mark 14.32-43. He has been faithful to the details of the story but has placed the event in a setting which is his own invention and invested the scene with an emotional and symbolic power.

 Bellini was working in Venice in the middle of the 15th century at a time of great change. Old political structures and religious certainties were giving place to a new secularism. This painting was not intended for a church altarpiece, but as a devotional aid for a wealthy merchant, and this released Bellini from conventional iconography to an entirely new interpretation. At the same time the newly discovered medium of oil paint, more flexible than old egg-tempura, gave him new freedom of expression and use of colour.

 In the painting we see, as St Mark’s account outlines, Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. He has “thrown himself on the ground,” and is looking up into the sky at the figure of an angel carrying a cup. He is praying, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I want but what you want.” His disciples, Peter, James and John are sleeping, “for their eyes were very heavy.” In the centre background, we can see “my betrayer is at hand”: there is Judas, leading a procession of soldiers “armed with swords and clubs”.

 Bellini places Gethsemane in a wide, sculpted, landscape. Jerusalem appears as three Italian hill towns, each with its church. Jesus prays on a hillock which appears to rise up to support him, almost like a prayer desk. The three disciples lie on their own bank in various postures of sleep, with St Peter, on the right, an exercise in foreshortening. The warm dawn light coming from the left illuminates the scene and picks out the figure of Jesus. Pink clouds hang in a beautiful dawn sky, and the angel carrying the cup seems to be part of the cloudscape.

 But there is a foreboding quality. A large part of the hill on the left has been sheared away, like a quarry, despoiling the scene. A lone, dead tree in the foreground prefigures the cross of sacrifice, and a wicket fence to the right, surrounding the garden, made of interwoven stakes, is a haunting reminder of the crown of thorns. Judas and his cruel procession are making their way towards the garden. They will cross a bridge over a stream, and their crossing is an irrevocable act of betrayal and violence.

 Jesus is in agony as he prays in the garden, and the surrounding landscape seems to be in agony with him, all the elements subject to the same coming sacrifice.

Easter will still come

Nicolas Bell

Easter Hymn, A E Housman

 If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

 But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

 It is surely anomalous to choose an Easter Hymn for a Lenten reflection, but these verses by A. E. Housman fall completely outside the songs of joy to which such a title would more normally be attached. Lent is a time for questioning, and the two sentences which comprise this poem leave many questions open.

 We are effectively presented with only two scenarios, each of them seemingly devoid of hope. If the reason for all the hatred in the world today is that we are still awaiting the full promise of the resurrection, then Christ’s death must have been in vain. The first verse ends all too acerbically, ‘Sleep well and see no morning’, with the Son of Man denigrated to become a mere son of man. But the second verse presents at least a glint of the possibility of salvation. If all the narrative of the Passion has meaning, then we can only plead for the Second Coming to be soon.

 Much of Housman’s verse is nihilistic, though he is rarely as apocalyptic as here. In the first verse he seems not only to be apportioning blame to Christ for compounding the devastation wrought by wars of religion, but also to be chastising him for not even imagining these consequences in dreams. This anger moves to bitter resignation in the second verse, that Christ’s death must be futile if nothing can be done to quench the smoke and fire that surrounds us today. For a brief while, the poet seems to have some sympathy with Christ’s ‘agony and bloody sweat’, but any such feeling is removed by the final command, ‘Bow hither out of heaven’ – a strangely presumptuous turn of phrase. Christ is asked to ‘bow out’, to take his last bow from sitting ‘at the right hand of majesty on high’, but also to ‘bow hither’, to lower himself from that position of majesty ‘and see and save’.

 There is much anger in this poem, but maybe after all there is some hope too. Too often it is easier to let the catastrophes which envelop our lives today overwhelm any notice of the advancements from which we all benefit. But Christ’s Cross and Passion were not in vain, and the fulfilment of the Easter promise will still come to us, provided that we never cease to yearn for it.

A Small Hint of Joy

Steve Jullien

This Ash Wednesday marks the 20th anniversary of my first service as a chorister. My parents have strange memories of the occasion. I was in the choir stalls, all robed up, whilst they were looking after my younger sister, who was sleeping in the pew.

 The anthem that evening was a setting of Ave Verum Corpus by William Byrd (1543-1623). It is a fitting communion motet as it is a Eucharistic chant, dating from the 13th century, and Byrd’s is just one of several settings. Whereas other popular versions, such as those by Elgar and Mozart, have an organ accompaniment, Byrd’s version is a cappella. Unlike Elgar and Mozart, Byrd also chooses a minor key. On the surface, this might appear to be a depressing choice, when many of us look to be uplifted by music in our worship. However, I find that the starkness of the piece always sends shivers down my spine. It also feels like a fitting setting for this Lent: not only are we entering a penitential season, but one where our lives have been stripped back drastically over the past year. We have been forced to slow down.

Byrd’s setting echoes this. Rather than rattling through the words, Byrd draws out the opening Ave phrase with long, sustained notes.  Here, we are invited to stop and contemplate the presence of Christ in our lives. As Byrd was writing before musical dynamics as we know them were conceived, there are no official directions for volume and so it is open to our own interpretation as to how we approach the words and music. If I’m directing the piece, I like to fill those opening Ave notes with crescendos and diminuendos, giving the sense that Christ remains present throughout the various crescendos and diminuendos of our own lives.

The middle section of the piece is centred around Christ’s suffering on the Cross and our redemption, and this is often the section where directors choose to have the loudest dynamic. Whilst I like the drama of the middle section, with its moving parts, I find the final section the most striking. This section is repeated and focuses on our own relationship with Jesus. As an adult bass singer, I feel this connection most strongly through the long, deep notes on o dulcis, o pie: a way of expressing love for the person of Jesus Christ.

Although my first Lent began with a serious service and sleeping children, it ended with a joyful Easter service and children chasing an Easter egg down the aisle! Whilst Byrd’s piece is nearly all minor, he ends on a major chord. Amidst the seriousness of the piece, there is a small hint of joy. Indeed, we know that after the seriousness of the Crucifixion, there is the joy of the Resurrection. So, in this starkest of Lents, let us allow ourselves to stop and recognise our relationship with Christ, whatever that may look like, and to look forward to the hope of Easter.

Ave verum corpus,
Natum de Maria virgine;
Vere passum immolatum
In crucis pro homine.
Cuius latus perforatum
Unda fluxit sanguine.
Esto nobis praegustatum
In mortis examine.
O dulcis, o pie,
O Jesu Fili Mariae,
Miserere mei. Amen.

Hail, true body,
Born of the virgin Mary;
Who has truly suffered, sacrificed
On the Cross for humanity.
Whose side was pierced,
Pouring out water and blood.
Be a foretaste for us
During our ordeal of death.
O sweet, o holy,
O Jesus Son of Mary,
Have mercy on me. Amen.

(Translation adapted from emmanuelmusic.org)

The Fragrance of her Perfume

Lesley Warren

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’ (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’

John 12.1-8

The sisters Mary and Martha and their brother, Lazarus, appear in all four Gospels and seem to embody the life of faith. It was when he was a guest in their home in Bethany that ‘Mary sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.’

Jesus answered Martha’s reproach of her sister Mary, for not helping with the work of hospitality: ‘Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

In John 12 it is Mary’s complete absorption in his message, in what she obviously recognises as Jesus’ last days, and her devotion in providing the materials with which to anoint him for his burial that are compelling. She is the still point amid the bustle of a meal and its surrounding conversation. Unselfconsciously she performs the menial task of washing a guest’s feet and makes the shocking choice of uncovering and untying her hair to do so.

In all four gospels Mary’s devotion to Our Lord is apparent in the humility and extravagance of her action. Matthew describes ‘the disciples’ and Mark ‘some who were there’ as being angry and reproaching Mary for ‘this waste’. That amount of nard would have cost the equivalent of a year’s wages for an ordinary working man. Luke’s account has the host privately scorning Jesus for not recognising ‘what sort of woman this is’ but in all three gospels Mary’s actions are defended and Jesus declares that her actions ‘will be told of her’. All four gospels record an account of a woman anointing Jesus but there are differences between them and only in John is she named Mary.

The context of this story is interesting. In chapter 11, John has described the raising of Lazarus and Martha intervening with, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’

In the next chapter of his gospel John recounts the action of Our Lord in washing the disciples’ feet before the Last Supper:  ‘If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.’

‘A new commandment… that you love one another as I have loved you.’

Jesus loves his disciples such that he – their Lord and Master - did not avoid even the menial task of washing their feet. 

And the next day he died for us. 

Smells are evocative: from the myrrh and frankincense over which Our Lady pondered, through this account, to our use of incense for holiness in worship.

There is no mention of the smell of Mary’s nard in any other than John’s gospel where ‘The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.’

Not my will but yours

Sarah West

When Jesus was asked by the disciples to teach them to pray, he gave them 70 words that form the one prayer every Christian knows off by heart because we pray it every day. However, do we know this prayer so well that some of the words have lost their meaning? Are we praying these phrases intentionally?

Jesus tells us not to “heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do”, but when you know the words so well that they trip off the tongue of their own accord, empty phrases are exactly what they can become.

I think that it is helpful to first explore who we think we are praying to. The Lord’s prayer is also known as the Our Father, and it is these two words that put the rest of the prayer into context. The intimacy of the word Father, is more than creator, it reflects a sense of relationship and ongoing care about our wellbeing, a sense of being known and loved. Praying to the Father reminds us that we are all children before him. Furthermore, we pray to Our Father, not ‘My’ Father. We are not an only child, we have brothers and sisters. In two words, we express our belonging to God’s family and our fellowship with everyone else. It portrays something of the character of God, which is important when considering the phrase that has caught my attention recently:

“Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.  

I wonder how often we say these words without really thinking about what this means. You could read it as God will prevail, without any action required from us. Or as an extension of the previous line: thy Kingdom come, as the fulfilment of God’s will. Or is there more to it than that? Does praying for God’s will to be done call us to get on board and participate, rather than just let it happen?

We say “Thy will be done”, but how often do we actually pray about “My will be done”. When we pray we ask for the thing that we want to happen and it’s difficult not to feel let down when God does not show up in the way we want or expect and our prayers seem to go unanswered. It is easy to get confused between our own will and the will of God. It is difficult to hear and discern God’s voice amongst all the noise and distractions of this life, to make space for God in the busyness of our minds.

On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus prays the same words that he taught the disciples earlier. “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). This is Jesus’ obedient surrender to his calling.

Thy will be done, is a challenging thing to pray intentionally. Even if we do think we know God’s will or sense what we are being called to, it can be a difficult thing to obey. It requires letting go, and putting aside our own need to be in control or our ego. It helps to remember who we are praying to, Our Father, who sees, knows and loves us, who calls us by name, and to whom it is right to pray ‘thy will be done’.

God, grant me the humility to still my own thoughts, the attentiveness to hear your word, and the courage to obey your will. Amen.

Truth

Julian Allwood

2020 was a punishing year for the word “Truth.” After President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, a journalist asked his press secretary Jen Psaki if her priority was to promote the interests of President Biden, or to provide “the unvarnished truth.” But 2020 showed us just how implausible this question is. The “unvarnished truth” about the virus changed throughout 2020, as our understanding and experience evolved. Many experts contributed well-evidenced insights with care, but none had sufficient foresight to describe a “truth” that would last in time. The “unvarnished truth” about Brexit is still far from clear. The predictions made ahead of the referendum by both sides have not yet been borne out, and the long-term consequences of Brexit will never be “unvarnished” as they will be revealed in the context of parallel stories, not least the pandemic. The “unvarnished truth” of the US election revealed like no previous event, how our tendency to read only the news stories that reinforce our existing positions allows a wide divergence in sincerely held beliefs about the “truth” amplified by our pride in justifying our own choices.

The alluring goal of a single “unvarnished truth” is an unattainable chimera. “Truth” evolves in time, is inseparable from its context and is coloured by pre-conceptions. This is challenging to my engineering background, where we teach a single “truth” based on the extent to which the blue-line of experimental measurement matches the red-line of mathematical prediction on a graph. And the history of Christianity reveals how, just as with the virus, Brexit and the US election, multiple and conflicting perspectives have been held up as Christian justification for actions that we now see as misguided, mistaken, irrelevant harmful or at worst, evil. “Unvarnished morality” is as tempting but impossible as “unvarnished truth.”

 In seeking any certainty about Christian truth, we have more chance to recognise wrong than right – what I understand has been called the “Via Negativa”. Eight of the Ten Commandments proscribe rather than prescribe, and our main knowledge of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness is that he rejected the temptations of the Devil.

There cannot be an “unvarnished truth” about how to express our faith in our life choices. But, as experience and insight sharpen our understanding of what not to do and strengthen our resolve to resist it, the unique truth on which we can pin our Christian identity, is the offer of forgiveness for the wrong steps on our journey of attempt.

In the moment

Andrea Harrison

Read: I am a little church, ee cummings

St Enodoc, Trebetherick, Cornwall

The voice in this poem is that of a ‘little church’ situated away from ‘the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities.’ The church is ‘at peace with nature’ and ‘the shortening or lengthening days, sun and rain’. It awakes to ‘a perfect patience of mountains’. This might suggest a retreat from the often harsh realities of life but the prayers of the ‘little church’ are those of ‘earth’s own clumsily striving (finding and losing and laughing and crying)children.’ The ‘little church’ is content to be in the moment, whatever that might be, a rather pertinent hope for many of us in this third national lockdown.

 For the last 20 years (excepting 2020) our extended family has taken a holiday together on the north Cornish coast. There is a walk from Rock beach to Polzeath over the cliffs and around Brae Hill that I love. In many ways the walk represents a place of escape or retreat for me and not being able to go made me long for it even more last year. About halfway along the walk, situated in the wind-swept dunes, is St Enodoc church. No road leads to it and the dunes on two sides are almost level with the building. It is easy to miss as you walk the coastal path but then suddenly the crooked spire comes into view. John Betjeman is buried in the churchyard and he made the church famous in his poem Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall:

 Come on! Come on! This hillock
Hides the spire,
Now that one and now none.

 For hundreds of years the church was almost entirely hidden, buried in those sand dunes, until it was excavated in the mid nineteenth century. The setting seems idyllic but for a long time being in the moment was being almost submerged by sands whipped up from the North Atlantic winds.

 The passing of time during this pandemic will have been experienced differently for each of us but perhaps the feeling that days are blurred is probably common to many.  And for some it’s been a bleak time. The spire of E ee cummings’s ‘little church’ lifts to ‘merciful Him whose only now is forever’ and so we can be reminded of the ‘deathless truth’ and timelessness of God’s promise to be with us always, however we experience this time.

 The spire in this poem and the spire of St Enodoc’s are ‘diminutive’ but nonetheless they are a witness to God, pointing heavenward and ‘welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness’. In reflection I wonder about our witness during this Lent.

The Return of the Prodigal

Caroline Brownlie

I’d like to link this painting and its powerful if already familiar image, with some words of Julian of Norwich which usually come to me as Lent approaches… and I paraphrase…

“keep your sin in proportion, because God’s mercy is always infinitely more important” … and this is confirmed by some sound teaching on the gradual development of Lenten practice in the early Church… Lent (and Advent to a lesser and secondary extent) began to be practised as giving the Church ‘time’ (both chronological and purposeful) to reflect on the mystery of God’s greatest acts and their purpose in the life of believers… the mystery of the Cross and their developing belief that it somehow freed us from the burden of all that is evil and wrong in ourselves and our world. They came to see Jesus giving his human life over to a death like ours as an expression of God’s overwhelming and unconditional love, for us as individuals within the human race. Gradually, the penitential aspects which we inherit came into focus, but always as the response to Christian’s belief in the love and mercy of God. Psychology has taught us that children can be helped to face wrongdoing if they know they are loved first…

Is this what we see in this painting? It wasn’t that the son hadn’t betrayed and let down his father, or brought about the jealous brother’s anger and envy; it was that in the end, what redeemed him in his father’s eyes was the overwhelming love that we hear about in the story; and his father saw him while he was still a long way off, and ran to meet and embrace him. It is as if the son needs the grace of his father’s love in order to truly feel his own responsibility and to humbly accept the embrace he is given, as we see here, with bowed head; as a young prisoner in a group of women with whom I worked noticed, “with his bare feet and worn sandals miss, he must have walked a bloody long way”.

I have squirmed and been humbled to receive someone’s real forgiveness knowing I didn’t deserve it, but Rembrandt can remind us that, with post Reformation theology still ringing in many of our ears, we need to put our real sin and responsibility in their place, as Julian says and turn to God as the prodigal son did, knowing what he needed in that moment and experiencing just how much more important his father’s love was than his misdemeanours.

So Lent can be our opportunity as the early Church discovered, to reflect on the revelation of God’s love, and to rejoice humbly that it is unconditional, making it possible for the Spirit to ‘reveal our unwitting sins’, and ‘the greatness of (your) mercy’, and reminding us that we can look fearlessly towards God, the source of all our good.