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.