The Return of the Prodigal Son - Week 7 - Becoming the Father

​I’d like to begin today by telling a story that is found in an ancient Indian Buddhist scripture called the Lotus Sutra. It is quite interesting because it it is very similar to the story of the Prodigal Son as told by Jesus.  The version I am telling now is a shortened or summarised version and goes something like this: 

Once upon a time a boy ran away from home and wandered about for many years becoming more and more poor and more and more confused.

The boy’s father loved his son very much, but had no idea where to find him. As time went on, the father became very rich.

Fifty years passed. One day, the son showed up at his father's palace. He did not know whose grand home this was, but wondered if he could find a job there. The father recognized his son, and set messengers to greet him. The father was overjoyed that his son had returned. 

But the son misunderstood. He thought the messengers were trying to arrest him for doing something wrong and so he tried to get away. 

The father saw his son’s fear and confusion. He realized his son was not ready to accept the truth, so he told the messengers to leave his son alone.

Later the father had some of his servants dress in rags. He had these servants go to his son and offer him a job shovelling cow dung. The son had been living so poorly for so long, he saw this job as a wonderful opportunity. 

Over the years, the father showed great interest in his son. Sometimes he even disguised himself in dirty rags so that he could speak with his son and get to know him so that his son would not become afraid and run away from him. During this time, the son grew and changed and he was helped to become more and more responsible, taking on more and more important jobs on his father’s estate. The father praised him, encouraged him, increasing his pay, as the son grew to be more and more responsible. The father loved being near his son and seeing him grow and mature, but he never told his son his true identity because he didn’t want to scare his son away. 

After twenty years, the father was old and near death. By this time the son was in charge of all of his father’s money and business. The son had become a responsible and a humble man just like his father, even though he didn’t know yet that it was his father.  

Finally, just before his death, the father gathered all of his friends and all the powerful people of the city to his bedside.  He revealed then the true identity of his son. The son inherited all of the fortune.

(The Parable of the Impoverished Son  - From the Lotus Sutra Chapter 4, Belief and Understanding. For a full English translation of the chapter click here)

Like I said earlier, this story is very similar to the story in the bible of the prodigal son. But in this parable, we see that it has been so long the son had completely forgotten who his father was. He couldn’t recognise his father. He was even scared of his father even though his father only wanted the very best for him. And so the father had to help his son grow until he was ready to hear that he was the son of his father. 

Indeed we are like that too. We are God’s children. In the book of Acts (17:29)  in the Bible, it says  “We are all God’s offspring”. The Greek word for offspring is genos from which we get the word genesis. Our genesis is in God. It is another way of saying, “We are God’s children.”  But we don’t always know how to act like God’s children.  Over time God needs to help us grow and become more and more responsible and more and more loving so that we can become more and more like God, full of wisdom and compassion. 

And that is the conclusion that Henri Nouwen reaches in his book. Some of us may be more like the younger son in the story of the Prodigal Son. Some of us are more like the older son in the story. But in the end, we all need to grow into being more and more like the father. 

And as Henri Nouwen says, Jesus shows us what true sonship is: He is free like the younger son without becoming rebellious. He is obedient like the elder son, without being resentful or becoming a slave. He does everything the Father sends him to do, but remains completely free. He gives everything and receives everything and so reflects the likeness of his father. And so when in John’s Gospel Philip says to him “Show us the Father”, Jesus responds, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father”.  (John 14:9).

Henri Nouwen says that perhaps the most radical statement that Jesus ever made is in Luke 6:36 “Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate”. In these words, Jesus is inviting us to become like God.  As Paul puts it in Galatians 4:7, God has made us God’s heir.

Our destiny is ultimately to inherit the fullness of God’s nature and offer to others the same compassion that God has offered to us. The return to the Father, is ultimately the invitation to become the Father, becoming transformed in his image, loving as God loves.  

But how do we do this?  Can I give without wanting anything in return? Can I love without putting any conditions on my love? Can I be kind to the ungrateful and to the wicked as Jesus suggests in Matthews Gospel?  It seems like an impossible task.

I wonder if the answer is that ultimately it is not our own doing or something that is even possible for us to achieve in our limited ego strength, but rather it is the unfolding of God’s infinite compassion within us.  The transformation into God’s image begins when we allow ourselves to be received and embraced and held by the love and compassion that God has towards us. The more deeply we come to know God’s loving compassion towards us, the more profoundly that compassion will flow through us towards others. 

1 John 3:2-3  Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him. Amen. 

​The Return of the Prodigal Son - Week 6 - The Prodigal Father

​What I find so moving about Henry Nouwen’s book on the Prodigal Son is that he is so open and honest about himself and his own struggles. He writes that for a long time in his life he struggled with self-rejection self-contempt and self loathing. He says it is a very fierce battle that rages within making him think that he is worthless, useless and negligible. He goes on to say that for a long time he considered low-self-esteem to be some kind of virtue. He says he was warned so often against pride and conceit that he came to consider it a good thing to look down on himself. But in his later years he writes how he had come to see that the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, and to ignore my original goodness.  He says that without claiming God’s infinite love and our original goodness, we lose touch with our true selves and begin to embark on a destructive search for that which which can only be found in God. For some that destructive search leads them to distant country’s of destructive and wild living, like the younger son. For others it is expressed in the attempt to justify our existence and to prove our worthiness and to earn others love through our hard work, our dutifulness and our achievements. Both are dead-ends. 

By contrast, Henri Nouwen writes that the parable of the prodigal son is a story that speaks of a love that existed before any rejection was possible and will still be there after all rejections have taken place. It is the first and everlasting love of God who is the fountain of all true human love.  He says that Jesus whole life and ministry had only one aim: to reveal this inexhaustible and unlimited love of God.  And this is perhaps expressed nowhere more profoundly than in his parable of the Prodigal Son, which Henri Nouwen suggests should be more accurately titled, the Parable of a Father’s love, in other words, a Parable of God’s love, a love that comes out to meet us, welcomes us home and celebrates our arrival. 

Today we explore that infinite love of the father as we look more closely at the Parable of Jesus as well as exploring Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son. 

Rembrandt’s portrayal of the Father Henri Nouwen notes that Rembrandt paints the father as almost blind.  He does not see with his physical eyes, rather in Rembrandt’s portrayal it seem that he sees with an inner vision that goes beyond just the physical sight.  He sees with inner spiritual eyes with an inner seeing of the heart that goes beyond mere outward appearances. As Henri Nouwen suggests it is a seeing that encompasses the whole of humanity. Even the elder son has the light shining on him, despite the fact that he has chosen to stand in the shadows. He too is touched by the gentle inner light of the father. 

Henri Nouwen points out that that the centre of his painting are father’s the hands. And those hands appear to have become extensions of this inner seeing and inner perception of the heart. The hands of the father also appear to be the instruments by which the father expresses and communicates his love as they are stretched out in blessing. Of particular interest in the painting is that the two hands are different. The one hand seems strong, muscular and masculine, holding the sons shoulder. The other hand appears slender and soft resting gently on the younger son’s back. Henri Nouwen makes the interesting observation that this is the hand of a mother.  And thus in a single painting, Rembrandt reveals that God is the source of both fatherly and motherly love, God is the source of not just masculine strength, but also the source of feminine gentleness.  It reminds us of the feminine love of God expressed in the prophet Isaiah, “Can a mother forget the child at her breast… I will never forget you!”

Henri Nouwen draws attention to the great red robe of the father which is stretched out like a tent ready to create a warm safe space for the weary traveller who has come home.  He suggests that the cloak again speaks of this warm feminine love of God like a mother hen who is taking her chicks under her wings, a reminder of that passage later on in Luke, where Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and cries out, “How I have longed to gather you under my wings, but you refused.”

Writing of Rembrandt’s portrayal of the father in the parable, Henri Nouwen writes that seldom if ever has God’s immense, compassionate love been expressed in such a poignant way. Every detail of the father’s figure – his facial expression, his posture, the colours of his dress, and, most of all, the still gesture of his hands- speaks of the divine love for humanity that existed from the beginning and ever will be.

Turning to the parable itself, what does the parable tell us of the father?

1stly, the Love of the Father at the beginning of the parable is a love that does not constrain or imprison his younger son.  His is a love that lets the younger son go. His love is too great to force the son to stay. It is a love makes room for people to make mistakes.  It is a love that is wise enough to recognise that sometimes people need to face the consequences of their own actions before they will come to their senses.  It is therefore a love that holds dear and yet a love that is willing to let go, even though it might break his own heart in doing so. AS Henri Nouwen expresses it: As a father, he wants his children to be free, free to love. And that freedom includes the possibility of leaving home, going to a distant country and losing everything.

2ndly we see that the love of the father is such that he has clearly been waiting for his sons return.   He has been on the lookout.  Having let his son go, knowing that he was about to make some terrible mistakes, he doesn’t wash his hands of his son. He does not disown the wayward son.  He continues to hold him close to his heart with a deep longing within him that causes him watch and wait for the sons return. 

3rdly, when the younger son returns, the father runs out to meet him.  Timothy Keller writes that no respectable patriarch in the ancient world would have gone running out to meet his wayward son.  He would have considered it beneath his dignity.  It is far more likely in the ancient world that  the patriarchal father would have emphasized his authority, making the son wait, giving him the cold shoulder to emphasize the crimes of the son against him.  Perhaps even more likely, he might have had his son publicly beaten before meeting with him.  

Not so with the father in Jesus’ parable, he runs our to meet the lost son who has returned home.  He wears his heart on his sleeve. There is something reckless about the love of this father which is why Timothy Keller refers to the parable, not as the parable of the prodigal son, but rather the Prodigal Father. 

4thl, There is no desire to punish.  The lost son has already been punished enough by his own waywardness. He has already experienced the hell of his own making. The father’s only desire is to heal and bless. 

5thly, The father’s love in the parable is extravagant. He is not into half measures with his love, as he says to his servants that they should put a ring on his son’s finger and to go and put the best robe on him.  The father in the parable wants only the best for his son which suggests that God only wishes the very best for us as well. 

6thly, This is a Father who enjoys a celebration. Isn’t it interesting that in a different era there were Christian groups who looked down on dancing. Dancing was the work of the devil.  I wonder how they justified such a stance when at the high point of this parable of Jesus, the father throws a party celebrating the return of his son and we read that there is music and dancing.  

Henri Nouwen writes that he is not used to the image of God throwing a big party. It seems to contradict the seriousness and solemnity I have always attached to God. And yet he reminds us that so many of Jesus parables are about feasts and banquets.  It is a reminder that the invitation into the spiritual life is supposed to be an invitation into joy. 

God rejoices writes Henri Nouwen, not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found. What I am called to is to enter that joy. It is God’s joy, not the joy that the world offers. It is the joy of being embraced and held by a love that is stronger than death. Perhaps one call it a crucified and risen joy. 

7thly, As we said last week, the same father who runs out to meet the younger son, is the same father who leaves the party to plead with his elder son to come in. God does not play favourites. Henri Nouwen writes: There is no doubt that his heart goes out to both of his sons; he loves them both; he hopes to see them together as siblings around the same table; he wants them to experience that, different as they are, they belong to the same household and are children of the same father. 

And so here, says Henri Nouwen, is the God that 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. 

He has no desire to punish them. They have already been punished excessively by their own inner or outer waywardness. 

Instead his deepest desire is to say, more with his hands than his mouth: “You are my beloved, on you my favour rests”. Amen. 

The Return of the Prodigal Son - Week 6 - The Lost Elder Son

​Most Bible translations introduce Luke 15:11-32  with a title, calling it the parable of the prodigal son and sometimes, the parable of the lost son.

But this diverts our attention away from the fact that Jesus begins the story with these words:

“A man had two sons”.  This is a story of two sons, not just one son.  It is also the story of two lost sons, not just one lost son. The second son, the elder son, doesn’t receive much attention in the Church or in our preaching, perhaps because he has more in common with most church goers than most of us would care to admit. 

And so today we turn to the parable of the second lost son today. His lostness is more difficult to pinpoint. It is more difficult to identify it. His lostness is far more respectable and thus it almost seems that he is not really lost at all. But at the end of the parable, while the first son is described as having come home, having returned to the father’s love, the second son, the elder son is perhaps even more estranged than the younger son ever was.  His story is not resolved. The question is left hanging in the mind of the listener? Will the elder son be reconciled with his father? Will he be reconciled with his younger brother? We don’t know. We are not told. 

Jesus leaves it up to us. He plants the seed of the story and leaves that seed to germinate. The problem is that we have so heavily fixated on the first half of the story, that we seldom reflect on what it means to be the elder son. 

Who is the Elder son? Why at the end of the story does he exclude himself?

In the first two weeks of this sermon series, I reflected on the life of Rembrandt as an aid to reflecting on his painting of the return of the Prodigal Son.  Rembrandt for a large part of his life was very much the younger son, who ended his life having squandered much of his wealth.  But Henri Nouwen writes that digging a little deeper into Rembrandt’s life, it is clear that there is also an elder son living within Rembrandt, a hardness and a self-righteousness that could express itself in coldness and even in cruelty.  When Rembrandt’s wife had died, he had an affair with the women who he had hired to look after his son.  Apparently he had intimated that he would marry her, but when he never did, the whole thing turned sour. She like Rembrandt was from the Reformed tradition and so she took him to the elders of the great Kirk which led to a kind of a church trial for Rembrandt which I didn’t end well for him.  But his response to her was a vindictive one, and, after drumming up false testimonies from his neighbours, he ended up having her committed to a sanatorium, saying that she was mentally unstable.  Even quite a number of years later, when she made attempts to be released from the sanatorium, he pulled strings with high ranking people he knew to make sure that she would remain inside.  He could be both wild and profligate, but he was also capable of being cold, cruel and vindictive. 

Turning to Rembrandt’s painting of The Return of the Prodigal Son, the elder son is depicted in the painting standing on the right hand side.  Strictly speaking, according to the parable, the elder son was not present at the meeting of the father and the son but only appears much later.  While Rembrandt’s painting is therefore not a factual representation of the story, what he is trying to do in one frame, is to capture something of the spirit of the story. 

As I have shared before Rembrandt depicts the elder son standing off to to the right hand side with a shadowy space between him and his father and brother.. He seems set a little higher in the painting as though on a platform. His posture is bolt upright, his hands in a crossed, closed position as he appears to look down in a mixture of judgement, disgust, pity, contempt and disapproval.  While there is a gentle light that shines upon the father and the younger son, the elder son is appears to be disappearing in the shadows. 

You can almost hear the words he speaks in the parable in verse 30 when he addresses his father and describes his younger brother with the words: “This son of yours…”.  In these words, he seems to have disowned both his younger brother, and even his father. “This son of yours…”

Henri Nouwen writes of himself: It is hard for me to concede that this bitter, resentful and angry man might be closer to me in a spiritual way than the lustful younger brother.  Yet the more I think about the elder son, the more I recognise myself in him. He goes on… All my life I have harboured a strange curiosity for the disobedient life that I myself didn’t dare to live… I have known the envy toward the wayward son. It is the emotion that arises when I see my friends having a good time doing all the sorts of things I condemn. I call their behaviour reprehensible or even immoral, but at the same time I have often wondered why I didn’t have the nerve to do some of it or all of it myself… The obedient, dutiful life of which I am proud or for which I am praised, sometimes feels like a burden that was laid upon my shoulders and continues to oppress me. And so Henri Nouwen writes that he has no difficulty identifying with the elder son who in verse 29 complains “All these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed any orders of yours, yet you never offered me so much as a kid to celebrate with my friends.” In this complaint, obedience and duty have become a burden and service has become slavery.  

Henri Nouwen writes that the lostness of the younger son is obvious. But the lostness of the elder son is much harder to identify. After all, he did all the right things. He was obedient, dutiful, law-abiding, and hard-working. People respected him admired him, praised him and likely considered him a model son. Outwardly he was faultless. But when confronted with his father’s joy and forgiveness at the return of his younger brother, a dark power erupts within him and boils to the surface. Suddenly, there there becomes glaringly visible a resentful, proud, unkind, selfish person, one that had remained deeply hidden for so long in the shadows of his own heart.

If this elder son is lost, he is lost, not in a distant country, living a wild life somewhere else, he is lost in his sense of judgement, condemnation, resentment, bitterness and anger. He is lost in self-imposed rules that the father has never actually placed upon him. Somehow he has placed them upon himself and then blamed his father. He is lost in a joyless life. 

Timothy Keller makes an interesting observation about the older son. He suggests that while the older son outwardly seems to be the polar opposite of the younger son, he is in fact motivated by exactly the same thing.  He loves his father’s money and his father’s stuff more than he loves the father.  The only thing that is different are his methods of trying to achieve the same result. The younger son rudely and disrespectfully blurts out that he wants his portion of the inheritance and then runs off and wastes it when he gets it. The older son has a longer term strategy. He has his eye on his father’s wealth and aims to achieve it by compliance rather than rebellion. But on the inside there is no real warmth or love towards his father. He is more interested in money than relationship with the father.  And so rather than living everyday in the light and joy of being his fathers son, he has come to regard his father as a slave driver from whom he will one day get his just desserts.  

In the end, both sons are lost, but only one returns. Wild, lustful living can be wasteful and destructive. But resentment and anger can be equally destructive because it leaves no room for love.  It is often the resentful saint whose moralistic intensity can spill over into fanaticism.  Henri Nouwen writes that joy and resentment cannot co-exist. The elder son refuses to join in the joyful celebration of a lost son who has come to his senses and finally returned home. If it is true that joy and resentment cannot co-exist, then it is also true that love and resentment cannot co-exist either. 

Perhaps what the parable is suggesting is that the spiritual answer to a destructive life of wild and
wasteful living is not going to the opposite moralistic and dutiful extreme.  If our obedience, our sense of morality and our sense of duty rob us of our joy and prevents us from celebrating life and expressing love and grace and forgiveness towards others and instead produces resentment and anger within us, then it should be an alarm bell that something is wrong. Just as the younger son needs to learn something of the more responsible ways of his older brother, so the older brother in the parable needs to learn something from the younger brother (and indeed his father) in how to let his hair down and to enjoy life a little. The answer does not lie in the extremes, but in a middle way.

How can the elder son in me and in you return home, because I can see that there is definitely an elder son living in me?  Jesus leaves the question open, although he makes it very clear that the father who runs out to meet the younger son is the same father who leaves the celebration to meet the older son too. There is no favouritism here.  The father desires for the elder son to join in the party. 

As Henri Nouwen wrestled with this question in his own life, he came to the conclusion that the way for the elder son to return is through trust and through gratitude.   Firstly to begin to trust that God is not the slave driver that I thought God was. That I can relax sometimes. That I can make time to let my hair down.  That rest, celebration and joy are as important as duty and hard work. If I am resentful that others are not working hard enough, then maybe it is a sign that I am working too hard taking on more responsibility than God is asking of me, that I am beginning to put myself in the place of God.  And secondly, through a life of gratitude.  Henri Nouwen writes that gratitude is the opposite of resentment. Resentment blocks the perception that life is a gift. My resentment tells me that I don’t receive what I deserve and that others are getting more than they should.  And so underlying my resentment is normally a hidden envy. By contrast, gratitude brings us back to our senses, back to the here and now, enabling us to experience the truth that all of life is a pure gift. 

Henri Nouwen writes in conclusion: There is always the choice between resentment and gratitude, because God has appeared in my darkness, urged me to come home and declared in a voice filled with affection “You are with me always and all I have is yours.” Indeed I can choose to dwell in the darkness in which I stand, point to those who are seemingly better off then I, and lament about my misfortunes. Or, there is the option to look into the eyes of the One who came out to search for me, and to  see therein that all I am and all I have is pure gift, calling for gratitude.  And this takes a leap of faith and trust. And every time I make this little leap, I catch a glimpse of the One who runs out to meet me with joy. Amen. 

SERMON TEXT - The Return of the Prodigal Son - Week 4 - Journeying Home

​Last week we considered what it meant for the son to leave home.  Today, we consider what it might mean for the son to return. AS Henri Nouwen reflects on Rembrandt’s painting on the Return of the Prodigal Son  he writes: 

The young man held and blessed by the father is a poor, a very poor man. He left home with much pride and money, determined to live his own life far away from his father and his community. He returns with nothing, his money, his health, his honour, his self-respect, his reputation… everything has been squandered. 

As Henri Nouwen writes: Rembrandt leaves little doubt about the son’s condition. His head is shaven, suggesting the head of a prisoner whose name has been replaced by a number. His individuality has been stripped away like a prisoner in a concentration camp. 

Wanting to be completely free of the constraints of living with his father, ironically he has become a prisoner to his own desires which have led him to his ruin. 

The clothes that Rembrandt gives him in the painting are underclothes, barely covering his emaciated body. Both the father and the elder son in the painting are depicted wearing expensive red cloaks giving the status and dignity. The kneeling son by contrast is in rags which seem to just cover his emaciated, exhausted and worn-out body from which all strength has gone. 

The soles of his feet tell the story of a long, arduous and humiliating journey home. The bare left foot is scarred. The right foot is covered only partially by a broken sandal.

Henri Nouwen writes that this is a depiction of a man who has found himself dispossessed of everything, except for one thing, his sword.  The short sword depicted in Rembrandt’s painting, hanging from the younger son’s hips is the last remaining sign of his dignity and nobility. 

Henri Nouwen writes that what it shows is that even in the midst of his debasement, he has clung to the truth that he is still the son of his father. Otherwise, he would have sold his so valuable sword, the symbol of his sonship.  Although he has come back as a beggar and an outcast and looking like a slave, he has not forgotten that he is still the son of the father.  And in the end, it is this remembered and valued sonship that finally persuades him to turn back and go home. 

Going back to the pig sty, Henri Nouwen points to verse 16 which says that “He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no-one gave him anything.”

Henri Nouwen writes that the younger son becomes fully aware of how lost he is when no one in his surroundings shows the slightest interest in him. When his money ran out he stopped existing for them. It is hard indeed to imagine what it means to be a complete stranger and foreigner, to be a person to whom no-one shows any sign of recognition. When no-one wants to give him the food that he is giving to the pigs, the younger son realises that he isn’t even considered a fellow human being.  Even the pigs are treated with more value and care than the son. 

Henri Nouwen writes: I am only partially aware of how much I rely on some degree of acceptance and belonging in life.  Common background, history, vision, religion and education; common relationships, lifestyles, and customs; common age and profession; all of these serve as a basis for acceptance. And so for all of us, whenever we meet a new person, we always begin by looking for what we have in common, a search for a common link that will help us to bridge the gap between ourselves and the person we have just met. The less we have in common, the harder it is to be together and the more estranged we feel in each other’s company.  When there is no common language or common customs or when we do not understand a persons lifestyle or religion or rituals or art or even their food and their manner of eating, then the more we feel foreign and lost. 

And so Henri Nouwen writes that when the younger son is no longer considered human by the people around him, the more profoundly he experiences his isolation and loneliness. He is truly lost, and it is this sense of complete lost-ness that brings him to his senses. He is shocked into the awareness of his utter alienation.  He is utterly disconnected from everything that gives life – family, friends, community acquaintances and even food.

In Verse 16, living in a foreign country, he has become a non-person.  All at once he sees clearly the path he has chosen and where it has led.  And it is this that helped to bring him to his senses. 

Straight after verse 16 as he reaches the lowest point in his life,  in verse 17 we read that “ he came to his senses”.

And this is often the case. Sometimes the wheels have to fall off before we are able to see things clearly. Sometimes we have to hit rock-bottom to truly recognise the truth about ourselves so that we are ready to make the necessary changes. 

For the prodigal son, this coming to his senses involved a remembering and a rediscovery of his deepest self. Whatever he had lost, be it his money, his friends, his reputation, his self-respect, his inner joy and peace, he still remained his father’s child. And so he says to himself in verse 17 “How many of my fathers hired men have food to eat, and here I am dying of hunger”.  

As Henri Nouwen writes: The younger son’s return is expressed succinctly in the words of verse 18 “Father… I no longer deserve to be called your son.” On the one hand the younger son realises that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time he is also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose. 

And so the younger son’s return begins at the very moment that he remembers and reclaims his sonship, even though he no longer feels worthy of it. It is the loss of everything that brings him to the bottom line of his true identity. In hitting rock-bottom, he hits the bedrock of his sonship his true identity. When he finds himself desiring to be treated as one of the pigs, he realises that he is not a pig, but the son of his father.  And this realisation became the basis of his choice to choose life rather than death.  

In this moment he recognises and remembers his father’s love… a love that would treat even his hired workers with dignity and fairness. And it is this remembering of his father’s love, however misty this may have been, that gives him the confidence and the strength to claim back something of his sonship. 

And perhaps that is what this parable is trying to tell us, that no matter how lost and alienated from life and ourselves we may become our truest and deepest identity is that we are children of God.  We have come from God and our truest identity is in God, and there is nothing that we can do that change this. Even if we may cease behaving like God’s children, it can never change the underlying fact that we are indeed God’s children.  We are God’s offspring, everyone of us, even when we do not act like God’s children. And this applies even to the Putin’s of this world. 

And so he remembers his father’s love and in doing so, begins claiming ever so hesitantly his true identity.  But he is not yet aware of the height, depth and the full extent of that love. 

And so as he journey’s home, considering his unworthiness, considering the full extent of his own crimes against his father, he rehearses an imaginary conversation in his head with his father. I wonder how many imaginary conversations each one of us have had. I think it is quite common. 

Henri Nouwen writes: I am seldom without some imaginary encounter in my head in which I explain myself, boast or apologise, proclaim of defend, evoke praise or pity. It seems that I am perpetually involved in long dialogues with absent partners, anticipating their questions and preparing my responses. I am amazed by the emotional energy that goes into these ruminations and murmuring.  He writes: Yes, like the prodigal son, I am leaving the foreign country. Yes, I am going home… but why all this preparation of speeches which will never be delivered?

The reason is clear, he writes. Although claiming my true identity as a child of God, I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation. I still think of his love as conditional… I keep entertaining doubts about whether I will be truly welcome… I am not yet able to fully believe that where my failings are great, God’s grace is even greater.  

In the end God does not receive us back because of our clever arguments or rehearsed confessions. In the end, all that is required of the prodigal son when he finally meets his father is simply to surrender into his father’s loving embrace. And it is this that Rembrandt captures so beautifully in his painting. The son collapses on his knees before the father, surrendering into his embrace as he rests his head into his father’s chest, like a little child in his fathers arms. 

In this moment, he has become like a little child again.  In fact it was a young women who pointed out to Henri Nouwen that the head of the younger son looks like the head of a baby who has just come out of his mother’s womb. Pointing to the painting she said, “Look, it is still wet and fetus like.”

In the light of his father’s loving embrace, the shaved head of the prisoner or slave has become the face of a newborn baby resting it’s head on it’s mothers breast having just been delivered from her womb. The pain of lostness has become the pain of new birth in the arms of his father’s love. 

Is this perhaps an image of what Jesus meant when he said that if we are to enter into the Kingdom of God, which might be paraphrased as entering the Embrace of God’s Eternal love, we need to become like little children. 

In Rembrandt’s painting, as the son collapses wearily into his father’s embrace and surrenders his head into the folds of his fathers clothes, it is as though he has been born anew and gifted with a new innocence.  And what it took was not some clever argument or negotiation about working as one of his father’s hired hands. What it took was a final surrendering of everything he had left into the unconditional embrace of the father’s love.  
In some ways it is an image of what all of us will end up doing as we breath our last. In that last breath what else will we be capable of, except to surrender and to let go and rest our weary heads into the unconditional embrace of God’s love. 

It is from God’s love that we have come, and in the end it is into God’s unconditional love that we will all have to surrender. 

I close with a quote from scripture:  1 John 3:2 “Dear Friends, we are already God’s children, but what we will be has not yet been made known.”

The Return of the Prodigal Week 3 - Leaving

I’d like to begin today by reading a very short anonymous poem about leave home: 

It is written on a post card from two parents to their daughter.  In the address section is written: the Great Unknown, Far, Far Away and the poem reads as follows: 

Dearest daughter,
Be careful.
We trust you.
We love you.
Mom and Dad

In those simple words is captured a whole range of thoughts and sentiments. A deep sense of love and care that has been nurtured and treasured over the daughter's lifetime, from her conception through childhood and teens and into adulthood… Dearest daughter, we love you. A sense of anxiety and worry over what could potentially go wrong. Be careful. The sense that she has grown and matured and has developed the skills to make it on her own. We trust you. And reading between the lines, the underlying sense of sadness that inevitably comes with having to let go expressed in the address: The great unknown, far far away… 

Dearest daughter,
Be careful.
We trust you.
We love you.
Mom and Dad

Today we continue our preaching series on the Return of the Prodigal Son, a reflection on the parable that Jesus tells in Luke 15 but also a reflection on a book written by Henri Nouwen reflecting on Rembrandt’s painting by the same name.

As Henri Nouwen reflects on the full title of Rembrandt’s painting ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’, he writes that implicit in the return is a leaving. Returning is a home-coming only after a home-leaving, a coming back after having gone away. He writes: “The father who welcomes his son home is so glad because ‘...this son was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and is found’. The immense joy in welcoming back the lost son hides the immense sorrow that has gone before.  He writes that only when we have the courage to explore in depth what it means to leave home, can we come to a true understanding of the return. 

In Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son, the sorrow and pain of leaving is depicted most profoundly in the rags of the son as he returns. But the depth of pain and sorrow are not just the son’s who has discovered the harshness of life outside of his father’s embrace. The sorrow is indeed also the sorrow and the anguish of the father who has watched his beloved younger son leaving home not as a means of growing to full maturity, but rather with a desire to avoid taking responsibility.  With sorrow in his heart, the father has had to watch the son leave, knowing that disaster is surely awaiting the son, but it is the only way he will ultimately grow.  Knowing also that if he tried prevent his son from leaving, he would lose his son’s love anyway. If you love someone, you will in the end need to set them free.  Like Jesus who doesn’t run after the Rich Young Man, the father in the parable does not run after the son, for the son needs to make the necessary mistakes that will hopefully in the end lead him back home. 

Henri Nouwen tells how Kenneth Bailey offers a penetrating explanation of the gravity of the son’s leaving.  He quotes Kenneth Baily who writes: 

For over fifteen years I have been asking people of all walks of life from Morrocco to India and from Turkey to the Sudan about the implications of a son’s request for his inheritance while his father is still living. The answer has always been emphatically the same… the conversation runs as follows: 
Has anyone ever made such a request in your village?
Never!
Could anyone ever make such a request?
Impossible!
If anyone ever did, what would happen?
His father would beat him of course!
Why?
The request means – he wants his father to die. 

The implication of the son’s request is ‘Father, I cannot wait for you to die’.  As Timothy Keller writes, the request shows that the younger son loves his father’s money more than he loves his father. It is the father’s stuff that he wants, not his father’s love. 

The son’s leaving is therefore more than just an offence to the father, it is a heartless rejection of the home in which the son was born and nurtured and a break from the whole tradition upheld by the larger community of which he was a part. 

One could say it is an act of profound self-centeredness and a betrayal of the treasured values of family and community that have nurtured and formed him, as he chooses to dispose of his father’s assets and leave for a distant country rather than to give back out of gratitude for all he has received in life. 

But this parable is not just about leaving home in a literal sense. It is meant to be read as a parable, a metaphor for those times when we feel disconnected from the inner life of our own spirits. And so Henri Nouwen writes that leaving home is much more than an historical event bound in time and space. Rather, it is a denial of the spiritual reality that I belong to God, that God holds me safe in an eternal embrace, that I am indeed carved in the palms of God’s hands and hidden in their shadows.  Leaving home means ignoring the truth that God has fashioned me in secret, moulded me in the depths of the earth and knitted me together in my mother’s womb. Leaving Home is living as though I do not yet have a home and so must look far and wide to find one, when all along I already have a home in God’s gentle embrace. 

Henri Nouwen goes on. He says “Home is the centre of my being where I can hear that voice that says: “You are my Beloved, on you my favour rests”.

To leave home for a distant country as the prodigal son does, is to cease to hear that voice of God that whispers our name and calls us the Beloved.  And in it’s place to seek other ways to fill the void that is left. Leaving home means seeking, in other things, and in other people, a depth of satisfaction, contentment and love, that only God can bring. 

To leave home in a spiritual sense, is to cease finding our fulfilment in things that are of eternal and enduring value and to put our hope and our trust in things that are impermanent, passing and of fleeting value. 

By contrast, if we find ourselves deeply rooted in the world of the spirit, and grounded in a sense of the eternal, then it is possible to appreciate and enjoy the fleeting joys of life, because we are rooted in something deeper. Is that perhaps what it means to be in this world but not of this world? But when we fail to root ourselves in our true inner home of the spirit, then chasing after the fleeting joys of life becomes like chasing after the wind as we read in Ecclesiastes. It is a recipe for desperate, futile, empty and addictive living as the younger son very quickly discovers as he finds himself hitting rock-bottom feeding pigs and longing to eat their food.  We can only appreciate the joys of our outward senses in the material world when we are rooted in the more enduring and deeper joy of the spirit, our true home. 

As I suggested earlier, the fatal mistake of the younger son in this parable is that he wanted to enjoy only the good things of life. Leaving home was an exercise in avoidance.  He was trying to avoid growing up, trying to avoid the pain and the difficulties of life as an adult and so soon he finds himself far away from his father’s love, living alone, in a pig-sty in a distant country.  And there he discovers for himself that pain and struggle in life cannot in the end be avoided. When we live our lives trying to avoid the pain, the struggles and the responsibilities of life, we end up in even greater pain and suffering than we were avoiding in the first place. 

We all find ourselves from time to time living in distant countries away from ‘the love of the father’. To live in a distant country is a metaphor for the dead-ends where we have searched for love, affirmation, value and satisfaction, but found only emptiness, broken promises and constantly shifting sands.  Henri Nouwen writes: “I am the prodigal son, every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found. Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere? Why do I keep leaving home where I am called a child of God, the Beloved of my Father?”

Henri Nouwen writes that it is not very hard to know when we are being dragged into a distant country away from our true spiritual home.  Fear, anger, resentment, greed, anxiety, jealousy, a sense of barreness and emptiness are all signs that we have left home, perhaps daydreaming about becoming rich, powerful and famous, and in the process disconnected from the inner voice of love that is already whispering: “You are my beloved, on whom my favour rests?”

What are the times in your life where it has felt psychologically or spiritually you were living in a distant country? 

What are some of the dead-ends you have found yourself over the years?

What are the places and occasions in your life where you were hoping to find satisfaction and contentment, (perhaps even unconditional love) but only found emptiness, like you had been chasing after the wind? ​

'SERMON TEXT:  The Return of the Prodigal Son - Week 2 - Rembrandt the Prodigal & Rembrandt the Father

​Last week I did an introductory sermon to a new sermon series on the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  

As an aid to exploring this parable in greater depth I will be using a book written by Henri Nouwen called “The Return of the Prodigal Son”.  The book in turn is a reflection on Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting by the same name, a painting that Rembrandt painted very near the end of his own turbulent and tumultuous life.

As I shared last week, the painting by Rembrandt is a beautiful and moving depiction of the moment the prodigal son meets and is embraced by his father when he returns home.  The kneeling son rests his face onto the father’s chest as the elderly and partially blind father places his hands gently over the son’s shoulders as he receives the lost and now destitute son with warmth and tender love, back to himself. 

There is a beautiful stillness to the painting, almost as though Rembrandt has captured a moment of eternity on canvas.  Henri Nouwen suggests that this painting reveals how by the end of his life, an inner transformation had taken place, with a deep sense of having developed an inner vision and a spiritual insight that he did not have in his younger years. 

Henri Nouwen writes that in Rembrandt’s younger years, Rembrandt had all the characteristics of the prodigal son. He was… “brash, self-confident, spendthrift, sensual, and very arrogant.” Henri Nouwen writes that at the age of 30 Rembrandt painted himself as the lost son in a brothel, with his wife Saskia painted as one of the ladies of the brothel. 

Rembrandt painted himself with his half-open mouth and lustful eyes holding up a half-empty glass while with his left hand he touches the lower back of the girl who appears to be seated on his lap. 

It is a portrait of merriment and sensuousness, that perhaps captures something of the character of Rembrandt in his younger years. 

Henri Nouwen writes that all of Rembrandt’s biographers describe him as a proud young man, strongly convinced of his own genius and eager to explore everything that the world has to offer; an extrovert who loved luxury and was quite insensitive towards those around him.  In addition, like the younger son in the parable, one of Rembrandt’s main concerns was money. Rembrandt made a lot, spent a lot and also lost a lot.  Nouwen writes that a large part of Rembrandt’s energy was wasted in long drawn-out court-cases about financial settlements and bankruptcy proceedings. 

Nouwen writes that other self-portraits of this period reveal Rembrandt as a man hungry for fame and adulation, fond of extravagant costumes, preferring golden chains to the traditional starched white collars, and sporting outlandish hats, berets, helmets and turbans. 

After Rembrandt’s short period of success, popularity and wealth as an artist what followed was a period of much grief, misfortune and disaster.  He lost 3 children over a five year period from 1635 – 1640. Two years later his beloved wife Saskia died in 1642.  After her death he had an affair with a women he had hired to look after his nine-month-old son Titus, which ended in disaster.

After that disastrous period of his life he had a more stable union with another women, Hendrickje Stoffels who bore him a son who died in 1652 and a daughter, Cornelia.

Henri Nouwen writes that during these years, Rembrandt’s popularity as a painter plummeted and in 1656 Rembrandt was declared insolvent, having to sign over all his property and effects for the benefit of his creditors in order to avoid complete bankruptcy.  In doing so he lost all of his possessions, all of his own paintings as well as his collection of other painters' works, his large collection of artefacts, and his house in Amsterdam with all its furniture. 

When Rembrandt died in 1669, he had become a poor and a lonely man.  Only his daughter Cornelia, his daughter-in-law Magdalene van Loo and his granddaughter Titia survived him.  His common law wife, Hendrickje had already died 6 years earlier and his son Titus had died a year before his own death. 

And yet, rather than becoming bitter and twisted by this tumultuous life; rather than wallowing in his own pain and self-pity, this life of excess, leading to disaster and loss had a purifying effect on him.  In a way his life of ruin and loss led him in a movement away from the glory of the world that seduces with all its glittering lights to a discovery of the inner light of old age, the glory that is hidden in the human soul which surpasses death.  While his own story had begun in excess and waste like the prodigal, in a very profound way, it was that very journey that led him to the Inner Light of God’s grace and compassion that is expressed so profoundly in his painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son. 

In a way, by the end of his turbulent life, Rembrandt had indeed become the prodigal who was now ready to return Home to God. In a very real sense, the prodigal son depicted kneeling before his father is a depiction of Rembrandt himself. It was he who had learned by the end of his life how to kneel before the God who had made him and loved him, it was he whose pride and brashness had been transformed into humility and surrender before the tender Love of the Divine.  

But in another sense, Henri Nouwen suggests that Rembrandt was not only the younger son in this painting returning home to the father. In a very real sense, by the end of his life, Rembrandt had indeed grown to become also the gentle, welcoming, tender father depicted in the painting.  The only reason that Rembrandt could the gentle compassionate embrace of the father was because that gentle wisdom and compassion of the father had begun to dwell within himself as well.  Nouwen writes: “One must have died many deaths and cried many tears to have painted a portrait of God in such humility”. 

At the end of his life he was indeed the prodigal who had begun to find his way home to God, but in another sense the gentle, loving and welcoming father had come to dwell within the sanctuary of his own heart. 

The journey of the Protestant, Reformed painter, Rembrandt Van Rijn from being the prodigal son in his youth to somehow also becoming the father in the parable by the end of his life, is, in a different way, paralleled in the life of the Dutch Catholic Priest Henri Nouwen whose life had become so deeply affected by Rembrandt’s painting. 

As I shared in last week's sermon, when Henri Nouwen had first encountered the painting, it was the prodigal son that had so captivated his attention. He had realised that he was that son. He was looking for a place he could call home. He was the one who felt lost and longed to be embraced.  

But a few years later, while discussing the painting with a trusted friend in England, his friend had looked quite intently at Henri and said, “I wonder if you are not more like the older son?”  With those words, his friend had opened up a new space within him.   He had never thought of himself as the older son, but the more he thought about it, the more he realised that there was indeed an older son living within him.  He had always lived quite a dutiful life, just like the older son, When he was 6 years old, he already wanted to become a priest. He was born, baptised, confirmed and ordained in the same church. He had always been obedient to his parents his teachers, his bishops and indeed to God. He had never truly run away from home and had never wasted his time and money on sensual pursuits, and never gotten lost in debauchery and drunkenness. For his entire life he had been quite responsible, traditional, home-bound.  And yet for all that he may well have been just as lost as the younger son in the story as he saw himself in a while new way. He writes: I saw my jealousy, my anger, my touchiness, doggedness and sullenness, and, most of all, my subtle self-righteousness. I saw how much of a complainer I was and how much of my thinking and feeling was ridden with resentment. I was the elder son for sure, he writes, but just as lost as his younger brother.  I had been working very hard on my father’s farm, but had never fully tasted the joy of being at home. 

Having first identified himself with the younger son in the painting, and then discovered that he was the elder son for sure, a few years later, he became challenged by another trusted friend, who again, when reflecting on the painting with him said to him, “Whether you are the younger son or the elder son, you have to realise that you are called to become the father… You have been looking for friends all you life; you have been craving for affection as long as I’ve known you; you have been interested in a thousand things; you have been begging for attention, appreciation, and affirmation left and right. The time has come to claim your true vocation – to be a father who can welcome his children home without asking them any questions and without wanting anything from them in return”. 

In writing his book on the Return of the Prodigal Son as few years after this conversation, Henri Nouwen writes: I still feel the desire to remain the son and never grow old. But I have also come to know in a small way what it means to be a father who asks no questions, wanting only to welcome his children home. 

Over the next few weeks, may we also discover within ourselves not only the lost children of God, but also the compassionate mother and father that is God. Amen. 

SERMON TEXT: Coming Home - The Return of the Prodigal - Introduction

​I was the last of the three sons to leave home.  My younger brother Wesley Who is about 4 years younger than me left home just after school at the age of 18 when he got a tennis scholarship in the US. The first time he came home a number of months later it was really wonderful. My Mom prepared everything in advance. She cooked his favourite food. On his pillow she placed his favourite crisps (Ghost Pops). When he arrived home, he knew that he had come home. 

I left home only about two years later at the age of 23 when I was accepted as a minister in training in the Methodist Church.  I was moved around quite a bit in those early years living in four different places over a four year period.  In some way it was an exciting time, but it was also an unsettling time and so trips back home to my Mom and Dad were just wonderful. It was wonderful to be able to return to the warmth and security of a place called home. 

But I am very conscious that there are many who don’t grow up in warm inviting and secure homes. For many home was and perhaps is been a place of insecurity, anxiety, trauma and abuse.  There are many who at home don’t feel at home.

But even for those of us who have grown up in fairly stable homes there are many who from time to time experience a strange feeling homesickness even when finding themselves at home. 

I read on the internet that in the Welsh language there is a word that expresses this mysterious feeling of being homesick even when you’re at home. It is the word: hiraeth. 

I understand that it is a word that can have a variety of shades of meaning.  Samantha Kielar writes that hiraeth can describe “...a combination of a sense of homesickness, longing, nostalgia, and yearning, for a home that you cannot return to, or perhaps no longer exists, or even maybe never was. It can also include grief or sadness for who or what you have lost, losses which make your “home” not the same as the one you remember.”

Lastly she says, one attempt to describe hiraeth in English says that it is “a longing to be where your spirit lives.” …” a sense of dislocation from the presence of spirit…. “a longing to be where your spirit lives”.

I get the sense that this was the feeling that Henri Nouwen was experiencing when he first caught sight of a painting by the Dutch artist Rembrandt. 

Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest who had been born in the Netherlands in 1932 and ordained in Utrecht in at the age of 25 at St Catherine's Cathedral in the city of Utrecht. 

He studied not only theology but also psychology and throughout his life he sought to integrate spiritual ministry with modern psychology. For a large part of his career he worked not as a parish priest but as an academic in a number of Universities in Europe and in the United States, most notably at Yale Divinity School and also as Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School where he taught until 1985 when his academic career came to an end.  

By his late 40’s a restlessness began to grow in him. His work as a professor, a priest and a writer of spiritual books while also doing part time voluntary work a seminary in Central America kept his life going at a pace that was not really sustainable. 

And so he began to explore a new direction for his life and ministry, which led him to sit in the office of a women from the L’Arche community for the mentally handicapped in France. He was exploring with her the possibility of taking a sabbatical to live and minister for a year in one of the L’Arche communities for the mentally handicapped. 

He had just finished an exhausting 6 week lecturing tour around the United States. 

While sitting in that office talking about his plans for a sabbatical and a possible new direction for his life, Henri Nouwen became mesmerised by a poster of one of Rembrandt’s paintings that was hanging on the back of the door.  It was Rembrandt’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son, a painting that he had finished in 1669 very near the end of his own turbulent life. 

It is a beautiful and a moving painting of the prodigal son’s homecoming when he meets his father.  The prodigal son is depicted in a wretched, bedraggled and destitute state with clothes like rags hanging off his body, with only one shoe left, after having wasted his inheritance. 

The painting depicts the prodigal son kneeling before his father in repentance, seeking forgiveness, while the father, who is depicted as quite elderly and seemingly almost blind, receives him back with a tender and warm embrace; his hands placed gently and tenderly one over the prodigal’s shoulder and back as he draws his once wayward and lost son towards himself with love.  In the painting there is a warm and gentle glow of light shining on the prodigal as he buries his face into the bosom of his welcoming father. 

Standing to the right is the older brother who seems set a little higher in the painting as though on a platform. His posture is bolt upright, his hands in a crossed, closed position as he appears to look down in a mixture of judgement, disgust, pity and disapproval.

In addition to these three main characters in the painting are three others looking on from different positions in the painting each with expressions ambiguous enough to make one wonder what they are thinking of all of this. 

But for Henri Nouwen, the moment he laid eyes on the painting, it was the figure of the prodigal being received home with warmth and tenderness by the father that captivated his attention interrupting the conversation he was engaged in. 

As he looked on the painting with longing in his heart he writes of his own condition: I was dead tired, so much so that I could hardly walk. I was anxious, lonely, restless, and very needy. During the [recent 6 week trip] I had felt like a strong fighter for justice and peace, able to face the dark world without fear. But after it was all over I felt like a vulnerable little child who wanted to crawl onto its mothers lap and cry. 

It was in this condition that he found himself staring at Rembrandt’s painting of the return of the Prodigal Son.  His heart leapt as he saw it. After his long self-exposing journey, the tender embrace of father and son expressed everything he desired at that moment.  He was indeed exhausted from the long travels; He wanted to be embraced; He was looking for a home where he could feel safe. 

He writes that in that moment, “...the ‘son-come home’ was all I was, and all that I wanted to be. For so long I had been going from place to place: confronting, beseeching, admonishing and consoling. Now I desired only to rest safely in a place where I could feel a sense of belonging, a place I could feel at home.”

In John 14:23 we read these words: “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

Henri Nouwen writes that these words had always deeply impressed him with the profound insight ‘I am God’s Home’.  It is not only that God, like the father in the parable is waiting with tenderness and love to welcome us home, but paradoxically and inexplicably, is it possible that God is also like a weary wanderer who is wanting to find a home, a resting place within us?

I have quoted St Augustine before when he writes: O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you.  Is it possible that God’s heart is also restless until God finds God’s rest, or God’s home, in us.  What could it mean to come home to God? Not later we die in the sky by and by, but here and now, in this world of crisis and conflict, today? And what could it mean to make our hearts a place where God can find a home?

Over the next few weeks I would like to invite you to join me as we explore the Parable of the Prodigal Son in greater detail, and with insights from Henri Nouwen, Rembrandt and the US Presbyterian minister, Timothy Keller, to explore more deeply how this parable is inviting us to more deeply to find a home in God, and in turn to allow God more deeply to find a home in us. Amen. 

​SERMON TEXT  - Do You Love Me? Sharing Bread - John 21:1-17

Today we continue to explore another of the Easter narratives in John’s Gospel.  John 21 seems to have been added as a post-script or as an epilogue to the original conclusion of the Gospel at the end of chapter 20 which seems to quite neatly conclude the purpose of John’s Gospel.  But in the end perhaps the writer felt there was a little more that he wanted to add.  

This Easter Resurrection narrative takes place in Galilee by the Sea of Tiberias, which was also known as the Sea of Galilee.  John doesn’t give a time-frame, he simply says that this revealing of Jesus, as he terms it, took place later on.   In verse 14 the passage states that this was the third time that Jesus revealed himself to the disciples after rising from the dead. 

Again, one would have to acknowledge that John’s sequence of events doesn’t fit with Luke’s sequence of events. 

John’s sequence of events takes the disciples back to Galilee where they go back to their former trade of fishing.  But Luke’s Gospel keeps the disciples in Jerusalem right up to Pentecost after which they are so busy preaching the gospel that there is no time for them to go back to their old lives in Galilee.  In terms of factual events, either John’s Gospel is correct, or Luke’s Gospel is correct. 

But as I suggested last week, truth is greater than fact. Truth can be communicated in other ways other than in a list of facts.  And so I invite us to explore briefly the deeper truth and meaning that this narrative has for us today.  I don’t know if it happened exactly like this, but I know this story is true. What truth might it contain for us today?

Some commentators suggest that this narrative in John is in fact a symbolic narrative that has more to do with the mission of the early church than with eye-witness events. 

The image of the disciples fishing in a boat symbolically suggests that the disciples were engaging in the mission of Jesus. When they had first been called, Jesus called them away from their nets and instructed them that from now on, they would be engaged in a different kind of fishing… fishing not for literal fish, but rather, fishing for human beings. Catching human beings out of the oceans of chaos and helping to bring them ashore onto dry land. 

Is it possible that this narrative is a symbolic narrative showing the disciples trying their best to fulfil Jesus commission to them they they would now be fishers of men and women? 

But in the story, the catch only happens as the disciples listen to the voice and the instructions of the Risen Christ.  Working in their own efforts, they catch nothing. Listening to the voice and the instruction of the Risen Christ, the disciples make a large catch. 

And that brings us to the mysterious number 153.  In verse 11 we read that Simon Peter went aboard the boat to help drag the net to shore full of large fish, one hundred and fifty three of them. 

That is a very specific number.  It raises the question why the author seeks to be so particular about the number of fish that were caught? John’s Gospel often has a tendency to be quite symbolic. Is it possible that the author is wanting his readers to see this number as symbolic? Some scholars point out that in the ancient world it was understood that there were 153 different species of fish.  From this perspective, the disciples have just caught one of each species of fish in the then known world.  If the disciples new mission is to be fishers of people, is it possible that the number 153 is symbolic of the disciples mission that is now to include people of all varieties, of every known colour and every known race. 

To make the catch, the disciples have to change the way they have been fishing?  They have to consider throwing their nets in a new direction?  I wonder if there is a message in that for the church today?  Is it possible that the church as a whole, and also local churches, need to think about doing church in a different way if we are going to catch all sorts of new varieties of fish? Is it possible that business as usual, fishing off only one side of the boat is no longer going to bring in the fish.  Perhaps a new direction is necessary? 

Secondly, isn’t it significant that Jesus prepares a meal for them and after saying to them ‘Come and have breakfast’, he steps forward, takes the bread and gives it to them.

It has echoes of other moments in which Jesus shares bread with others. It reminds us how early on in Jesus ministry Jesus is criticized by other religious leaders for sharing his bread with sinners and outcasts. Then at the end of the Gospel narratives, it echoes the moment of the last supper where Jesus takes bread, breaks it and shares it with the disciples saying, this is my body. Also significant, the narrative in Luke’s Gospel when two forlorn disciples walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus after the crucifixion of Jesus. They are joined by a stranger who opens the scriptures to them. At the end of the journey when they invite him to share a meal with him, when he takes the bread and breaks it, their eyes are opened and the see it is the Risen Jesus.  What is it about the action of breaking bread and sharing it that enables us to see Jesus? Perhaps it reveals the very pattern of his life, a life of self-giving love, a life lived in open welcome and sharing towards others, where all were welcome at the table of Jesus, both saint and sinner alike. 

And that takes us to the third point for today. In this narrative Jesus shares his bread with a group of disciples who had abandoned and disowned him. When he needed them the most, they headed for the hills. And yet the Risen Jesus is still willing to share his bread with them, still willing to welcome them to his table, even before they have asked for forgiveness.  In fact the story that follows shows not the disciples seeking a healed relationship with Jesus, but rather Jesus seeking a healed relationship with the disciples. It is Jesus who comes to them and not the other way around.  And it is the character of Simon Peter who becomes the symbolic focus of this part of the narrative. 

In Verse 15 we read, that when they had eaten, Jesus drew Simon Peter aside and said to him, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these others do?’ 

Do you hear the echo of the words of Peter earlier in the narrative, before Jesus was crucified, Peter declared, "Even if all fall away, I will not." Or as the New Living Translation puts it, "Even if everyone else deserts you, I never will."

It seems that Peter had thought that he was better then everyone else. He had pretensions of having an heroic faith that would show that he was a cut above all the other disciples.  Even if all fall away, I will not. Even if everyone else deserts you, I never will. 

In John’s Gospel, Peter says to Jesus ‘I will lay down my life for you.’ To which Jesus replies ‘Lay down your life for me? In all truth I tell you, before the cock crows you will have disowned me three times. 

And now Jesus asks him, ‘Simon, son of John,’ (Jesus is no longer using his nickname of Peter. He is using the name given him by his parents). Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these others do?  It is a probing question, that is digging in to Peter’s prior sense of superiority to the other disciples. Even if everyone else deserts you, I never will.  Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these others do? 

Peter’s reply is interesting, ‘Lord, you know that I love you.’  He is no longer making superior claims of his love and loyalty to Jesus. He is no longer claiming to be better than the others. Rather than making any claims of his own, he appeals to what Jesus already knows about him, that despite his failure, despite his having deserted Jesus in such dramatic fashion, Jesus does indeed know that he loves him. 

To which Jesus replies, ‘Feed my sheep!’ 

What Jesus wants from us is not claims of heroic superiority or attempts at perfection. What Jesus asks of us is simply our love, no matter how weak or fragile or imperfect that love is. 

Simon, son of John, do you love me more than all of these?

Lord, you know that I love you. 

There is more that can be said on this beautiful passage. More to be reflected on. But perhaps this is enough for now, except for a closing comment. When we are invited to share bread at the table of Jesus, what Jesus is asking of us is not our worthiness, not that we have a heroic or perfect faith. All he asks of us is our love, no matter how weak, fragile or imperfect it may be. This is not a meal for the perfect, only for those who love Christ, even if just a little, and long to love him more. Amen.