Given at Christ Church, Worton
Luke 15. 11-32
The Prodigal Son Receives His Portion by Murillo (1660s), hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.
Last year, I had occasion to be in Dublin, and ended up having most of a Bank Holiday Monday free just to wander around. I was spending time there for the first time in many years, having at one time visited the city several times a month. I found myself wandering into the National Gallery, which has a pair of paintings of scenes from the life of the Prodigal Son by the 17th Century Spanish painter Murillo.
In the first, the son’s eyes are so firmly fixed on the bag of money he has just been handed that he doesn’t even notice his father’s eyes, full of pain, riveted on him. Behind his father stands his brother, shooting him a look of withering contempt. In the other painting, the son, dressed in rags and surrounded by swine, is gazing into the sky with eyes imploring God’s mercy.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of those bible stories that speaks profoundly into our own time and place. Just as the Father in the parable gives the son free will to squander his inheritance, so our heavenly Father gives us the freedom to take the gifts He has given us and either use them for His greater glory, or to squander them, as we choose.
In the case of this country and most of this continent, one of the gifts we were given was a culture that had been formed upon the loomof Christianity for fifty generations. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but perfection doesn’t exist. But the irony was that just as we reached a moment in our history with balance of freedom, order, and prosperity, rarely seen anywhere in history, we threw it all away for a few decades of good living.
We thought we could build a better society based on abstract logic and cold reason, rather than faith and the wisdom gained by the experience of generations. And some of what we did as a result of that was indeed good. But nothing has replaced Christianity as the undergirding story that held society together, and nothing has replaced the social capital and organisation the churches always provided. As we look at a society that has become much more individualistic, with all sorts of societies and organisations much weaker than they used to be, with trust in our institutions falling, and all that even before we talk about a ravaged environment—well, we must wonder if we aren’t going to end up in the pigsty.
The three figures in the Parable are all important, and of course the Father’s boundless generosity and welcome to the returning son, despite everything he has wasted – God’s absolute commitment to a new beginning whenever we commit ourselves to one — lies at the heart of Christ’s message.
But if it turns out that the signs we’ve heard in the last few years are indeed true that young men in particular may be starting to return to the Christian Faith, what does the parable say to us? For surely, we would then be the brother who remained faithful.
If people do return to the Faith, that process will undoubtedly look very different to how we might have imagined something like that would or should. People may be return for reasons that surprise us, perhaps reasons we may not appreciate. Newcomers may challenge us, perhaps even disturb us.
Their heavenly Father will welcome them with open arms, just as they are. Will we?
Top image: Rembrandt, Return of the Prodigal Son (1668), hangs in the Hermitage, St Petersburg.
