Focus: Love changes God’s relationship with himself and with us.
My favorite parable is the prodigal son. You know the story well enough. A father has two sons. The younger of the two comes to him and asks for his inheritance early. He goes off and “squanders it all in dissolute living.” He realizes he’s out of money, goes back with his hat in hand, but “while he is still far off,” his father sees him, runs out, and embraces him. Before he can give his prepared apology, his father gives him a ring and throws a feast. At the end of the story, the elder son, who’s resentful and maybe rightfully(!) about his father taking his son back with all this fanfare is invited to join the feast, and the question is whether he will.
Usually the story is told that the father is God, the prodigal son is the sinner who returns, and the elder son is the good church-going folk. That’s certainly one way to tell it. But a couple years ago, I read a book that we’ve since done for our book club: Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. Nouwen was inspired by his love of this beautiful painting by Rembrandt.
Nouwen writes that the first time he saw the painting,
My eyes fell on a large poster pinned on [a] door. I saw a man in a great red cloak tenderly touching the shoulders of a disheveled boy kneeling before him. I could not take my eyes away. I felt drawn by the intimacy between the two figures, the warm red of the man’s cloak, the golden yellow of the boy’s tunic, and the mysterious light engulfing them both. But most of all, it was the hands—the old man’s hands—as they touched the boy’s shoulders that reached me in a place where I had never been before. 1
What do you see when you look at this painting? For me, I see a deep love between a father and a son, a love that somehow sends the message of calm, “everything is ok,” a message of home.
Maybe that’s why, after suggesting several different ways to look at the parable of the prodigal son, Nouwen comes to his most controversial take of all. That the father in the story is God, but the son…is Jesus. What does it mean, after-all, that “God so loved the world that he sent his only son,” other than that he left his home? Nouwen writes,
Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father’s home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son, but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God. Jesus, who told the story to those who criticized him for associating with sinners, himself lived the long and painful journey that he describes. 2
Maybe that take is unusual, controversial, or you name it, but when you look at this picture, isn’t that what it is? Today is Trinity Sunday. The Trinity is not a math problem. It is this picture. It is a Father who sends his only Son into the world for us sinners and in the resurrection and ascension welcomes him home in tenderness and joy. In this picture, we experience and realize something we lose when we just read holy scripture: that those words father and son are not just placeholders or empty titles. They say something about who God is. Anyone who has ever been a parent knows that, as a member told me at the baby shower last year, it changes your entire world. Not just what you do: diapers, cleaning up baby spit-up before the cats eat it, and so many more other joys, but who you are, what your priorities are, what your identity is, what matters to you. In this picture you see what matters to God the Father is welcoming home his beloved son.
Ah, PJ, but you said this is the Trinity. It may not be about math, but it still has to be more than 2! Where’s the Holy Spirit!? The Holy Spirit, as Jesus says, is like wind. It blows where it chooses. You hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from or where it goes. And I would add this. We can see the Spirit’s effects.
Effects like a warm embrace for two who have been separated. Effects like two age-worn hands, reaching down to rub a prematurely worn back. Effects like sighs too deep for words. Effects like forgiveness. The Holy Spirit is hiding in plain sight. The Holy Spirit is the Love between the Father and the Son.
You can tell where the Holy Spirit is by when people come together. The Holy Spirit brought together the father and the prodigal son, just as the Holy Spirit raised Jesus’s lifeless body on Easter Sunday and brought him back to the Father.
There is one more character in this story: the elder son. You can see him in this picture looking on, unsure whether to join in or not. Even in Jesus’s parable in Luke, we are never told whether he decides to join or not. But we want him to.
Because the elder son stands for all of us.
Life in this world is not always kind to prodigal sons: people who are strangers, people who mess up, people who squander their money or opportunities. I don’t know about you, but I am longing to feel like the son in this picture: loved, forgiven, at home. I am longing to feel God’s embrace, God’s welcome, God’s love.
The Good News is that this is exactly what God wants to give us. Like the elder son in the picture, we are welcome to not just look on, but join in the embrace. The choice of what happens next is ours. Through Jesus’s death on the cross all has been forgiven. Through the Holy Spirit and water, in baptism we are reborn as children of God. Children who as Paul says, cry out, “Abba!” Daddy!
The Holy Spirit is not just the love that brings the Father and the Son together, but the love that brings us together with God our Father and with Christ our brother. And with all of our brothers and sisters here in this church and in the world. The question for us on Trinity Sunday is not just who God is. But how God loves the world. And are we willing by our faith and by how we live our lives to join his embrace for the world he loves so much? Amen.
1 Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 4.
2 Ibid., 55.