If you have never read any of Henri Nouwen’s work, The Return of the Prodigal Son is an excellent place to start. Nouwen’s reflections are not just on the parable Jesus told in Luke 15, but also on the famous Rembrandt painting. By tying these two elements together, Nouwen challenged me to reflect on the three main characters in the story: the younger son, the elder son, and the father.
The younger son is a character that most people identify with. What gets lost in the story, when reading it with 21st-century Western eyes, is the profoundly Eastern nature of the narrative. I had always known that, but Nouwen, through reflection on the Scripture and the painting, pointed out something unreal – the son’s request for half his inheritance was an act of wishing the father were dead.[1] This fact indicts me of my sin. When I want to do what I want to do and not what my Father wants me to do, I, in a way, wish he were dead. Sin is an action that is done as though God were irrelevant. As Nouwen states: “Leaving home is, then, much more than a historical event bound to time and place. It is a denial of the spiritual reality that I belong to God with every part of my being, 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.”[2]
The older son is the one Nouwen and I identified with most. When I approach God, do I approach him as the Pharisee in another closely linked parable in Luke 18? Do I do what God wants me to do because I fear rejection? The older brother in the painting stands (rather than kneeling in supplication to the father like the younger son) off to the far left. He is distant from the father’s love because of his jealousy and indignation. But Nouwen makes an essential point about the older son. “The joy at the dramatic return of the younger son in no way means that the elder son was less loved, less appreciated, less favored. The father does not compare the two sons. He loves them both completely and expresses that love according to their individual journeys. He knows them both intimately. He understands their highly unique gifts and shortcomings.”[3] The father was looking for the older son as much as he was looking for the younger – and I need to remember this.
The fact of the father looking for both the older and younger son brings us to the father. In the painting, Nouwen states that the Father is the center of the painting. The most light is shed upon the father, and his hands, one male and one female, embrace the younger son. What strikes me about the story and the painting is the joy the Father feels when the son returns. It reminds me of a Phil Keaggy song I heard on July 1, 1981. The song is “Rejoice,” and the chorus sings, “All the angels in Heaven above rejoice when there’s a soul saved!”[4] Whenever any son – prodigal or not – returns to the Father, there is much rejoicing. Nouwen reflects that the father “gives himself totally to the joy that his returning son brings him. I have to learn from that. I have to learn to ‘steal’ all the real joy there is to steal and lift it for others to see.”[5] What makes the Christian faith so distinctive is that God has sorrow when we leave Him and rejoices when we return. It is deeply personal. My faith has to express this joy. For others to comprehend the awesomeness of our God, they need to see the Father’s celebration in me so they will have a hunger and a thirst for that same joy.
[1] Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming (The Crown Publishing Group, 2013), 34.
[2] Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 38.
[3] Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 80.
[4] Phil Keaggy, “Rejoice,” from the album What A Day, 1974.
[5] Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 115.
