Author: Henri J. M. Nouwen
Publication details: Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1994.
Written in his more mature years, Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son is a reflection of his spiritual search for identity and belonging. He subtitles it, “A Story of Homecoming,” and so it proves to be. Nouwen first encountered Rembrandt’s painting, the Prodigal Son, when he saw a poster print reproduction hanging on a friend’s door at Trosly, France. His fascination with Rembrandt’s depiction of the Gospel parable, a painting which foregrounded the remorse of the prodigal, the compassionate love of the father, and the stern disapproval of the elder son, did not peter out over the next few years. Instead, the image of the compassionate near-blind father, in Rembrandt’s interpretation, inspired and drew Nouwen to embark on a spiritual pilgrimage of homecoming that lasted years: “… the tender embrace of father and son expressed everything I desired at that moment. I was, indeed, the son exhausted from long travels; I wanted to be embraced; I was looking for a home where I could feel safe.” When he was finally given the opportunity to actually view the painting at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, he spent extensive time meditating on the painting that had intrigued him for so long.
Nouwen’s reflections center on the different characters of Rembrandt’s painting, while paying close attention too to the biblical parable from which Rembrandt drew his inspiration. The book is divided, thematically, into three parts or movements: The Younger Son, The Elder Son, and The Father. In fact, Nouwen says that after seeing the Prodigal Son, he recognized that his spiritual journey was marked by “three phases” represented by each of the three family members. We are, as the readers, also invited to identify ourselves with each of the characters in our meditation and thoughts; we are, in turn, the prodigal son, the elder brother, and finally, the father. Inserted into the book is a postcard-sized reproduction of the painting for the reader’s use in meditation and reflection. (The original is more than life size.) It would thus be useful to start with a description of the picture, which interprets the well-known and well-loved parable of Jesus’ storytelling days.
Rembrandt chose to paint his picture by placing the family of three, father, elder son, and prodigal son in the foreground of this homecoming scene. Rembrandt departed from the way Jesus told the parable. He deliberately brought all the characters involved together in just one scene. Rembrandt held on “not to the letter, but to the spirit of the biblical text.” In his painting, the prodigal son kneels at his father’s feet; his back is turned to us, and we see only the beggarly clothes he wears, the shorn head, the repentant pose. The father is old and half-blind; his hands are held out over the lost son in an embrace of forgiveness and love. The elder brother stands a little way away to the right, dressed in the same finery and richly-colored clothes as the father, but his posture is rigid, stern and disapproving. The family is foregrounded by the artist’s use of light to throw them in sharp relief. Behind them, however, are three other characters who form not the main tableau, but the dark and shadowy background. Behind the elder son a man, looking like the family steward, sits, with one hand partly raised, as if beating his breast at the scene he views. Yet his expression is puzzling—it could be indifference. Behind him, shrouded even more by the shadows, is a female servant standing behind a pillar and looking passively on. Yet farther back, in the dark, another shadowy female figure stands, also looking. These three figures bear the same pensive, indifferent demeanor and gaze of the outsider or bystander.
The prodigal son’s departure is occasioned by, firstly, his rejection of his father’s house and ways. Nouwen’s reflection on the son’s leaving and what it meant in eastern culture strikes a deep note about God’s forgiving compassion. In effect, when the prodigal told his father to divide his goods and give him his inheritance, he was telling his father that he wished he were dead. The tragedy of our early human rebellion is nowhere as clearly played out as here in Jesus’ simple parable about an old father with two sons. Luke’s matter of fact style does not bring out the emotional import of those words, “Father, let me have the share of the estate that will come to me,” but every Asian will appreciate their damning effect. The son’s leaving was, therefore, “a much more offensive act than it seems at first reading.” Yet it is only in the safety and sanctum of “home” with his father that the prodigal will truly come to an understanding of himself. Nouwen reaches this understanding in his own journey—“[home] is the center of my being where I can hear the voice that says: ‘You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.’”
While never really leaving in the way the biblical prodigal left his father’s house, Nouwen recognizes in himself (and all of us) that impenetrable stubbornness against what we all know intuitively, that humans were made in the image of God, and to bear that image well means entering into the most basic and fundamental of all relationships with the Father as his sons. This was the first mysterious impulse that drew and inspired Nouwen in his personal longing to understand Rembrandt’s painting: “For years I had instructed students on the different aspects of the spiritual life . . . But had I, myself, really ever dared to step into the center, kneel down, and let myself be held by a forgiving God?” For Nouwen, the search for personal insight and identity which provided the strength for his long journey “home” revolves around answering this question. Looking for success and unconditional love in all the wrong places brought him to a point of emptiness and emotional bankruptcy, like the erring son. The Prodigal Son allowed him freedom and lease to consider the wonder and unchanging assurance of the Father’s unconditional love. To collapse, as the prodigal did, before his half-blind and aged father, and to admit his utter bankruptcy and uselessness, was the humbling step to restoration. Not everyone chooses to take this step; only those who know their father’s character are moved to abandon themselves to his mercy alone. In the Prodigal Son, the younger son wears bedraggled clothes, but has, significantly, kept his short dagger at his side. A sign of sonship, the dagger reminds him of his generous father in a way that nothing else did. The dagger also speaks of the inherent dignity the prodigal remembered in his relationship with his father: he was still a son.
All other relationships arise from this one fundamental one; hence, in Rembrandt’s painting, the father is central to both the prodigal and his elder brother. As the father reaches out in unconditional love and forgiveness to his prodigal, he also reaches out to the one who is not the prodigal. In his meditation, Nouwen saw himself first as the prodigal who wandered to a distant country, far from the father’s home and love. As he deliberated on his waywardness, however, he began to see how he also reflected the attitude of the elder brother, the good son who stayed home and did his father’s will. In Jesus’ story, the elder son was so angry with his father’s extravagant treatment of his useless younger brother that he refused to come into the house to join the celebration. Jesus says that the father went out and persuaded his son. The elder son needed to come home, too, and rest in his father’s forgiving embrace. In Rembrandt’s painting, the resentment of the elder son is marked on his face, stern and disapproving of the father’s excessive kindness. The parable that Jesus told and Rembrandt painted might have been better called, “The Parable of the Lost Sons,” for the elder son, in not understanding either his father’s character or his own privileged status as the obedient son, is in many ways more lost than the erring prodigal. The favour that comes to the prodigal comes as a result of his remembering what his father was like. The elder son could not see the point at all.
Nouwen reminds his readers that resentment and gratitude are mutually exclusive and “cannot coexist.” The elder son has to learn that “all of life is a pure gift,” and that truly, nothing we are given is deserved. The father’s spontaneous forgiveness tells us that; his persuading the elder brother also tells us that. In Jesus’ words, the father tells his elder son that everything he had already belonged to him: “You are with me always, and all I have is yours.” In effect, he did not even have to ask to be given a party. He could just have done it—it was his by the gift of sonship already bestowed on him. This was the major difficulty in the elder son’s resentment, and Rembrandt captures his attitude wonderfully. In the Prodigal Son, the elder brother is dressed in clothes that mirror the father’s fine clothes. In fact, they are bound by similar deep red cloaks that stand out in the foreground. The elder son and the father are one. In contrast is the misery of the returning prodigal son. But all this is lost on the elder son, who sees only his father’s extravagant gesture, and who does not yet grasp that he is the father’s son, and “all I have is yours.” Rather, Nouwen tells us, we must look to an infinitely worthier Elder Son for our example, whose relationship with his Father is unspeakably precious and cemented in an eternal give-and-take: “…Jesus is the elder Son of the Father. He is sent by the Father to reveal God’s unremitting love for all his resentful children and to offer himself as the way home. Jesus is God’s way of making the impossible possible—of allowing light to conquer darkness. Resentments and complaints … can vanish in the face of him in whom the full light of Sonship is visible.”
To remain in the positions of the returning prodigal or the elder brother is not enough in our spiritual homecoming. Basking in the Father’s forgiveness, or realizing at last our privileged status as true sons, is liberating and freeing, but only because they push us toward our ultimate end: like Jesus, our Elder Brother, we are called to be like our Father. Thus the final part of Nouwen’s meditation involves our rising to meet the demands of our true vocation—becoming the father whose inviting hands reach out to his erring children in a benevolent gesture of forgiveness and welcome. After all, “a child does not remain a child. A child becomes an adult. An adult becomes father and mother.” The maturity expected of us requires that we first understand what it means to have the Father’s blessing: “You are my Beloved; on you my favor rests.” It also requires that we transcend the ways of children, and do as the Father does: “I now see that the hands that forgive, console, heal, and offer a festive meal must become my own.”
Few people claim such a role for themselves because it is too difficult: “The pains are too obvious, the joys too hidden.” Many do not even go so far as to return to the Father, or remain with the Father. They are the ones shrouded in the shadow and darkness of Rembrandt’s background, the servants who play the role of observing bystanders. Part of the picture, they are nevertheless too hidden in the background for involvement in the touching scene before them. The degree of indifference and separation is indicated by the servants’ distance from the father and the lighted foreground. These passive onlookers are uninvolved; they are hirelings, who can afford to be indifferent bystanders. But sons cannot.
Nouwen’s meditation thus draws to a natural close with his gradual acceptance of his sonship and his maturing vocation to be the welcoming father to others in need. It is not enough to view the painting as an observer; one must also live the painting. Bearing the courage to reach out aging hands in a gesture of benediction and forgiveness means remaining open to both the repentance and rejection of wayward sons. But to not enter into that final maturity is to “shirk … responsibility as a spiritually adult person.” Claiming fatherhood is the final passage of life that he sees God calling him to enter into. As Nouwen views his advancing years, and his own aging hands, he realizes that they were given “to stretch out toward all who suffer, to rest upon the shoulders of all who come, and to offer the blessing that emerges from the immensity of God’s love.”
