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| The Return of the Prodigal, by Rembrandt c.1667 |
I’ve
used it to accompany a display that’s all about home – the children and adults
at Messy Church this morning made some junk-model houses to accompany it - because it seems to me, that’s what the story
is about. It’s about home – leaving
home, returning home, but also about the more subtle sense in which we can feel
“at home”, or not, as the case may be.
The
younger son’s journey away from home and back is obvious. He asks for his
inheritance, which his father gives without comment or judgement, and leaves
for a distant country. When the money runs out – and so do the friends and the
fun – eventually, in desperation, he comes back, only daring to hope that his
father might take him back as a servant.
His
father has other ideas, though, and the picture captures the moment when he
embraces his son, having run to meet him. He doesn’t just take him back into the
heart of the family. He throws a lavish party to celebrate.
But
the story isn’t just about the younger son. There’s an older brother, too, who
has been dutifully, if rather resentfully, working on the family farm
throughout all this. When he hears the noise of the party, he’s furious. He’s never even been given a goat to feast
with his friends, he says to his father, never mind had a fatted calf killed
for him. But his father answers, rather bemused, “You are always with me, and all that I have is yours.” He only had to ask, and he could have had
whatever he wanted. He has been at home all the time, but somehow never seems
to have felt “at home” able to trust that his father loves him, that he can, in
the best sense, take this love for granted and relax into it. The younger son
has wasted his inheritance on “loose living” as some translations put it, but
the older son wastes it on tight living, because he never dares to call on it
at all.
But
what, you might be asking, has all this got to do with Good Friday, this day
when we remember Christ dying on the cross?
Well,
it seems to me that the death and resurrection of Christ also have profound
things to say to us about our sense of home. On the cross, Jesus comes to a place
where no one would want to find themselves. He comes to a place of suffering
and death - the killing fields of Calvary – where he is literally pinned down
by hatred. He comes to a place where people are looking for someone to scapegoat,
someone to mock and belittle. He comes into the midst of the power struggles
and political turmoil of his time and allows himself to become the whipping boy
on whom the Roman and Jewish authorities take out their jealousies and fears. He
comes into a situation where he is helpless, just as so many were in his day,
and still are in ours.
He
comes, in other words, to places where we all find ourselves at some point, and
which some have to inhabit all the time. He comes to places where we find
ourselves estranged from one another, estranged from goodness, estranged from
hope, estranged from God. We may not
know not quite know how we got into there, when we are in these places. But what
we do know, deep down, is that we are a long way from home, a long way from
where we should be, a long way from where we need to be.
“Father of all,” we pray in the Communion service, “we give you thanks and praise that when
we were still far off, you met us in your Son and brought us home.” Christ comes to these places in which no one
wants to be, and brings us home. Or
perhaps, more accurately, he comes to these places and, simply by being there, turns
them into home, transforming them – and us - with his love. “Father forgive them” he prays for the
soldiers who nail him to the cross. “Today
you will be with me in paradise,” he says to the thief who hangs beside
him, as if he’s the king of the universe, not just another crucified man – and
of course, he is right. He is the king of the universe, and the cross
becomes the gateway to his kingdom.
“Be at home in God,” says one anonymous proverb,
“and the whole world will be your home.” Or, as Jesus put it, “The Kingdom of God is among you… within you… close at hand.” If that is true at all, if the Kingdom really can
be right here and right now, it means that God isn’t just at home in the good
things of life, in the glorious sunset, or the unfolding bluebells. He’s also
at home in the squalor of a refugee camp, or the hopelessness of a prison cell,
or the agony of grief. In fact, if God can’t be in these places, can he be
anywhere at all?
For
Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus is the proof of God’s presence
in the worst of human experience, and the darkest of places, transforming them
by his presence. Where God is, there is home, a place where we are loved and
ultimately safe.
The
hymn we are going to sing later in the service reminds us powerfully of this,
and even more so when we know the rather convoluted story behind it. If you followed
our
daily reflections on hymns this Lent you may remember some
of that story. The first couple of verses were originally a Swedish poem, written
in the late 19th century, which was then translated into German and
set to what is probably a Russian tune. The German hymn was in turn translated
into Russian, and was discovered in that form in the 1930s by a British
missionary, Stuart Hine, when he was working in the Carpathian mountains, on
the border between Poland and Ukraine. He translated it into English. But that
wasn’t the end of the tale.
When
war broke out, Hine and his wife had to come home to England where during and
after the war they worked with some of the many thousands of European refugees.
The question those refugees often asked them was “will we ever go home?”
It
was this question which prompted Hine to write the fourth verse , the verse
which ends the hymn now, as a reminder to them that wherever they were, their true
home was in Christ, and nothing could keep them from it. That’s why I wanted us
to sing it today, because that’s just as true for us, not just after death or
at the end of time, but here and now, every day, as we discover God’s presence
with us.
We
might feel like the younger son in Jesus’ parable. We might be aware that we
have walked away from God, or just drifted away, till he is out of sight, off
our radar. One day we wake up and realise we are home-sick. We need to come
back. And when we do, God is right there, by our side, welcoming us back to the
home we’ve longed for.
Or
we might feel like the older son. We have doggedly, perhaps unadventurously,
stuck close to God all along, tried to do the right thing, played by the rules,
or at least our understanding of them, and insisted others do the same. But we’ve
never really felt “at home” with God as he would want us to. We’ve never really
felt sure of our place, secure in his love. And as a result our faith has
become smaller and smaller, more and more exclusive, more and more fearful and
judgemental. We need to find out what it means truly to be “at home” with God,
relaxed in his presence, knowing we are infinitely loved, just as we are, not
for what we do. And when we do, God is right there, delighted that we have
finally decided to trust him. We have come home.
Wherever
we are, in Christ, God comes to us and calls us to discover what home really
is. It’s not a beautiful building with all the latest gadgets and elegant
furniture. It’s not the advertiser’s dream of a happy family, mum and dad and
2.4 children, all smiles and sweet agreement.
It is anywhere where we are in
the presence of God, where we know we are loved and secure, precious and
treasured, noticed and valued, and anywhere that we make others feel those
things too.
Preaching
that message – that everyone can be at home with God - cost Jesus his life, but
in his death, even death itself was transformed into the home of God, not an
end, but a beginning, not a failure, but a triumph, opening the gates of glory
to let the love of God flood into the world.
Amen
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