Return of the Prodigal Son
Sister Wendy Beckett
You could take this picture anywhere in the world, to the deserts, jungles, or islands, and everybody would immediately understand it and respond.
This is a picture about parental love, and we have all either had a loving father or longed to have one. The story is the Gospel parable about the father who had two sons. The younger was unwilling to wait until his father died and asked for his inheritance in advance. The father gave it, and the son went off and wasted it. Then there was a famine, and the son found he had only fair-weather friends. He kept alive by working on a pig farm, so hungry that he envied the pigs their swill. He came to his senses, remembering how even the servants at home were well fed and housed, and he decided to go back. He composed a little speech confessing that he had been a rotten son, and asking only to be treated as a servant.
Now we come to what I think is the loveliest part of the story. We are told that when he was a long way off, his father saw him coming and ran out to meet him. It is as if the old man, knowing his son’s weakness and that he would one day return penniless, had gone out every day to watch for him. When they embraced, the son tried to stammer out his speech of repentance, but the father would not let him. He simply held him tight and rejoiced, summoning the servants to bring out the best garments and to kill the fatted calf, because the true father offers total love, always.
Rembrandt shows them lost in a silent intimacy, the son’s face half hidden, his poor, worn-out shoes falling from his calloused feet, his clothes ragged, his exhaustion palpable. The father’s cloak swells out in almost womblike protection, enclosing them in that one-to-oneness that is the essence of all relationships and cannot be judged by anyone else. The elder son looms judgmentally at the side, resentful, as stiff as his staff, a man of legal narrowness instead of love. He receives no embrace because he does not seek it, standing aloof from the family and the extended family of servants, all eyes in the background.
This parable may have had a special poignancy for Rembrandt, all of whose children died young, except for one son, Titus, and even he died before his father.
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