Be It Unto Me According to Thy Word

I know. You did not hear those words in the Scripture reading this week. You heard the parable of the prodigal son, the one who wasted his inheritance only to come to himself in a far-off country, poor and destitute, where he “comes to himself” and returns. It is a powerful story of homecoming.

It is captured in what is probably the last painting by Rembrandt called the Return of the Prodigal Son and which hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, having been acquired almost a century later by Catherine the Great. The Return of the Prodigal Son is the title, too, of a wonderful meditation by Henri Nouwen about the painting and the parable as a story of homecoming. It is really all about the journey of our lives as embraced in God’s providential love.

You have all just returned from the March break. Some of you have, perhaps, gone to far-off places. I hope you weren’t left poor and destitute! You have now returned to the school, your alma mater or nursing mother with respect to intellectual and spiritual matters. We left just at the early beginnings of Lent and now return to find ourselves in mid-Lent in the patterns of spirituality and prayer that belong to the Christian understanding. In the Islamic world, this is the last week of Ramadan, equally a special time of prayer, fasting, reflection and responsibilities towards one’s community in the Islamic understanding. These religious themes contribute to our lives in community in our commitment to the ethical ideas of love and service.

But why this text, “be it unto me according to thy word”? Some of you will recognize that these are the words of Mary, the blessed Mother of our Lord, the theotokos or mother of God in the Christian teaching. What does it have to do with the idea of homecoming? What does homecoming mean? At the very least, it suggests a sense of purpose and connection about who we essentially are in our common humanity. But as the story of the prodigal son shows, homecoming belongs to who we are in the embrace of God’s love. The son who has rejected his father’s home and thus his father himself in going off to a distant country has forgotten who he is but “comes to himself” in a beautiful image of repentance.

Repentance is really about coming to ourselves in thinking upon what is prior to ourselves. Hence the significance of metanoia, translated as repentance but literally suggesting the idea of thinking after or upon the things of God. The prodigal son remembers the things of his home which he recognizes he has rejected. I will return, he says, and “will say unto my father, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.” He thinks of returning simply as a servant instead.

The movement of his return is occasioned by recalling his father and his home but in an incomplete fashion. Why incomplete? Because regardless of how far he has wandered, regardless of how destitute and poor he is because he has misused and wasted what his father has given him; in short, regardless of what he has done, he is still and always the father’s son. What he recalls, however incompletely, is the father’s love. It is that which moves his return. And his return is the cause of rejoicing. He who was dead to himself and to his father is alive again because of the father’s love. That love literally runs out after him to gather him home to himself in that love.

March 25 is nine months before Christmas. It marks the feast of the Annunciation which more often than not falls within Lent, sometimes even on Good Friday! It reminds us of the deep connections between the various moments in the story of Christ, that “his Christmas day and his Good Friday,” as John Donne puts it, “are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day.” Birth and death, as he puts it, “are but one continual act.” In 1608, the Annunciation and Good Friday were the same day, March 25. This prompted a wonderful poem by Donne that focuses on “th’ abridgement of Christ’s story … which makes one of the Angels’ Ave and Christ’s Consummatum est.” This insight carries over into the pattern of death and resurrection in us as shown in the parable of the prodigal son. The father runs out to gather him into his love, not as a servant but as a son. It is the occasion of rejoicing. Why? “For this my son was dead and is alive, was lost and is found.” There is the greater joy of our return, in the redemption of ourselves to the truth of ourselves in the love of God.

This, too, is captured in Chapel where every morning we are like the prodigal son in the confession of sin, coming to ourselves about our “thoughts, words and deeds” but only through the love of God which makes confession possible. It belongs to the idea of ourselves as the children of God.

The Annunciation is the moment of Christ’s conception in the womb of Mary that ultimately leads to his birth at Christmas, on the one hand, and his death at Calvary, on the other hand. Mary’s response to the angel and to God is the very definition of Faith. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” she says. Mary is the embodiment of our true humanity in her active willing of God’s will; her ‘yes’ to God shapes our prayers. “Be it unto me” … “thy will be done.”

Christ is man born of woman to redeem both sexes, as one Anglican divine puts it. Mary’s ‘yes’ to God is crucial to the idea of redemption, the idea of our return from the far-off places of self-will and self-interest, of sin and folly, to find ourselves in the embrace of the Father’s, the love which runs out after us to gather us to himself.

Rembrandt has captured this moment of the son before his father with the father’s hands embracing him, gathering him into his love. The hands of the father in the painting are most intriguing. The one is masculine in its strength and firmness, the other, the right hand, Nouwen suggests, is more feminine, gentle and caressing. It is about coming home to where and who we truly are as human beings as embraced in the love of God. “Be it unto me according to thy word.”