Journey to the Passion: Resentful Hearts

Sunday, March 30, Lent 4 – Joshua 5:9-12, Psalm 32, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I stood in the library of the Lutheran Church of the Resurrection, preparing to leave for a spiritual retreat the next day at the Greenbough House of Prayer in middle Georgia. I pulled Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming off the shelf and began reading while I waited for the person I was there to see.

I was immediately gripped by the text, and over the course of the next several days, it worked its way into my heart and my soul and changed how I see the parable that we just heard. On the cover of the book is Rembrandt’s famous painting of the prodigal son’s return (pictured above).

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch-born Catholic priest, divinity school professor, and prolific writer, first glimpsed Rembrandt’s painting in the office of a friend and was immediately gripped by its beauty. “My heart leapt when I saw it,” he wrote. He had just finished a six-week lecturing trip and was exhausted. In the book, Nouwen writes,

I was dead tired, so much so that I could barely walk. I was anxious, lonely, restless, and very needy…After my long self-exposing journey, 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. The son-come-home was all I was and all that I wanted to be… I desired only to rest safely in a place where I could feel a sense of belonging, a place where I could feel at home.”

His words spoke to my deepest heart. Like him, I yearned for “a final return, an unambiguous sense of safety, a lasting home.”

At that point in my life, I had been downsized out of several jobs, and was then embarking on my path as a singer and songwriter. But I felt like I had wandered in the wilderness a long time.

As I read Nouwen’s examination of the characters in the story of the prodigal – and in Rembrandt’s painting – it was as if he knew everything about my own soul and its struggles. His use of this parable as a mirror to see inside his own depths opens it up for all of us to see ours too.

As he was writing this text, he had just left his teaching position at Harvard Divinity School and had begun working as the pastor at a community home for developmentally disabled adults. He voluntarily left the pinnacle of his academic career to live among people who would never read his books or appreciate his intellect. All they cared about was his heart.

This story is typically called “the prodigal son,” and the word “prodigal” means “extravagantly wasteful.” I’d also like to suggest that this son is resentful. He resents the constrictions that life at his home demanded of him. When we enter the story, this son treats his father as if he’s already dead by demanding his inheritance. Then he goes away and spends it all, but a famine forces him to take the lowliest of positions – that of feeding the pigs. It’s there he realizes that he would get more to eat as a slave in his father’s house.

I’ve never identified with the younger son. I was a “good girl” and basically followed the rules.

I was always home on time as a teen, I never drank or smoked, and I got good grades. But like Nouwen, if I’m honest, I’m more like the older son who resents his brother’s free-wheeling lifestyle and the greeting he gets after wasting his money. He won’t even come inside to the party when his brother returns.

As Nouwen admits,

all my life I have harbored a strange curiosity for the disobedient life that I myself didn’t dare to live, but which I saw being lived by many…Outwardly, the elder son was faultless. But when confronted by his father’s joy at the return of his younger brother, a dark power erupts in him and boils to the surface…[Nouwen verbalizes his inner complaint,] ‘I tried so hard, worked so long, did so much, and still I have not received what others get so easily. Why do people not thank me, not invite me, not play with me, not honor me, while they pay so much attention to those who take life so easily and so casually?’…Here I am faced with my own true poverty. I am totally unable to root out my resentments.”

Even today, I must admit that I’m often resentful. I still feel like I’ve jumped through a million hoops to do what God has asked of me, and yet my outer life is not the banquet I was hoping for. I don’t say this to fish for ego boosters or to attract your pity, but to lay out the truth that I often find it hard to enter God’s house of joyful celebration.

In a way, this elder son is as much in a far-off country as his brother was. And the father is eager to bring them both home. Have you realized by now that the father in this story is God? And in a sense, God is the most prodigal – the most extravagantly wasteful – of all; God is wasteful with his boundless Love. But as Nouwen writes,

The Father’s love does not force itself on the beloved. Although he wants to heal us of all our inner darkness, we are still free to make our own choice to stay in the darkness or to step into the light of God’s love…God’s boundless love is there. What is so clear is that God is always there, always ready to give and forgive, absolutely independent of our response. God’s love does not depend on our repentance or our inner or outer changes. Whether I am the younger son or the elder son. God’s only desire is to bring me home.”

How do we get home to that place of return, of welcome? Nouwen says that the key is trust. Not trust in our own power, but trust in God’s love.

He writes,

I need light, but that light has to conquer my darkness, and that I cannot bring about myself. I cannot forgive myself, I cannot make myself feel loved…I am lost. I must be found and brought home by the shepherd who goes out to me…The question is not ‘How am I to love God?’ but ‘How am I to let myself be loved by God?’…When I look through God’s eyes at my lost self and discover God’s joy at my coming home, then my life may become less anguished and more trusting.”

While Father Nouwen originally believed that low self-esteem and self-deprecation was a kind of virtue, he finally came to realize that “the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness.” Our denial of that first love sends us searching for love from limited people and in the wrong places “for what can only be found in the house of my Father.”

We might ask ourselves, “Where am I the younger son who throws away the love I’m given out of disregard for its essential value?” And “Where am I the elder son who hoards resentments that blind me to the truth about my belovedness?” Can we move from resentful hearts to trusting hearts? Can we humbly open ourselves to the love of God that Jesus revealed is there for us in every moment?

Maybe this parable holds the key.