The Father's Field of Vision: Re-framing the Parable of the Prodigal Son
The lectionary texts for the Fourth Sunday in Lent invite us to consider Psalm 32 alongside the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This pairing makes sense considering the ways the psalm—particularly verses 3-7—mirrors the experience of the wayward son.
The psalm neatly divides into three parts: In the first part, verses 1-2, the psalmist looks back upon the experience of having been forgiven. Next, in verses 3-7, the psalm recounts the pre-forgiveness condition, beat by beat, including the pain caused by sin. Finally, in verses 8-11, the psalm enjoins hearers to trust and rejoice in God’s forgiveness.
Verse 4 hides God in plain sight, subtly suggesting that even when sin goes unconfessed, God is nearby (“For day and night your hand was heavy upon me”). The psalmist experiences God’s hand as an unbearable weight, but God is nevertheless present.
Later, in verse 7, the psalm describes God's nearness not as cumbersome, but as a source of protection:
“You are a hiding place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.”
Taken together, these seemingly contradictory ways of addressing God (thank God for the Psalms) imply that God’s posture toward sinful humanity and forgiven humanity is the same—he is within reach. What changes is humanity's perception of God’s proximity.
Whereas the sinner harboring unconfessed sin interprets God's presence as heaviness, the forgiven sinner interprets God's presence as a hiding place.
We see this very dynamic on display the parable of the prodigal son. The paradoxical interpretations of God’s nearness in Psalm 32 mirror the prodigal son’s dual understandings of his father’s presence.
A 16th century icon of the parable from a monastery in Athos beautifully illustrates this overlap between the psalm and the parable.
On the right side of the icon, the Prodigal son is shown stooped among the pigs, depicting the events of Luke 15:14-16.
Then, on the left side of the image, which portrays Luke 15:20-24, we see the son again, this time leaning into the arms of his father, whom the icon reveals to be Jesus himself.
But the way we interpret the son’s stooping changes with Psalm 32 echoing in the background. Whereas the younger son once wanted nothing more than to get out from under his father’s roof, now he experiences his father’s presence as protective. Not for nothing, the prodigal son stoops even further in his father’s embrace than he does among the pigs.
Again, we can almost hear the words of Psalm 32 in the parched throat of the prodigal son as he collapses in his father’s arms: “You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.”
Notably, the icon doesn’t just depict one isolated scene in the parable. Instead, in showing the prodigal son twice, the icon narrates two scenes sequentially: First, the son is in the far country, a great distance from his father’s house. Later, he returns home.
Because of the constraints of the canvas, the iconographer compresses all of the action of the parable into a limited space, which creates the illusion that the son’s journey home from the far country is comically short.
In an odd way, this accident of composition becomes what is most moving about the image: the prodigal son is never as far from home as he thinks he is. At any point, he can reach out and touch his awaiting Savior. Before Jesus utters a word of the parable, the religious leaders hit the nail on the head, as it were: “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
The way the icon shrinks the distance between scenes highlights a couple of important truths we who are familiar with the parable might otherwise miss. First, God is mysteriously with us whether we’re in the household of faith or in the far country. If, at present, the best we can imagine is filling ourselves with the pods the pigs eat, it’s only because the father’s banquet lies just outside of our limited field of vision.
This is, of course, good news in more ways than we can count, and the three parables in Luke 15 are nothing if not repeated reminders to count carefully. Those who are believing for wayward loved ones, for example, might rejoice in the mystery of just how near the so-called far country is to the arms of Jesus. (For what it’s worth, neither the shepherd in the parable of the lost sheep nor the woman in the parable of the lost coin map neatly onto God, if for no other reason than God doesn’t misplace things in this way.)
The arrangement of characters in the icon is comedic, really. The prodigal son could drop dead and be at Christ’s feet. All it would take is one unruly hog to knock the walking stick out from under him. Listen closely, and you might hear the same kind of whimsy behind the words of the Prayer to the Crucified Christ. It’s not just that “everyone might come within reach of his saving embrace,” but that anyone at all might stumble into his arms. If, as Jesus says, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who slouches home in spite of himself, we who count wayward ones as family had better be ready to celebrate at a moment’s notice.
Because of what God has done in Christ, the distance between the old passing away and the new coming as close as our next breath.
Second, readers of Jesus’ parable will no doubt notice the son who is not depicted in this icon. The icon gestures toward the father’s house and the far country—the parable’s physical geography—but how does it portray the parable’s spiritual geography?
Fittingly, the older son is absent, except perhaps as the apple of his father’s eye. Like God in the garden, Jesus’ eyes in the icon are open and searching, as if to ask after the older brother, and every older brother before him, from Adam to Cain to Ishmael to Esau, “Where are you?”
The older son has been faithfully serving in his father’s house for his entire life. It’s not insignificant, then, that when the prodigal returns, Jesus includes the detail that the older son is laboring in the field. It’s at this moment that the icon, now a silent instructor in the art of seeing, invites us to lean in, asks if we’re certain of the identity of the stooping figure on the right. Exhaustion assumes many forms, after all.
The older brother’s (seeming) absence from the icon witnesses to the way in which his journey from the field to his father’s house is somehow longer and more arduous than his younger brother’s journey home from the far country. By omitting the older son who stayed in his father’s house, the icon captures this reality, even if unintentionally.
Many viewers might identify with the older son’s frustration. Even though we’re physically present and going about what we think is the father’s business, we feel a sense of spiritual estrangement that places us further from home than any far country the prodigal son might have visited. And if we can’t place ourselves in the icon, we certainly won’t feel at ease among the music and dancing to come.
Theologian Chris Green sums up this tension when he says, “It’s easier to leave home and come back again than it is to be home when you’ve never left.”
One of the most striking characteristics of Psalm 32 is its drastic changes in tone. Verses 1-2 and 8-11 almost sound as though they're being uttered by an entirely different voice.
Commenting on these abrupt shifts, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann recognizes “a temptation for the religious to [dwell on] the instruction of verses 1-2, 8-11, but to neglect the transformational act of verses 3-7, which costs. Otherwise, we might have long since done it.”
According to this framework, the psalm sounds like a conversation among a cast of characters. Imagine the Pharisees, present at the very least the audience of the parable, speaking verses 1-2. Next, imagine the older brother, dutiful and self-assured, speaking the psalm’s instructional verses (8-9), while the younger son utters the middle verses (3-7) that detail what Brueggemman identifies as the “costly transformational act.”
But what about the father’s lines? Because the father in the parable is automatically cast as Christ (again, the icon does this interpretive work for us), we might not consider the ways that we are invited to identify with him.
How might we benefit from casting ourselves in the role of the father in the parable? For starters, we are to welcome wayward ones as he does. We are to extend mercy. We are to invite those who are hungry to partake. We are to watch and wait for both sons to come home. We are to stoop with the guilt-ridden and plead with the self-righteous, and when each arrives home, we are to throw them a party, making sure to count twice to ensure both are on the guest list.
As long as we're assigning the lines of Psalm 32 to the cast of characters in the parable, we might say that the father is the one who utters verses 10-11 to his sons, each in turn. Consider verse 10:
“Many are the torments of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.”
If we hear these words in the voice of the father from the parable as spoken to the younger son, the tone of shifts significantly: “many are the torments of the wicked” sounds less like a pronouncement of judgment far removed from the actual torments the wicked endure and more like the sorrow-filled longing of a parent toward a wayward child. Son, we can hear the father say through tears, I know the pain you have endured. Rest now, my beloved.
If the father speaks the words of verse 10 to the younger brother, then perhaps verse 11 serves an invitation to the older brother, the one whose journey home from the father’s field is in some ways more difficult than the journey from the far country:
“Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.”
Don’t you see? He pleads.We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.
Seen in this way, verse 11 is a call to rejoice not only because our own sins have been forgiven (which is reason enough), but also, and perhaps more significantly, because the sins of our enemies have been forgiven.
Those of us who have been in the fields stewing over a wrong that has been done to us or to someone we love would do well to hear the words of Psalm 32:11 from the one who stands ready to forgive not only our sins, but also those who have sinned against us. He invites us to extend the same forgiveness in order that we might have our field of vision conform to his, that we might see the forgiveness of our enemies as cause for celebration.
No matter who we are in the parable, its conclusion invites all to a table of celebration where, as George Herbert must have known in writing “Love (III),” every encounter with Love surely ends:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.