The Father Welcomes Home
The Return of the Prodigal, prt. 6
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
March 20, 2011
There are two brief texts I want to use to start our focus on the Father in Christ’s parable of the return of the prodigal son. First obviously is the text we’ll be looking at in Christ’s parable:
Luke 15:20 (NIV)
20 So he got up and went to his father. "But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
Luke 15:28 (NIV)
28 "The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him.
The other text I want us to look at this morning is this one:
Luke 13:34 (NIV)
34 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!
Both of these texts taken together show us another side of God. You might call it the feminine side. I’m not trying to be provocative or make anyone uncomfortable, but you all realize God’s not a man, right? God isn’t male or female. In fact, we can easily conclude that God is both male AND female. After all, both men and women are made in the image of God. This is not just a philosophical observation – it’s essential to how we think about God.
So let’s start with the basic stuff first. Yes, God is referred to as Father in the Old Testament and New Testament scriptures. This, of course, is because this was a patriarchal culture. Women didn’t get respect. It’s one thing that the Messiah came as a poor carpenter. Had he come as a woman, he could barely have gotten the time of day, much less attracted the attention of the multitudes.
Yes, Jesus addressed God as Father. Jesus was a good Jew. Besides, the tradition is that Mary was the mother of Jesus, and God was the Father. This is appropriate, for obviously there is nothing WRONG with the imagery of God as a male. It’s not in the least bit wrong, it’s just incomplete. Men and women, being both created in God’s image, share equally in God’s character. Scripture bears this out, for just as we see traditionally masculine characteristics ascribed to God, such as God providing for his people, and God’s strength, and God’s leadership, we also see traditionally feminine characteristics ascribed to God, such as God nurturing his people, and serving them, and weeping for them.
Does it sound too liberal to talk about the feminine side of God? I hope not, because it’s a totally Biblical idea. In the final analysis, God is above and beyond WHATEVER we describe him or her to be and so it shouldn’t be difficult or offensive in any way to speak of God as she or her. In fact when we do this, it may be easier to think of God’s feminine qualities.
And it is both the masculine and feminine sides of God that I want us to look carefully at today, but perhaps we’ll give a bit more attention to the feminine side.
Look closely at Rembrant’s painting of The Prodigal Son.
Look at the hands. They are different from each other, and considerably so. We must not assume this is an accident for a painter of Rembrandt’s skill. He’s portraying something here. The Father’s left hand is on the son’s shoulder and is very masculine. The fingers are far apart. The bones or veins in the hand are prominent. There almost appears to be a little bit of pressure, which you might particularly notice in the Father’s thumb. With his left hand the Father appears to be not only touching, but maybe actually holding a little bit.
The right hand, on the other hand (!), is refined, soft, and tender. The fingers are close together and have an elegant quality. It lies gently upon the son’s shoulder. Henri Nouwen says it wants to “caress, to stroke, and to offer consolation and comfort. It is a mother’s hand.” Let’s refer back to the text I read earlier.
Luke 13:34 (NIV)
34 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!
Jesus himself makes the comparison of God to a hen gathering, nurturing, and protecting the chicks under her wings.
The Father is not simply a great patriarch, but is mother as well as father. He holds,
and she caresses. He confirms, and she consoles. Indeed the red cloak of the father might remind you of that passage where the hen gathers the chicks under her wings. This is all God. Nouwen writes.
This is great imagery for me. As a man I am a little uncomfortable thinking of a man being this nurturing and tender. I mean, I am that way with my girls, but most men are not quite that tender with their sons – at least not their adult sons. But when I see it as the feminine that is in God, it connects.
And women, this is certainly something most of you can relate to as well, for your children began in your womb, as part of your body, got their oxygen through the cord attached to your body. In the same way, you and I began in the bosom of God, and drew our life from God. God has given us birth and we proceed out from God, just as women give birth to their children, and children proceed out from them. In our desire to think of God always in the masculine, it would be so easy to overlook these critical understandings about her. (If you read The Shack, perhaps that helped you a little bit with this line of thinking, as the writer portrays God as an aging black woman.)
And so, if we see God in this way, we see that God, the Mother, is gathering her young son into her arms and cloaking him with her cloak, while the elder son stands outside of that warmth and protection. My friends this is where we really get to the depth of the love of God. This is what I struggle to understand and accept and embrace. At most I tend to think of God perhaps as shaking my hand and saying, “Hey – it’s cool.” I struggle to think of God in an affectionate way, but that’s exactly how God is portrayed here – with a depth of affection I either must attribute to femininity or I cannot really think of it at all. Look, it doesn’t matter how you think of it. Think of it however it helps you to think of it. What matters is that somehow you are able to begin to see your way through to this kind of depth in the way God loves you and longs for you and desires to care for you.
Guys, I suggest this might be especially difficult for you UNLESS you can somehow switch to the feminine imagery of God. Men, most of us are simply not going to be comfortable with this image of God’s deep care for us man to man. So thinking of God as mother rather than father, when we’re trying to understand God’s love, might be very helpful for you. Women have always had this idea of a male God, a male Christ. Nuns think of Christ as their spiritual husband, and this is fine. But where do we go, men, for a metaphor that can help us grasp the love of God? I suggest the metaphor of God the nurturing Mother. And if that really doesn’t work for you, don’t worry about it. God as mother is as much a metaphor as God as father. God is neither one. More accurately, God is both!
The next thing we need to do to get our arms around the love of God, and this is not just for men, but for everybody, is to stop thinking of God as hiding out and making it hard for us to find him. I think the reality is that it is we who are doing the hiding. I have mentioned before that in my work with couples, it is usually the case that each partner is demanding that the other partner love them in a certain way, while at the same time acting in ways that make it nearly impossible for the other partner to do that. That’s our struggle. I demand, “Love me, love me, love me” and then you try to love me and I don’t notice, or I don’t like the way you did it, or that doesn’t seem like love to me, or it’s not as good as the way somebody else has loved me before, or it’s not the way I learned to accept love from my parents, or my ex, or my friends, or else I see you trying to love me and, though I have demanded your love, I now see you as pathetic for placing yourself below me and serving me in love, and I now look upon you with contempt. There are ten thousand ways we demand to be loved and then do not see it, do not accept it, do not want it, and do not appreciate it, when someone tries to love us. In the course of regular human relationships, we do this constantly. My wife makes me a sandwich, thinking thoughts of love and appreciation for me all the while. She brings it to me and I am so caught up in my TV show I barely acknowledge her, let alone thank her, let alone realize that sitting on that plate is a gesture of her love. Ten minutes later I try to talk to her as she is engaged in the TV show and if she doesn’t hear me right away, if she does not immediately stop what she is doing, if she does not attend to me in just the way I envision that she should, I feel snubbed, or unappreciated by her, when just ten minutes earlier I have neglected to see that she has in fact loved me – only when she loved me, I was not present to it. You, and I, are fully present to the ten thousand ways we are unloved and unappreciated every day, and just barely present to the ten million ways in which we are loved.
This is the cycle we are caught in and around and around we go. Is there any reason to suspect that this sick game we play with one another we do not also play with God? Only with God, of course, only one of us is playing. Yet do we not imagine that God is loving us the same way others do? Imperfectly, intermittently, impatiently, begrudgingly, insufficiently, and partially? We should not be surprised at the suggestion, in fact, we should assume that it is the reality. We have good scriptural support for the idea that the way we love others IS the way we love God.
Matthew 25:37-40 (NKJV)
37 Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink?
38 When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You?
39 Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?'
40 And the King will answer and say to them, 'Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.'
1 John 4:20 (NIV)
20 If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.
This is deeper and truer than most people understand. Feeling unloved and unappreciated by God? Learn to see the people around you loving and appreciating you and you will come to feel loved and appreciated by God. Feeling condemned by God? Learn to accept words of grace and compassion and forgiveness from people around you and you will learn to feel forgiven by God. Feeling abandoned by God? Learn to see the efforts people around you are making to be available to you, and you will see that God, also, is available. Feeling alienated from God? Learn to connect with the people around you and you will learn to connect with God – not because learning one of them helps you to do the other, but because they are the same thing. “As you did unto others, you did unto me.” Of course the main pathway for doing this is the marriage pathway. Look at the way you love your spouse and that is the way you love God. Look at the way you receive love from your spouse, and that is the way you receive love from God. And you will have the same difficulties in loving and being loved by God as you have in loving and being loved by your spouse. It is not God who is hiding, it is US!
There stands the elder son, feeling no love at all from his father, unable to accept the gracious compassion the Father wants to freely give and in fact is freely giving to the younger son. Many of us are like that – we believe deeply in the love of God, only not for ourselves. We stand there feeling unloved while we watch God pour out his love on others, and we feel hurt, or even resentment, that God loves others but does not love us. But is it true? Of course not. Just like in our parable and our painting, this does not reflect a deficit in God, but a deficit in ourselves. This is one of the symptoms of our fallenness: the inability to know that we are loved and chosen by the father, and the need to rebel, either by running away like the younger son and doing our own thing, or by doing everything right like the older son, and developing a bitter, resentful spirit that feels unappreciated and taken advantage of and is unable to respond to the love the father offers.
How are you learning to live in this immense love, which YOU are invited into?
