Imago Dei Community Sermons

Rembrandt depicted the story of the prodigal son as a picture of an embrace (see below). This image does not capture the action of the story, but rather the stillness of the Father’s embrace. For Rembrandt, coming home to the Father equates to an embrace. Is this how we read this story? Culturally (contextually), when this son leaves home with his inheritance he is telling everyone “I wish my Father was dead!” What kind of son would do this? A son who is trying to rid himself of the identity of being a son. A son who desires autonomy. We are all that son. For those who have read, and even studied, this passage before it is likely that we have viewed “prodigals” (even ourselves) as those who do very bad things. This foreign country that the prodigal travels to is a country defined by bad morality, isn’t it? This is viewing the story through a moral matrix. Understood at a much more significant level the distant country is actually a country marked by loss of relationship—a relational matrix. This i