Lenten Meditation, Fourth Sunday of Lent 2025

Rembrandt (1606-1669) ¹ ,The Return of the Prodigal Son (1642) in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, North Holland, The Netherlands

Scripture ² – Luke 15: –


This parable, considered one of the great literary works of the world, is the last of a trinity of famous parables in Luke 15. ⁴

But notice how the chapter begins:
 
Curiously this chapter begins in such an unpromising way, with an ugly sound. Did you hear those sounds of men grumbling (murmuring)⁵ discontentedly, even angrily? The Latin (Vulgate) translation of grumbling is: ² Et murmurabant⁶ - and thus “to murmur.” There are two things that are helpful to notice.

First, the Latin verb is rendered in the Imperfect Tense, which describes actions that were ongoing, habitual, or incomplete in the past. This means not only that these men grumbled, but that it had become a habit with them – “they kept on / would not stop grumbling”. C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce has a passage where the traveler / narrator meets a wise man, George Macdonald (1824-1905). They observe a waspish⁷ woman who is making a noisy complaint to an Angel! Macdonald explains that if it is she who is grumbling, then there is hope, because there still exists enough of her to choose not to grumble. But if her grumbling has become a habit (i.e., it has become “second nature” – thus “waspish”), then she has ceased to be a person free enough not to grumble. She is no longer a person who grumbles but a Grumble. Macdonald continues:

 

Second, in the Old Testament, grumbling is a hateful habit of the people of God. Grumbling or murmuring against God and Moses was characteristic of them during the years that they wandered in the Wilderness. They who for generations had been enslaved in Egypt found freedom deeply unsettling and bridled at the demands it made on them. Easier to grumble than to grow up. As parents react badly to the rolling eyes of discontent in the face of teenagers, so God had a particular distaste for the incessant grumbling in the mouths of His people – God “loathed”⁸ it (Psalm 95:10).

Have you noticed how we Americans need to pay closer attention to our grumbling? Is not grumbling one of the proofs that we have indulged a lethal habit of becoming victims of our reality rather than free participants in it, who work the problem, seeking counsel from the wise, showing courage, and sustaining a highly developed capacity for adventure? When has our habit of blaming (its opposite is praising) ever served us well?

Yet, this most beautiful parable in Luke 15 not only begins with grumbling but it nearly ends with grumbling – the grumbling of the elder son.

It is striking to me that one of the greatest parables was composed in relation to one of the most ignoble, immature, and irritating habits of human beings, who believe that God owes them clarity, overlooking that what we owe God is our trust. The parable sits inside the sound of grumbling, both before it – that of the Pharisees and Scribes (v2) and after it – that of the elder son’s complaint (vv28-30). Eugene Peterson puts it: “Their grumbling triggered this story.”

For heaven’s sake, if any person in the parable had a right to grumble, to feel exasperated and dishonored, it was the father. But he does not grumble or blame. The key is for us to ask ourselves: What does he do instead?

A Poem – G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), “O God of Earth and Altar” (1905)

J.R. Watson, editor and commentator, An Annotated Anthology of Hymns (Oxford University Press, 2002) writes: “Like Henry Scott Holland, Chesterton was concerned at the state of the country [Britain] at the beginning of the last century [i.e., of the twentieth century]. His hymn used emblems of corruption to suggest the ills of society: a people who were drifting and dying spiritually; a nation consumed by greed and pride; and, in verse 3, a world in which lies were found in the press and in speeches, cruelty and terror abounded, and honor had been profaned.”



The Poem - Observations and Insights –

O God of earth and altar, / Bow down and hear our cry, / Our earthly rulers falter, / Our people drift and die; - The fact that his nation is falling apart is described by Chesterton with a poem. We notice the rhyming in the four-line stanzas of the last word in the first and third lines, and of the last word in the second and fourth lines.

This effort to rhyme words that describe disordered things is an act of beauty – the loveliness of the sound of rhymes - but also of insight. The poet relates things that would not occur to us to coordinate, which is what opens to us insight.

Consider the intriguing insight given us in the rhyme “altar” and “falter” in the first stanza, suggesting that we falter when we have lost contact with our religious practice and with a religious teaching sufficient to our depth and experience.


Consider what we learn in the rhyme “profanation” with “damnation”, where the first word means: “To treat (something sacred) with irreverence, disrespect, or contempt; to desecrate.”

Consider the insight in “divide” and “pride”, where the second word means: “A high, esp. an excessively high, opinion of one's own worth or importance which gives rise to a feeling or attitude of superiority over others; inordinate self-esteem.”

Consider the rhyme “free” and “thee” (i.e. “God”), which compels us to ask in what way is God free – like “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, or a meaning of “free” quite different from that?

Do you see how this works?

Chesterton could have grumbled better than I can and do it far more elegantly. He was a man far greater than I. But he did not grumble. (And neither, not once, did the father in the parable.) Instead, he chose an ordering literary form – a poem – to describe to God what he understood about the increasing disorder within the social order and to pray for his country.

His poem, which the churches of Britian, and with the help of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, consider a hymn,¹⁴ is itself, by its very composition as word and music and able to be sung by the whole congregation, a deed of hope, a victory of order in a disordered time, a prayer both humble and insightful sent by all of us singing it into the attentive ears of the Almighty.
 
Prayer: “O God, who through your Word reconcile the human race to Yourself in a wonderful way, grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come.”

¹ Grove Art at “Rembrandt (Harmensz.) van Rijn” by B.P.J. Broos et al. - Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher. From 1632 onwards he signed his works with only the forename Rembrandt; in documents, however, he continued to sign Rembrandt van Rijn (occasionally van Rhyn), initially with the addition of the patronymic ‘Harmensz.’. This was no doubt in imitation of the great Italians such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, on whom he modelled himself, sometimes literally. He certainly equaled them in fame, and not only in his own country. His name still symbolizes a whole period of art history rightfully known as ‘Holland’s Golden Age’.

² This is the Gospel read today on the 4th Sunday of Lent.

³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Lk 15:31–32.

⁴ I believe that it is included in the Norton Anthology of World Literature; that is, it made the cut; judged significant enough to the whole world, religious or not, to be included in the “canon” – a definitive collection of the greatest treasures of literature.

⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary at the noun “grumble” – 1. – 1623 – An act of grumbling; a murmur, of discontent or dissatisfaction; a subdued utterance of complaint. And then the verb “to grumble” – 1.a. – 1608 – Of persons and animals: To utter dull inarticulate sounds; to mutter, mumble, murmur; to growl faintly.

⁶ The Greek of this verb “to murmur” – 33.383 διαγογγύζω: to express discontent in an emphatic way—‘to complain, to grumble.’ ἰδόντες πάντες διεγόγγυζον ‘all the people who saw it started grumbling’ Lk 19:7. [Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, in Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996) 432.]

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary at “waspish” – 2.a. – 1566 – esp. Quick to resent any trifling injury or affront; irascible, petulantly spiteful.

⁸ The Oxford English Dictionary at “to loathe” – 4.a. - a1200 – To feel aversion or dislike for; to be reluctant or unwilling to (do something). Now only with stronger sense: To have an intense aversion for; to regard with utter abhorrence and disgust.

⁹ Nova Vulgata Bibliorum Sacrorum Editio, Editio Typica Altera. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1986), Ex 15:24.

¹⁰ Nova Vulgata Bibliorum Sacrorum Editio, Editio Typica Altera. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1986), Ex 16:2.

¹¹ One of the names given to REPHIDIM after the Israelites stayed there during their exodus from Egypt (Exod 17:1–7). The people complain to Moses because they find no water to drink. Moses presents their claim to God, who commands Moses to strike the rock at Horeb (an odd reference, since they have not yet arrived at Sinai). Moses does so, and the rock produces water to drink. Although the story does not present God as being angry at the people’s demand, the name of Rephidim is changed to Massah, meaning “testing,” and MERIBAH, meaning “quarreling.” Massah then becomes the paradigmatic instance of the people testing God (Deut 6:16; 9:22). [Kevin A. Wilson, “Massah,” in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006–2009) 834.]

¹² New American Bible, Revised Edition. (Washington, DC: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), Ps 95:8–10.

¹³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Lk 15:28–30.

¹⁴ “O God of Earth and Altar” – King’s Lynn in the album A Vaughan Williams Hymnal: The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge (1995).