Edge | Vol 1

In our church we have this huge print of Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son. It sits to the left of our stage, illuminated from the bottom by a small table lamp. The lamp’s light slowly creeps up the print from the bottom, its reach failing perfectly around the head of the prodigal’s father.

Some say that Rembrandt painted the Prodigal at one of his lowest points. He had survived his wife, lost three children and been declared insolvent. Ill-advised career decisions had seen him shunned by his patrons. It wasn’t long after the death of his only surviving son that Rembrandt painted the Prodigal, and he was close to his own death when he did.

They say it was his last will and testament. His attempt at capturing his own life in the harrowing misfortunes of the son’s. In painting the hands of the father, Rembrandt had hoped to find a grace of his own, a welcoming embrace in the end of his own journey.

There was always a great depth in Rembrandt’s work. He was fascinated with the details of humanity; his play between the shadows and the light served as his take on the swings and sway of the world’s undercurrents – in the details you would find the commentaries of his own deep pains and joys.

We’ve become enamoured with this Prodigal moment. It’s become a mystery to us. Enigmatic. A depth within a depth. The funny thing is, every time you look at it, you see something different.

Take the son’s feet, for example.

The painting shows the prodigal son, penitent in the court of his father. The son has fallen to his feet, his face buried in his father’s breast. His robes are gone, leaving only dirty rags. His head shaved like that of a servant. Stripped of the tokens of his household, all but his worn scabbard. If you look at the son’s feet from the right angle, they are immediate in the foreground. Remnants of beggar’s sandals now fall from his heels. One foot is entirely naked, the other, half covered by tattered scraps of material.

The father stands above the son’s kneeling figure, his hands gently rested on the son’s sunken shoulders. If you follow the father’s eyeline, his gaze seems to bypass the son’s head. He is looking beyond, over the broken curve of the son’s back, looking to his battered feet.

And amongst the shadows, you lean further in. Closer. And you see more.

You see more in the son’s left foot. His sandal has long since fallen off. If you look closely enough, you can see the scars on the soles of his feet.

Scars from the road. Cuts from the journey. All these tiny wounds point us to all those things that lie on either side of this moment. These scars indicate the journey behind the son. They point to the journey ahead of the son.

The son walked a long way to escape this moment. He walked a long way to get back to it. But the scars tell us that his journey is not yet over. The son is forgiven, he will be re-clothed in fine array from his father’s closet. He will be washed with oil.

But these scars. Perhaps they will stay.

Because these are the scars of his pride. The mark of his impatience. The dust of the world.

Because these are the harsh cuts from the hands of whores and gamblers. Broken skin from the abuse of his temporary friends.

These wounds will heal, but his feet will always be marked from his travels.

These are the scars from his long road home. And his road does not end there.

These are scars of a broken relationship. There is a long road ahead for the son. He will have to mend the relationship he once enjoyed with his older brother. He will have to earn back the trust of his father, torn to pieces. He will have to repair the damage he caused when he dragged his father’s name through the dirt of a distant city.

Wounds will heal, but the son’s scars will be his reminders. When you look closely at the moment before in that painting, it becomes clear that this scene is just a moment in the son’s long road home.

You can see that the father knows it. His face is held in a bittersweet sway. My son is home. But he is scarred. He has been hurt by a deep hurt. Marked by a deep mark.

And there is a road ahead of the son. One that stretches out before all the wreck and dash.

The son is home. He has found forgiveness. In forgiveness he has found love. And hope.

Love, and hope. The true transforming powers. It is love that will transform the scars of the son. It is hope that will give them purpose.

The son’s scars are like the scars of Christ. In the scars of Him, we find pain, we find our own sin. We find great darkness, in those scars we are faced by the great hurt of humanity.

But it is love, and hope that made Christ’s scars something else. It is hope that made these scars beautiful. A reminder of a new road ahead, and an altar to the rescue from the old path.

Life is not pretty. It is beautiful, but beautiful is not an easy thing to describe.

Of all the lessons the prodigal son learned, his scars will deliver him the most precious – the realization that not one of us will survive this life unscathed. Not one of us will travel this road without stumbling, or tearing our feet.

But love. With love our scars are made beautiful. With hope, these cuts and bruises become a legacy, a roadmap, and inheritance of our own. With hope we look at the sons broken feet and torn robes and we see redemption born from foolishness, humility born from pride and wisdom born from naivety.

Through the story of hope, the journey of the son should never be described as a catastrophe. It was simply a detour on that long road.

And these scars, they give us hope. We may stumble, we may fall. We may make detours of our own. At times we may lose sight of the Father’s great, unfaltering love.

But we do not faint. We do not lose hope.

We’ll make it home again.

My friend has a little catchphrase he likes to use. It’s usually offered from behind the lens of his fish-eye camera. It’s his way of trying to relax you. Your lips, at least. Have you noticed that your first instinct is to purse your lips when someone whips out a Kodak? Sociologists say it’s something to do with hiding your teeth, which are the universal sign of aggression. Among monkeys anyway.

But I digress. Tell Me a Story. That’s what my friend says. He wants to get you talking. Get you relaxed.

No pressure, no posing. No pretence. When you can achieve this, you can get a great photo. Your subject won’t be sporting a perfectly-formed pout. Their elbows (Elle-bows) won’t be symmetrical in a ‘just so’ fashion. God forbid, you might catch a glimpse of those imperfect-but-beautifully crooked teeth.

But you will have captured a moment. A Story.

Here at Edge, we’ve got a good decade worth of stories. They are ours. And like every church community should, we think they make us pretty special. Beautiful even.

When we booked out the studio in Easter this year, we figured we’d reached a point where some of those stories were ready to be captured.

E.O Wilson calls these stories a Sacred Narrative. Within it is a sense of a larger purpose.

When it comes down to it, these stories are our worship. We express our sense of this larger purpose, we put them down on paper.

We sing these promises.

We remind ourselves of this hope.

We add our chapter to the Sacred Narrative.

So, in a sense, this is a worship album. But it’s also a piece of our heritage. It’s also the photo of a perfect moment. A moment where God was speaking a message to us that was great and wide and beautiful and hard and right-on-time.

But this is your story too.

And we can’t wait for you to hear it.

Some amazing things happened on that weekend.

And there are some stories that are worth telling you.

We can’t wait to share them.