The Lord’s Prayer

Rembrandt van Rijn’s etching of the return of the prodigal son alludes to a Lukan parable (Luke 15:11–32) and highlights a moment in it that resonates with the petition for forgiveness at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’. The humdrum earthiness of Rembrandt’s vignette underscores that human forgiveness is an integral part of how we receive and recognize divine mercy. By contrast with the two servants in the doorway who recoil in disgust and the third who gawps insolently from the window, the father opens himself unreservedly to the son’s embrace, bending forward, bowing down, touching him, and welcoming his touch.

There is a sharp contrast between the father and his son: he is clothed and shod, his son is half-naked and barefoot; he is coming down from a higher place, the son kneels after climbing from a lower place; he is old, his son is young; his face is clean and comely, his son’s is soiled and disfigured.

But those differences are overcome in the embrace. Their sealed lips, downturned eyes, and bowed heads communicate not only their receptivity toward each other, but also their posture of prayer in silent thanksgiving to their Heavenly Father. Here forgiveness is complete, and the deformed visage of the half-starved youth is caught up into a humanizing bond of love and mercy. He had come home because he was hungry and so ‘came to himself’ and realised that he had sinned before heaven and before his earthly father (Luke 15:17–18).

So too in the Lord’s Prayer Jesus brings people back to the proper I-Thou relationship to the Father, to relearn the humility to hallow His name and seek His will, and the self-awareness to plead for bread and for mercy. Rembrandt makes vivid the personal relationship of love and forgiveness in which this transformation is possible.

References

Durham, John I. 2004. The Biblical Rembrandt: Human Painter in a Landscape of Faith (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press)

White, Christopher. 1999. Rembrandt as an Etcher, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press)

When Gabriel came to Mary with the promise that she would conceive and bear a son who would sit on David’s throne and rule forever, Mary gave her whole self in assent: ‘Behold the servant of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy Word’ (Luke 1:38).

The bema mosaics in this Byzantine church from Norman Sicily depict the moment when the Holy Spirit entered the Virgin, sent by the hand of God from the heavenly hemisphere. The gesture of the divine hand signifies speech, as God’s Word is made flesh (John 1:14).

In this ecclesial setting, the scene is positioned over the entrance to the sanctuary, so that it frames the liturgical mystery of Transubstantiation in light of the historical mystery of the Incarnation. The motif of Mary spinning the scarlet threads of the Temple veil (Prot. Jac. 11) hints at the Passion, for at Jesus’s death the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two (Mark 15:38); it was by the veil of his flesh that he opened a ‘new and living path’ to God (Hebrews 10:20).

This scene can be contemplated as a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, since the Annunciation reflects its petitions. This is how the Son of God came into the world, that ordinary people could discover a relationship to God as ‘Our Father’. The angel’s promise of a royal Son is how God’s ‘kingdom comes’; Mary’s response echoes ‘Thy will be done’. By yielding her body for the Word to be enfleshed, she allows God’s will to be done ‘on earth as in heaven’.

The location of the scene over the sanctuary recalls that God nourishes his people with the ‘daily bread’ of the Eucharist, while the motifs that allude to the passion underscore both the personal costliness of Mary’s fiat, and the grounds for believers’ confidence that the Father through the Son could indeed ‘forgive us our trespasses’ and ‘deliver us from the Evil One’.

References

Kitzinger, Ernst. 1990. The Mosaics of St. Mary’s of the Admiral in Palermo, with a Chapter on the Architecture of the Church by Slobodan Ćurčić (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oakes)

Between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, block book Bible commentaries—printed using woodcuts—were widely distributed. Today they are known as Biblia Pauperum, although they were not typically made for the very poor and could be quite costly. They contextualize Christian tradition in relation to Old Testament narratives and prophecies.

We see a page of one here. Its Latin titulus can be translated, ‘Satan tempted Christ in order that he might overcome him’, and the central section portrays Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, where he fasted for forty days (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13; cf. Mark 1:12–13). In the background, the city and the precipitous mountain recall how Satan tempted Jesus to accept earthly dominion in return for homage, and to prove God’s merciful protection by flinging himself from a high rock.

Most prominent, however, is the encounter in the foreground where Satan tempts him to turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger. In the adjacent sections, interpreted through textual glosses above and below, Esau (at left) prioritizes a tasty meal over his father’s blessing and honour, and (at right) Satan tricks Adam and Eve to expect godlike knowledge from eating. By contrast, Jesus, at centre, lifts his hand to touch, but not to taste, the stone.

The prophets, portrayed two-by-two above and below the central scenes, hold inscribed banderoles, through which God chastises his wayward people and declares his victory over the enemy (above: Psalm 34:16; Isaiah 29:16; below: 2 Kings 7:9; Job 16:10). The composition as a whole argues that God gained victory over Satan by Christ’s obedience, thereby fulfilling what the prophets had called for but humanity had neglected from the first.

As a devotional aid to meditation on temptation, this page captures the tension between human frailty and hope in God that is expressed in the closing petition of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’. By focusing attention on how Christ defeated Satan where all humanity had failed, the Biblia Pauperum strengthens confidence in God’s sovereignty to defeat evil, including even the evil that works insidiously through carnal appetites and self-directed desires.

References

Henry, Avril. 1981. ‘The Forty-Page Blockbook “Biblia Pauperum”: Schreiber Editions I and VIII Reconsidered’, Oud Holland 95.3: 127–50

Labriola, Albert C., and John W. Smeltz (trans.). 1990. The Bible of the Poor (Biblia Pauperum): A Facsimile and Edition of the British Library Blockbook C.9 d.2 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press)

Rasmussen, Tarald. 2008. ‘Bridging the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: “Biblia Pauperum”, their genre and their hermeneutical significance’, in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation, vol. 2, ed. by Magne Saebø (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht), pp. 76–93