At the beginning of May I went to do some consulting for the Museum of the Bible. They gave me a few hours off one morning and I got to go see the special temporary Tintoretto exhibit, and some of my other favorites in that gallery. Here below is a painting by a little known French artist– Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who painted a very revealing portrait in oil of the Prodigal Son in 1879. 
The artist has captured the very moment of reflection when the prodigal ‘came to his senses’ and said to himself ‘I will return to my father and say….’. There he is sitting in the pig pen, pondering how he has squandered his young life and his inheritance in ‘riotous living’ as the old KJV would say. This is one of those paintings which you can sit and look at for hours, and not exhaust its meaning and relevance. How often in life have we gotten off course, become stubborn wanting ‘what’s coming to us’ even before we should have it, and done stupid things we later came to repent of? It calls to mind Luther’s sarcastic advice— ‘oh sin in haste, repent at leisure’. It also calls to mind the universal applicability of this painting, since we’ve all been there and done that if we’ve lived long enough. It calls to mind Jesus’ reminder in John 3— if even pious old Nicodemus needs to turn and be ‘born again’ then so do we all.
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