The Return
How fear of rejection keeps us from repentance and how the love of Christ invites us into true freedom.
The 2024 movie, “The Return,” is a demythologizing interpretation of Homer’s The Odyssey, led by two iconic actors: Juliette Binoche and Ralph Phiennes, who are once again brought together (The English Patient) by Italian director Uberto Pasolini. Looking at the film from a theological perspective, I believe it captures well a lesser-discussed effect of human sin on the individual.
The movie begins with the hero(?) Odysseus washed up on the shore of his homeland, Ithaca, almost dead and unrecognizable (and not because of the touch of Athena but simply because of the dehumanizing effects of war). After being found by his loyal herdsman, Eumaeus, and being restored back to life, Odysseus moves around his country and among his people in the shadows, “disguised” as an old beggar in rags.
For the audience, we want or expect Odysseus to reveal who he is, come take his rightful place as king. Tell your wife and son, Odysseus. Let there be celebrations! Instead, he hides behind his long raggedy hair and beard, barely clothed, shrouded in weakness. Only his faithful dog Argos recognizes him—then only to die immediately after seeing his master again.
Why the anonymity, Odysseus?
We begin to receive clues to an answer through a conversation he has with his wife, Penelope, in the palace hall where the male suitors have gathered. She does not yet know his true identity. They are left alone, a huge bonfire in the center of the room with a few torches of light scattered around, casting shadows against the walls.
Penelope calls him to the light so she can see him. Instead he walks around the hall along the crevice, where light and darkness meet, his eyes diverted away from her face. She asks him if it is true he was in Troy. “You fought with my husband?” “Yes,” he sheepishly replies. “Where have you been since you left Troy?” “Travelling. Drifting.”
After pressing for more information about her husband, she says, “The man who left would have never stayed away from his son, his wife, his people.”
“Perhaps he is afraid,” Odysseus answers.
“Why should he be?”
“Perhaps he’s lost.”
“Lost? How can man find war but not find their way home?”
“For some, war becomes home.”
“Why do men go to war?” she asks. “Why do they burn other people’s houses? Why do they rape? Why do they murder women and children? Aren’t they happy with their own family?”
Then comes the dagger. “Did my husband rape? Did he murder women and children?”
With only the sounds of his heavy breathing mixed with the crackling of burning logs, he bows his head and offers no reply. We are left with no certain answer but with the implied probability. He carries with him the guilt of what he did during war in Troy. In these questions he feels seen, exposed, even as he remains unseen, unknown.
How would she respond if he answered “Yes”?
In his words, he has been afraid, lost, drifting. War may be over, but it hasn’t left him.
It’s not until the very end of the movie, in the final scenes, after his true identity has been revealed and Penelope and Odysseus are once again together alone, that we hear the truth from Odysseus’s own lips. She asks: “So many years. Why?”
Why did you stay away so long from your family and people?
He answers: “Would you still love the man I had become?”
Assuming the answer would be no, he continues: “I couldn’t return. Forgive me. Forgive me.”
If I told you I had raped and murdered and pillaged in the war, would you still love me? If you knew all that I did and who I had become, would you want me to return?
Without the assurance and certainty of forgiveness and love on the other side, the abyss is too great, the return too risky. Without forgiveness, “those things which we ought to have done but left undone and those things which we ought not to have done but did” can cause us to go into hiding, adrift at sea, living in anonymity, in shadows. So it was for Odysseus in “The Return.”
The fear of not being loved or forgiven is a very strong emotion. Sin can break trust between people and can result in a loss of love. How does one cope? Where does one go? What does one do? But wander and wonder. Drifting on the sea of what ifs and fear.
There is a chasm, at least in the mind and heart of the offender (and in Odysseus’s case, I’d imagine it’s both the things that he did and the trauma of what he experienced and was done to him—we’ve all been touched by what we have done to others and what others have done to us), between the sinner and those she or he have harmed. Think of the lost son in the parable that Jesus told in Luke’s Gospel. Even though the father longed for the return of his son, the son was afraid to return. In the end, he only returned because he felt like he had no other choice. He did not expect that he would be welcomed. He anticipated needing to beg in order to be accepted as a slave.
We should not underestimate the fear of the person who wants to be reconciled, who wants to return, who wants to be honest and repent, but shies away because he expects to be met with rejection. I have experienced this. Have you?
“There is so much I do not know,” Penelope replied to Odysseus’s answer.
“You do not want to know.” (Odysseus’s past is still too painful, even after all these years.)
“I need to understand.”
“You cannot understand. I cannot understand.” (He cannot even understand the pain of his past.)
Then she speaks as a type of Christ: “We will. Your past will be my past. And mine, yours.”
“Better to forget,” he replies.
(In other words, “The remembrance of [our manifold sins] is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.”)
But Penelope presses: “We will remember, and we will forget together. And then we’ll live. And we’ll grow old. Friends again. Together.”
This scene gestures toward the in-Christ, gospel reality for Christians. We want to forget. We don’t want to hurt others again; we don’t want ourselves to be hurt. Remembering is too painful. Therefore Satan would have us live a half-life in the shadows. But like Penelope, Christ tells us that we will remember together and then forget together. We first must remember before we can truly forget. And true forgetfulness only comes because our past becomes his past and his past becomes ours.
We often think of the great exchange between Christ and us as this one-time event on the cross where our past sins (before we were Christians) were taken upon him and we were given his righteousness. But a gospel that only speaks to our pre-conversion and not our present or future is not good news. The gospel we confess is that this exchange happens daily through faith and the power of the Spirit. And this is not only an exchange of our unrighteousness for his righteousness; rather, the exchange includes everything that comes with our sin, even our memory of it.
In Luke 22, right before his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus tells Peter to watch out. “Satan has asked to sift you like wheat.” A few verses later Jesus tells Peter concretely what this temptation will mean for him: “the rooster will not crow today until you deny three times that you know me.”
If Jesus knows that Peter will deny him (commit apostasy—a great sin in the early church that we sometimes diminish), then why would he tell Peter to watch out?
A clue to one possible answer is what Jesus says next after his warning to Simon. “But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And you, when (or after) you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”
What a kind and loving word of grace to Peter. Situated in between temptation (Satan has asked to sift you like wheat) and sin and failure (you will deny), Jesus prays that Peter’s faith will not fail and in full assurance of his prayer being answered he anticipates Peter’s return: when you have turned back, not if.
Peter’s unfailing faith in the one who loves him, prays for him, and dies for him, results in him turning back (repentance) and strengthening the brothers and sisters, presumably strengthening them in their faith, too.
After praying for Peter, warning him (watch out) and encouraging him (faith, turn back, strengthen), Jesus then goes to the cross, willingly, to lay down his life for Peter, for the other disciples, for you and me. He hangs on the hard wood and gives up his spirit. As he says to his disciples at the end of Luke when he has appeared in his glorified body: “The Messiah would suffer and rise from the dead the third day, and repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all the nation, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” You are to be living witnesses and testimonies to the forgiveness of sins.
Peter, when you have failed the test and have gone into hiding, then remember everything you have learned about me, who I am and what I have come to do. Don’t doubt that I’ve stopped loving you because you rejected me. Believe upon me. Take heart. Your sins are forgiven. Turn back and as you turn, strengthen your brothers who have gone into hiding, who too are struggling with guilt and shame for abandoning me in my greatest need. Return, and you will find grace and mercy.
Jesus prayed for Peter—for his faith, his repentance, and his ministry among the community of disciples—in the midst of his knowledge of Peter’s soon-to-be failure. What love! Likewise, Jesus prays for us (1 John 2:1-2; Hebrews 9:24). Jesus Christ, who is our life and our salvation, in whom there is complete forgiveness of sins, who doesn’t condemn us but rather has taken our condemnation, who loves us with his whole self, who calls us brother and sister, prays for us as our intercessor that our faith will not fail in the face of our failure and that we, too, will return and live a full life in the light of his countenance.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)
God commands our return (see Amos 5). He invites our return. He prays for our return. We do not need to return like Odysseus in the movie, “The Return”, in fear, in anonymity, in weakness, in disguise, in the shadows, in uncertainty of how we will be received. For Jesus stands waiting for us with open arms, such that we can see the nail scars in his hands, ready to kill the fattened calf, to put the family ring on our finger, and to clothe us with the finest robe. And he has sent his Spirit to us, pouring out his love into our hearts (Rom. 5), so that we would be able to return in certain faith and freedom and not in fear.
What would happen if we, too, stand with Jesus opening our arms to our brothers and sisters, bidding them return just as Christ bids our own in love and readiness to forgive?
The burden of our sin may be intolerable, but he takes that burden, makes it his own, and gives us instead peace and joy so that we can live as friends! Thanks be to God!