The Presbyterian Brother
This story from the gospel of Luke is one of the best
known of Jesus’ parables. We call it the
parable of the prodigal son. The younger
brother demands his inheritance, leaves home, wastes everything, falls on
unbelievably hard times, and then returns, hoping to beg his father for a
position as a servant. The father is so
glad to see him that he brings out the best clothes for him to put on, which he
will need because the father is throwing a great party to celebrate. The lost is found, the son is back home, and
all’s well that ends well, right? Not
exactly.
We kind of forget the second half of the parable, which
isn’t about the prodigal son at all. Remember
that the story begins like this: “There
was a man who had two sons.” The
story is as much as about the elder son as the younger one – the elder son, presbuteros in Greek, the same word that
gives us Presbyterian.
The Presbyterian brother, like any good first-born, has
a deep sense of duty and responsibility.
He follows the rules, and he works hard.
And what happens? That
ne’er-do-well kid brother of his, that son of his father, gets the big party, the
gourmet meal, with the live band and the open bar. And the elder brother doesn’t even get so
much as take-out burgers to eat with his buddies. Where is the justice in all this?
Let’s look more closely at the story to see what it
tells us about this first-born son. Right
at the beginning (verse 12), the younger son demands his inheritance from his
father. In the culture of this time and place, it was an unthinkable request, a
deep insult, a violation of all the rules of family and faith. After all, you don’t inherit the family
business while your father is still running it. In effect, he is asking his
father to drop dead, at least from the perspective of the law. The boy demands his share and, amazingly, the
father complies.
But it isn’t just the younger brother who gets his
inheritance. The father divides up the
whole estate. The older son gets his portion, too. The father gives it all away. Everything he has is given to these two boys
to do with as they will. The one throws
it away. And the other clutches it so
tightly that he cannot see the value of what he has. Reading between the lines, he is obsessed
with getting and having. He leads a
joy-less life.
And the sound of the party going on, as he is
dragging himself in from the fields, is just more than he can stand, especially
when he finds out that it is a celebration of his brother’s homecoming. The nerve of the old man, doing something
like this!
One writer, Robert Farrar Capon, describes the scene
for us (The Parables of Grace, p 142; NRSV substituted for KJV in original):
The
Elder Brother. Mr. Respectability… The man with volumes and volumes of the
records he has kept on himself and everyone else. And as he comes near the house, he hears
music and dancing. …. He gasps:
Music! Dancing! Levity! Expense! And on a working day, yet!
He calls
one of the slaves to ask what is going on. He is not happy: Why this frivolity? What about the shipments that our customers
wanted yesterday? Who’s minding the
store?
And the
slave tells him, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted
calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.”
He
rants: The fatted calf! Doesn’t that old fool know I’ve been saving
that for next week’s sales promotion when we show our new line of turnips? How am I supposed to run a business when he
blows the entertainment budget on that loser of a son?
And he
is so angry that he refuses to go in. Finally,
therefore, he makes a proclamation: I
will not dignify this waste with my presence.
Someone has to exercise a little responsibility around here!
And then, for this ungrateful, jealous, bitter boy, the
father leaves his guests and goes out to him and pleads with him to come to the
celebration. But he won’t. “Listen!” he
says – and you can hear the hostility and disrespect in his tone – “Listen! For all these years I have been working like
a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you
have never even given me a young goat so I might celebrate with my
friends.”
And do you hear how he misses the whole point. He isn’t working for his father at all. The whole estate that is left belongs to
him! He is not a slave to his father; he
is a slave to himself.
He has cut himself off from his family. He refuses to claim kinship with his brother,
referring to him as that “son of yours.”
But his father won’t let him get away with any of this. He says to him: “Child, you are always with me, and all that
is mine is yours. But we had to
celebrate because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was
lost and has been found.”
And there the parable ends, without a real
ending. It just stops, leaving us
standing in the yard with the father and the elder son, not knowing what will
happen next. Will the elder son do as the younger one did, and return to his
father’s embrace? Will he acknowledge
that nothing he can do will make him worthy of the father’s love? Will he celebrate with all the other unworthy
guests? Will he be willing to eat with
the sinners? Will he put on his party
clothes and go in, or will he stand in the yard by himself, clutching the rags
of his respectability and trying to warm his own cold heart?
I think we can guess how Jesus wanted the story to
end. The clue is in the first and second
verses of chapter 15: “Now all the tax collectors
and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were
grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”
This fellow, this Jesus, welcomes sinners. And as one scholar notes, in this parable there
are two kinds of sinners, two kinds of sin (Kenneth E. Bailey. Finding the Lost:
Cultural Keys to Luke 15, pp 190-91):
“One is the sin of the law-breaker – the prodigal – and
the other is the sin of the law-keeper – the elder brother. Each sin centers on a broken
relationship. One breaks that
relationship while failing to fulfill the expectations of the family and
society. The second breaks his relationship
while fulfilling those same expectations.”
And where are we in this story, my Presbyterian
brothers and sisters? Where are we? We are the ones who try so hard to do things
right, to follow the rules, to be good. And
there is nothing wrong with that. But it
will not earn us God’s love. There is nothing we can do to make God love us or
to make God stop loving us. That is the
scandal of grace.
As Frederick Buechner defines it (Wishful Thinking, p 38):
Grace is
something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring
it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or
earn good looks or bring about your own birth. …
A
crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are
saved by grace. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s
nothing you have to do.
In her poem The
Wild Geese, Mary Oliver writes this:
You do
not have to be good.
You do
not have to walk on your knees
for a
hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only
have to let the soft animal of your body
love
what it loves.
We were created in love; we were created for
love. And the wide expanse of God’s love
in Christ is big enough to take in the whole world – saints and sinners,
wastrels and misers, prodigals and Presbyterians.
We don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to be good. We only have to love as we were made to
love. And that means loving God with
heart, mind, soul and body, and loving our neighbors, our brothers, our
sisters, as we love ourselves. And when
we love that way, we are where we belong, next to God’s heart, and there is
cause for celebration.
So listen for the sound of music and dancing. God is throwing a party, and we are all
invited, we are all welcomed, every single one of us. God wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thanks be to God!
Sermon preached for
First Presbyterian Church
Hartford, CT
March 10, 2013
by Martha C. Highsmith
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