The Elder Son
The Return of the Prodigal, prt. 4
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
March 6, 2011
Part 4 today in our series called The Return of the Prodigal. We have spent the last three weeks looking at the younger son. Week 1 we focused on his leaving home. In weeks 2 and 3 we looked at his return. Today we’re going to shift focus and move to the older son. I want to pick up this week with the last part of last week’s text. The younger son has just returned home and made his big speech to the Father, admitting what a worm he is and asking to be made a hired hand.
Luke 15:22-32 (NIV)
22 "But the father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.
23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate.
24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate.
25 "Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing.
26 So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on.
27 'Your brother has come,' he replied, 'and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.'
28 "The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him.
29 But he answered his father, 'Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.
30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!'
31 "'My son,' the father said, 'you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.
32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'"
We’re using Rembrandt’s painting of the return of the prodigal son to help us see as deeply as possible into the text in this series. The first thing you might notice in Rembrandt’s painting is that it shows the elder son standing there at the moment the father welcomes the son home. This is not strictly the way the story goes. In the text, by the time the elder son gets “into the picture,” the feast is already going on inside the house. But this artistic liberty is okay. Rembrandt painted one scene, not multiple scenes, so the elder son is present in this scene, and portrayed as Jesus described him. Stand-offish. He is literally looking down on both the father and the son. He is standing with his arms folded in front of him – a position of being closed off. This is in contrast to the man seated behind him, who appears to be holding himself – this tends to indicate grief or compassion. Where the father and the younger son are bathed in light, the elder son is receding into the shadows. There is some light on his face, but besides that the light on him is dim. Not as much as the characters in the background but of course they are not a focal point of the story.
Rembrandt himself had been both of those men. Early in his life he was the younger son. He partied hard. He had a lot of women. He was into hedonism. Later in life he abandoned these things, but he is known to have had a penchant for treating his loved ones with considerable cruelty. One biographer describes him as a “bitter, revengeful person who used all permissible and impermissible weapons to attack those who came in his way.”
By the time he painted The Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt had spent time as both the rebellious younger son, and the hard-hearted and bitter elder son. So there they both are. Both needing healing and forgiveness. Both needing to come home. Both needing the embrace of a loving father. But from reading the story, as well as looking at the painting, it is easy for us to understand that, in Nouwen’s words, “the hardest conversion to go through is the conversion of the one who stayed home.”
Now some people will relate better to the younger son. Some people have lived life on the edge. Some people have, at some point, gotten into drugs and alcohol and sex and partying. I know that for a fact because I have talked to you. If you are living that life, or if you are carrying shame right now because you think you’re the only one who has lived that life, trust me – you’re not alone. You are in very good company. Most people have a past, and there are burdens you carry when you have a past.
But some people don’t have a past. Some people have been dutiful all of their lives. Some of you have never colored outside the lines. Some of you have never partied, never woke up in the wrong bed, never taken drugs or drunk alcohol. Heck, some of you are so good you even got good grades in school and never served detention and never skipped class.
Now I have never been THAT good, but I can tell you that I have never partied, never smoked pot, and never gotten involved with sex the way some have. Most of my struggles have been internal – struggles with myself, even struggles against myself. Some of you relate to that. My friends, especially those of you who relate better to the younger son, I want to assure you that there are burdens you carry when you do not have a past. It is not only the ones with pockmarked histories who have struggled. After all, in Christ’s parable, who is on his knees before the father? Who is broken? Who is kneeling and receiving grace through the laying on of his father’s hands? The one with a past. The one who has done stupid things, made stupid mistakes, gone to the wrong places, drunk the wrong beverages in the wrong quantities, and woke up too often beside the wrong people. That’s who is now receiving grace. That young man is right where he needs to be. But the older son is separated from the father. And he is separated precisely because he doesn’t know that his proper place is on his knees next to his brother. Being the “good son” often creates this mindset. The attitude, “I am so good,” usually leads to the attitude, “Therefore I am more deserving of mercy, of love, and of grace than others around me.”
After all, it is not the younger son who stands in judgment. He KNOWS he’s a sinner. He KNOWS he doesn’t deserve anything. He KNOWS that he is broken. But the older son doesn’t know this. He has been so good. He has never done anything wrong. He has it all together! And where is his reward? He seems contemptuous – angry at the father because of his compassion, and angry at the younger son as well because of his stupidity and irresponsibility.
I was thinking about what three words I would use to summarize the basic attitudes of each of the three main characters. The younger son’s key phrase would be, “I just wanna...” Fill in the blank. The younger son is a slave to his desires. The father’s would be, “I love you.” He is free to love, and a slave to nothing. But the elder son’s phrase would have to be, “How could you.” He is a slave to his goodness. His spotless record has become his biggest liability. “Brother, how could you hurt dad like this? How could you come back begging to live here again? How could you expect dad to give you anything at all? How could you be willing to accept what you do not deserve?” “Father, how could you let this guy back into your house? How could you actually throw a party for him after all he has done? How could you kill the calf for him? How could you restore him to full sonship? How could you overlook my goodness and what I deserve? And how could you fail to reward me tenfold over what you have rewarded my brother – after all, I am at least ten times the son he is. Father, how could you fail to administer justice?”
But of course After all, if the father cared about giving the older son what he deserved, he’d have had to launch into a lecture about the elder son’s pompousness, about his arrogance, his presumption, his hard-hearted bitterness. The younger son doesn’t get what he deserves, and that’s a good thing. But the older son doesn’t get what he deserves either, and that too is a good thing. Instead, both get only love.
When you are demanding justice – that you be given your due, treated the way you deserve to be treated, or especially that someone else should not be getting good things, you are being the elder son. And this is a hard place to be, because the younger son’s sin is more obvious. He can clearly see what has separated him from the father. But the older son, in clinging to the father faithfully for so long, has developed a sinful sense of his own sufficiency.
Though the younger son’s homecoming is the central thrust of the story, it does not appear at the center of the painting. It is off to the left. The older son stands off to the right. The other two people in the picture are in shadows, and so there is this dark space between the older son and his father. Something needs to happen with this space. What will the older son do? Will he walk over to where his father is laying hands on his brother, and lay hands on his brother as well? Or embrace him? Or embrace the father? There’s this vacuum at the center of the painting.
Notice that Rembrandt paints the elder son very much like the father. Both are wearing lavish red cloaks. Both have beards. And both have light on their faces. This suggests that in fact the elder son and the father really do have a connection and share much in common.
But what a difference between them. The father bends over his returning son, while the elder son stands erect. The father’s cloak is wide and welcoming while the son’s hangs flat on his body. The father’s hands are spread out in a gesture of blessing over his son. The elder son’s are tightly clasped and held to his chest. The light from the father’s face seems to flow through his whole body, whereas the light pretty much stops at the neck of the elder son. The father reaches down in love. The younger son looks down in humiliation. The elder son looks down in scorn.
Nouwen rightly suggests that the story should be called the Parable of the Lost Sons. It is not just one son who got lost, but two. One through leaving, and the other precisely because he stayed.
Nouwen writes (read pg. 71, bottom two paragraphs)
Now I often use books to help me frame out the way I want to approach a series, and I normally try very hard to avoid just standing up here reading someone else’s book to you. But I want to read for you one more paragraph. It is where Nouwen characterizes how bitterness and resentment can take root in the human heart. Whether you identify with the younger son or the older, I believe we have all found ourselves trapped in this spiral of resentment from time to time. (Read Nouwen, p. 72, highlighted paragraph).
Ironically, this type of bitterness is more likely to take root in us the harder we have tried to be good, upstanding, and moral. Nouwen doesn’t deal with why this tends to happen, but I suggest that it is because without very deep inner character (which takes years of cultivation), simply being moral and following the rules actually create the conditions in which resentment and judgment grow. The more we follow the rules, the more other people look at us and say, “Wow, how do you do that?” Eventually we start to believe our own press. We start saying, “Yeah, how DO I do it? After all, I am pretty unique. Others are struggling with all these things, and I’m not really struggling at all.” And we slowly come to believe in the myth of our specialness and sanctity. And how easy it is for me to look at you and assume, “I did it – there’s no reason you can’t do it as well.” We see that all the time with people who have achieved something significant. Maybe a person struggles with weight all his life and then finally loses a hundred pounds, and then seems to instantly lose the ability to be compassionate towards others who are still struggling. “I did it – why can’t you? Suck it up.” Maybe someone finally starts to exercise, or to pray daily, or go back to school. Anything good at all that we begin to do, we can very easily end up sitting in judgment upon others who aren’t there yet. But even more subtle and vicious are the genuinely good character qualities we have that others do not yet have. One woman says of another, “She’s a slut.” Which of course really means, “Look how unslutty I am. Aren’t I just profoundly decent?” A guy at the office says, “Everything John does is all about impressing people,” which of course is just another way of saying, “Look how deep my character is. Unlike John, I do not simply live to impress other people. Now isn’t THAT impressive?” It is like the person who one day notices that his spiritual pursuits are leading to increasing humility in his heart, and then goes around bragging about it to everyone he sees.
See there are two ways of being bad. First, there’s just going out and being bad. It’s simple and easy to see. That’s what the younger son does. But the other way involves being good, and ending up with a sense of superiority over all the simply bad people because of it. This is the way of the older son. And that way of being bad is especially bad because it disguises itself as being good, and actually comes from one’s success in having achieved goodness! Nouwen writes, “Returning home from a lustful escapade seems so much easier than returning home from a cold anger that has rooted itself in the deepest corners of my being. My resentment is not something that can be easily distinguished and dealt with rationally.” The badness of being good is precisely what Jesus was talking about when he said,
Matthew 6:23 (NIV)
23 If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
In other words, we can be in no worse shape than to think that we see when we really don’t. Speaking of this, Jesus also said to the religious leaders – the elder sons – of his time:
John 9:41 (NIV)
41 Jesus said, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”
The irony of this parable is that the broken younger son at the feet of his Father has begun to see himself clearly and moved back towards the Father. He knows his need. But the elder son doesn’t know his need at all. In this situation he sees only sin in the younger son, and only foolishness in the Father. This is what always happens when we do not see clearly. Spiritual blindness does not mean we will not see evil. Spiritual blindness means we will see evil in others but not in ourselves. It is the younger son who sees himself with a measure of clarity. That is why the younger son is broken at the feet of his father, and why the older son stands there in cold judgment of both of them. Who needs healing and grace? They both do. Who knows it? Only the younger son. This is what Jesus meant when he said,
Matthew 9:12-13 (NIV)
12 ...Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick."
Who is sick? All of us – the younger sons and the older sons. But just like in the parable, some of us don’t know it. And until we know we are sick, we will not see the need for a doctor.
Of this, Nouwen writes (read p. 76, last paragraph, and close)
