We take as our text today the parable of the prodigal sons. As I hope you know, the story is about a father with two sons. The younger son took his share of the inheritance early and blew it on prostitutes and riotous living. When the money was gone, he returned home.
His father ran out and embraced him. The delighted father offered his boy his finest robe and threw a feast in his honor. The older son, the responsible one, was appalled. He stood outside the feast, crying in effect, “Look, All these years I’ve been working hard and obeying you faithfully, and you never gave me special treatment such as this!”
The father responded, “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” But he had to celebrate the younger one’s return. The boy was lost and now is found.
Did the father do the right thing? Is the father the right model for authority today?
The father’s critics say he was unjust. People who play by the rules should see the rewards. Those who abandon the community, live according to their own reckless desires should not get to come back and automatically reap the bounty of others’ hard work. If you reward the younger brother, you signal that self-indulgence pays, while hard work gets slighted.
The father’s example is especially pernicious now, the critics continue. Jesus preached it at the time of the Pharisees, in an overly rigid and rule-bound society. In those circumstances, a story of radical forgiveness was a useful antidote to the prevailing legalism.
But we don’t live in that kind of society. We live in a society in which moral standards are already fuzzy, in which people are already encouraged to do their own thing. We live in a society what advanced social decay – with teens dropping out of high school, financiers plundering companies and kids being raised without fathers. The father’s example in the parable reinforces loose self-indulgence at a time when we need more rule-following, more social discipline and more accountability, not less.
It’s a valid critique, but I’d defend the father’s example, and, informed by a reading of Timothy Keller’s The Prodigal God, I’d even apply the father’s wisdom to social policy-making today.
We live in a divided society in which many of us in the middle- and upper-middle classes are like the older brother and many of the people who drop out of school, commit crimes, and abandon their children are like the younger brother. In many cases, we have a governing class of elder brothers legislating programs on behalf of the younger brothers. The great danger in this situation is that we in the elder brother class will end up self-righteously lecturing the poor: “You need to be more like us: graduate from school, practice a little sexual discipline, work harder.”
But the father in this parable exposes the truth that people in the elder brother class are stained, too. The elder brother is self-righteous, smug, cold, and shrewd. The elder brother wasn’t really working to honor his father; he was working for material reward and out of a fear-based moralism. The father reminds us of the old truth that the line between good and evil doesn’t run between people or classes; it runs straight through every human heart.
The father also understands that the younger brothers of the world will not be reformed and re-bound if they feel they are being lectured to by unpleasant people who consider themselves models of rectitude. Imagine if the older brother had gone out to greet the prodigal son instead of the father, giving him some patronizing lecture. Do we think the younger son would have reformed his life to become a productive member of the community? No. He would have gotten back up and found some bad-boy counterculture he could join to reassert his dignity.
The father teaches that rebinding and reordering society requires an aggressive assertion: You are accepted; you are accepted. It requires mutual confession and then a mutual turning toward some common project. Why does the father organize a feast? Because a feast is nominally about food, but, in Jewish life, it is really about membership. It re-asserts your embedded role in the community project.
The father’s lesson for us is that if you live in a society that is coming apart on class lines, the best remedies are oblique. They are projects that bring the elder and younger brothers together for some third goal: national service projects, infrastructure-building, strengthening a company or a congregation.
The father offers each boy a precious gift. The younger son gets to dedicate himself to work and self-discipline. The older son gets to surpass the cold calculation of utility and ambition, and experience the warming embrace of solidarity and companionship.
Source: The New York Times, February 18, 2014; page A19.
Excellent!!! Thank you for sharing this thought-provoking reflection.
ReplyDeleteBrooks did a nice job.
DeleteAll that you say is true, and I can see validity in arguments on both sides. God avert that I should argue for a narrow legalism and strict justice, since I definitely need God's mercy and forgiveness myself! But I do wonder very much what "the rest of the story" is. Was the older brother's half of the inheritance subdivided to give half to the returned prodigal? In the world, inheritances are pretty much a zero-sum game, and if one heir gets X amount, the other gets the total-minus-X, and so on. Presumably this is where the analogy breaks down since God's bounty and mercy are infinite and if He is merciful to person A, it doesn't mean there is less mercy left over for person B. But in practical terms for our own lives, when we forgive people and take them back, is it really entirely fair to follow this paradigm? It actually happened to a friend whose brother demanded his share of the inheritance and mis-spent it. Then he returned and the parents promptly disinherited the daughter (who had stayed faithful to them and cared for the father during his heart attack and even suffered a miscarriage possibly brought on by her exertions on their behalf when they expected her to cater an entire wedding of 200 people) and gave her share to the errant son because they said she didn't need anything from them, having earned a Ph.D. and married well, while the son had not even finished college and had seduced a young woman whom he was forced to marry. This did not seem right. I can see forgiving a repentant child and maybe trying to work out something about providing for him or her, but not basically punishing the child who has done everything humbly and obediently. Why did the father in the parable never even given the good son one goat to have a party with his friends? Presumably he had plenty, since there was at least one fatted calf waiting for slaughter when the prodigal returned? Being merciful to the repentant is good, but does it mean neglecting the "99 just who have no need of repentance" and maybe diminishing their inheritance (admittedly they are not "entitled" to anything--it is all free gift) to be sure the repentant one isn't left with nothing? Or perhaps even though the prodigal was taken back into the family and everyone celebrated his return, it didn't mean that the father basically pushed Reset and now planned on giving him half of whatever was left of the estate. He was still going to have to work harder for a living and a future. So often I am left wondering how things turned out in the end, or wishing there had been more to the parable, like wondering in the Parable of the Talents what would have happened to someone who invested his talent in something that didn't work out and ended up losing it altogether. Would he have gotten less blame than the one who didn't dare invest it at all? Or would it have been OK that at least he tried his best? And even if he wasn't scolded, would he have been given another talent "for trying" like the kids in the soccer games on the losing team who get trophies anyway for "good sportsmanship" or whatever excuse the Self-Esteem Police thing up. In other words, are there consequences for our choices even though we are forgiven and redeemed if we repent of the bad ones? And if not, does it even matter what we do since it will all end up the same anyway?
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff, as always. In many ways, I think we just have to try to be morally good and leave everything else up to God. These parables are always challenging and the more we pray with them, the more difficult they prove to be. As Richard Rohr states, "we have to do our second half of life work" when the questions become quite different. I wish I had answers for your theological and philosophical questions, but I just trust God will sort it all out and will cause us all to want to always choose the good for ourselves and others.
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