THE OTHER PRODIGAL John M, Buchanan
Luke 15:11-32 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
April 1, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

Most, if not all, older brothers and older sisters, feel cheated; +f not
cheated, at least smug. There is something about parenting and parents i- general
which makes the whole project more intense the first time around, The first child,
typically, is subjected to more parental attention, more rules, demands 2. hopes
than any other children who might happen along. Perhaps it is because w« are so
young at the time, but most of us were convinced that our first chiid waz the best

ever in every way, and that our solemn and grave responsibility was to m>intain that
standard thereafter, Psychologists are interested in first childreu a: the dynamic
of their special relationship with parents, Many Presidents were oid2: Lrothers, and

I am told, a majority of clergymen,

By the time the second, third and fourth child comes along parents are older
and therefore wiser, not as intense, more relaxed, and probably better parents, In-
variably the rules are loosened a bit: parents no longer believe the world will come

to an end if their children don't clean their plates, go to bed precisely at 8:00 or

practice the piano thirty minutes per day, All of which allows the oldest child to

say - "When I was that age you made me eat spinach," and although it sounds Like
social protest, it feels good, actually. I know about it, I am én ¢1is~ brother,
I have always loved that old Boystown poster: one boy carrying anotie: «ud saying,

"He ain't heavy, Father, he's my brother." I know about that: but I also know that
most of the time that isn't the way it is. Most of the time the older brother says:
"Here we go again: him riding free, and me doing the work,"

The Parable which is our text today is for older Brothers or Sisters, literal
or figurative, It is for the hard workers who never had a fling in the Far Country,
but stayed at home, loyally, gladly, to get the job done, It is one of the most
remarkable tales ever told: it has been called the perfect short story. Helmut
Thielicke introduces it by telling about his young son, seeing a full length mirror
for the first time, being fascinated with the figure in the mirror and after a perio
of time saying, "That's me in there."" Thielicke suggests, and I have experienced,
that the more you think about this deceptively simple Little story the more you will
say: "That's me in there,"

The name Prodigal Son really doesn't describe it adequately, It is about a
father with two sons, It is about his relationship with each of them, It is about
him and the dominating strength of his love, The younger son is the one for whom
the story is named traditionally, He is more dramatic and therefore more interest-
ing than his brother, His attraction and popularity is that almost everybody can
feel good in comparison with him, But if prodigality means wasteful squandering -
the real prodigal is the elder brother. He is the character Jesus intended to
dramatize, I believe, He represents unresolved tension when the story ends, There
is a real possibility of a happy ending for the younger son; but the older brother
is still outside, However, it is the father, whose strength empowers the entire
sequence, It is, finally, a story about him,

The story begins in the hearer's imagination. "A younger son" means there is
an older son, and we know who he is without meeting him, We know that in this
family there is a stable, hardworking young man who is the heir apparent, who takes
the management of the farms and herds very seriously, who is by his father's side
every day and at his board each night. We know the special love the father has for
his oldest son: his right-hand man,

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The story introduces the younger son with his request to his father for his
share of the inheritance: not a very flattering beginning, Rudyard Vipling wrote
an intriguing little poem on the story, Let him introduce the younge-: Lrother;

"My father glooms and advises me,

My brother sulks and despises me,

And mother catechizes me

Till I want to go out and swear,"
(The Prodigal Son, Rudyard Kipling's
Verse Definitive Edition, p. 580-581).

~~ He had a legal claim to one third of his father's assets, Wordlessly, wisely,
his father grants the request, But there must have been endless hours of discussing
and arguing, Thielecke imagines them in that ageless father-son debate - Son: "My
freedom means to be able to do what I want to do." Father: "And for me freedom
means that you should become what you ought to be," (The Waiting Father, p,19).

There is no resolution to that dialogue, of course, And so he goes - away -
as he must - and Kipling has him say:

"I never was very refined, you see,

(And it weighs on my brother's mind, you see)
But there's no reproach among swine, d'you see,
For being a bit of a swine,

So I'm off with wallet and staff to eat

The bread that is three parts chaff to wheat,
But glory be! - there's a laugh to it,

Which isn't the case when we dine,"

Maybe that boy had to go, Maybe there was no way for him to discover who he
was and what life is about in the long shadow of that older brother, In any event
he went, and did all the things he always wanted to do and then made an amazing
discovery. The party is over when the money is gone, Reduced to poverty and despair
the story has him working on a hog farm - for a Jew - the absolute lowest, most de-
grading work on the face of the earth, In fact, to be in daily contact with swine
was to deny race and religion and identity: it was to be permanently unclean, Hungry
too, apparently; hungry enough to contemplate the swill and decide to steal instead,

There is a school of thought that refuses to applaud the fellow for what he
does next, It probably is a mistake to attribute his decision to altruism, Very
simply, he remembers where there are three square meals a day, Now that memory
didn't just pop into his mind. In fact, it was an obsession with him, morning, noon
and night, - all that fveod in the dining room at home, The only problem is how to
go back without having the door slammed in his face, So he composes a speech, and
as he's feeding the hogs he goes over it and over it until he has it down, and then

he heads home,

His brother, meanwhile, is still working hard: all day long, only now he has
to work hard at the dinner table because his father is misty eyed more often than
not, and conversation takes a morbid turn without anyone intending it and he has te
try hard to be cheerful and optimistic and light,

~3-

Every morning the old man takes a walk before breakfast, down the road a bit,
to the point where you can see through the valley for miles, and the son knows what
he's doing, Lately, he's been taking the same walk at noon and again at dusk, He's
watching that road like a hawk,

And then one day,in the heat of the noon sun, he lets out a shout and the older
brother sees him flying down the road to meet the ragged, but unmistakable figure
coming the other way, In the near East, men of age and substance ran nowhere, even
when they were In a hurry. It was undignified: he should have waited - or walked
with ponderous dignity, But he ran and the startled, filthy hog hand started his
speech but only got a few words out because his father's arms were around him, And
unlike any father I ever heard of he doesn't say "I told you so" or "ZI hope you've
learned you lesson" or "Maybe now you'll settle dawn and be sensible". (See F, Beuchner,
Telling the Truth, p,67ff). Instead he barks out a few orders to the servants to get
a party going - "Who cares why he's back? All that matters is that he's here: we

thought he was dead and he's alive!"

Frederick Beuchner writes perceptively: "ZL think that these parables can be
read as jokes about God in the sense that what they are essentially about is the out-
landishness of God who does impossible things with impossible people,..Is it possible
that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really
hear it at all?" (Ibid, p. 66, 68).

And so the party begins, and it's just party enough that the laughter and the
music carry out across the fields to where the older brother is finishing up and he
can't believe what he's hearing. He had not run to meet his brother because he was
busy and wanted to complete whatever he was doing and, as had happened so many times
before, time had slipped away, Could it be possible that the party had begun already?
And the more he thought about it as he leaned onto his hoe che angrier he became -
and the angrier he became the more impossible it seemed that he could naturally and
gracefully join the celebration, And after a while his father came to him, knowing
as fathers and mothers always do, exactly what was wrong, and asked him to join the
party,

The older son, by this point, is in such a state that he insults the old man by
refusing to address him; Launching instead into that timeless older brother litany -
“all these years I've worked and you never had a party for me" - and then, he showed
his complete disdain by refusing even to acknowledge the family tie: "this son of
yours": not my brother but "your son", as in “your son broke a window this morning":
or "your son wet the bed last night": or "your son wants his daddy to put him in
tonight", Buechner thinks he is guilty of all the deadly sins in his tirade: "Envy
and pride and anger and covetousness: sloth and lust - as he invokes even the prosti-
tutes with whom nis brother has been living." (Ibid, p.6§8).

Kipling imagines that the yeunger son leaves home again after the banquet: free

now to leave for the right reasons -

"So back I go to my job again,

Not so easy to rob again,

Or quite so ready to sob again

On any neck that's around,

I'm leaving Pater, Good bye to you!

God bless you, Mater! f£'1l write to you <

I wouldu't be impolite to you,

But brother, you are a hound,"

—

classic tragedy - is that the older brother, for some reason, doesn't feel loved, ¥
It's very easy to be critical of him, It's easy to see that he in the original
context represents those self-righteous scribes and Pharisees who were so critical Y
of Jesus ahd His associations: those pious men who hounded Him to His death, It's
easy to be self-righteous about self-righteousness, But the father doesn't criti-
cize his eldest son either, The father loves him steadfastly and steadily - as
always - without malice or demand, But they don't embrace, as he and his younger

son had done: they can't embrace, I get the impression they gave up embracing when

he was about thirteen: that the boy pulled back, because he didn't feel loved and
began to forget how to love, and started to try to earn his father's love,,.. which
is what he had been doing all those years out in the field, I, frankly, see the
tragedy and reality of our human situation here - in the shriveled, mean and sad
heart of that pathetic son,

The tragedy of this parable - and I think it is at least fifty percent Vb 2

The most radical idea in the Bible is the idea of grace, Religion always
has a bit of trouble with it, Grace is the word theologians assign to the truth
millions upon millions of people have discovered; namely, that in Jesus Christ God
loves them: that God's love has no strings attached to it: it cannot be earned: it
cannot be shut off: it can't be escaped, God loves us as we are, in spite of what
we are, There is nothing we can do to make Him love us less, He loves us even
when we can't stand ourselves,

The idea itself offends us somewhat, We like to pull .our own weight and earn
our own way, If we are loved by God, or anyone else for that matter, we'd like to
think it's because we have made ourselves so lovable, We are offended by the
suggestion that God doesn't pay much attention to the goodness we accumulate: that
He actually does love the scoundrel as much as He loves us,

We believe that love is negotiable, How much you get depends on how much you
earn, Swiss psychiatrist and theologian Paul Tournier writes: "...from infancy on
all trauma is connected with this doubt about being loved,..,The child has the im-
pression that his parents’ love is conditional: that they will love him on the
condition that he is good," (Guilt and Grace, p.189).

Tournier teaches that the dynamic - the conditional nature of love, and our
fear that we won't get it unless we work at earning it becomes a very important
religious phenomenon, People believe that God will love them only on the condition
that they are good, and life becomes a very grim and determined effort to measure
up, to prove oneself, to earn God's Love,

That's what happened to the Elder Brother in the parable and that is what the
story intends to emphasize: grace and the common inability of most of us to cope
with it, - which means to relax and enjoy it: in theological terms to enjoy the
salvation God has given,

The story is important theology, It portrays the father's first concern as
the wholeness and unbroken unity of his family, The young son breaks it with his
sojourn in a far country, And just as it appears that the family will be whole
again his older brother breaks it, The father's love strains to heal, But his
eldest son can't respond, In fact, the older brother doesn't seem to realize it but
his relationship with his father is broken because of the disdain he feels for his
brother,

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That is an important dynamic, God wants most of all for His family to be
together, His will and purpose in history is to bring all people together in
harmony, justice and peace, If this parable is to be trusted, there is a banquet
in Heaven this week, God the Father is very pleased because two brothers - or two
sisters - Israel and Egypt - have sat dawn together and the whole family is a little
closer,

We know, I think, what it is to be separated, We may never have heen so spec-
tacularly prodigal as the young son ~ but we know, I think, what it means fo be in a
far country. We know, perhaps even better, what it means to be in the self-inflicted
exile of the older brother, the far country of feeling unloved, the Loneliness of
striving ¢o prove one's own worth, He remains outside as the stery ends, He was
invited to the banquet table, but for a variety of reasons he could not go in, Ue
know how that feels,

He was convinced that his worth as a person depended on the work he produced,
He had all the makings of a joyless workaholic, He couldn't enjoy or even feel his
father's love for him,

The Good News is that the Father does love him and will continue to Love hin,
The Good News is that God loves us: that our worth as persons is a product - not of
the work we do, the accomplishments we achieve, or the money we earn, but of our
Father's Love, The Good News is that both sons are invited and welcome at the
Father's table and that the Father will not rest until both are there.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is that the reconciliation of each of His children
is worth the life of God's Son: the Good News is that the love of God pursues His
children into whatever far country they stray, The old hymn says it best ~

"Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;

Tis grace has brought me safe this far,
And crace will lead me home,"

The elder brother, working in the field, sweating, boiling in resentment in
wounded price, and frustrated love, heard music - the music of a reunion celebration

' from his father's house, It tugged at his heart, but he would not and could not and

did not join the banquet, We don't, of course, know what that music was like, But
it could have been "Amazing Grace": for that is always the music at God's banquet,

Hear it anew today, Let it call you home, Let your father God love you, Let
His love send you to the table of humanity, part of the family again - safe, free,
Loved,
Amen.

Father, sometimes it offends our sense of fairness that You should Love all
of us, Sometimes we find it difficult to think about Your love for us, Help us
to lay aside all the devices we use to prove our worth, Open us to the miracle
of Your grace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen,