THE GOOD BROTHER
Luke’s gospel is full of humanity in all of its humanness,
Full of good-cum-bad people involved in self-rescue operations,
Full of pariahs whom others despise but Jesus welcomes.
The so-called, and, I might add, misnamed parable of the Prodigal Son, which is found only in Luke, is perhaps the most famous of all the parables in the gospels.
This in spite of the fact that as a story it is not even complete.
Luke never tells us whether the older son ever comes in to enjoy the feast, never tells us whether the younger son sticks around to do his share or scarpers off at the first opportunity.
Indeed, there are a lot of problems presented by this parable. I’ve heard people say, ”I suppose I get the point, but secretly I think the elder son got a bum deal.
The impulsive younger son, impatient with the routine and perhaps dull chores at home, takes his inheritance early, skips out on his responsibility, lives a wasteful and unproductive life, and slinks home when the going gets tough.
The elder son, who stays home and does his duty by his father, this son whose life is a continuous round of dull monotony, never once feels the sense of love and acceptance that he sees being given to the wastrel brother.
It just isn’t fair.
The late Henri Nouwen wrote a wonderful short book meditating on this parable, aptly called The Return of the Prodigal Son, and in this book he suggests that this parable could easily be called the Parable of the Lost Sons. We know about the younger son's travels to a distant country looking for happiness, but the bitter elder son, the one who stayed home, has become a lost man as well.
The elder son, the good son, does his duty.
He works hard every day and fulfills his obligation, but interiorly, he has wandered away from his father, becoming increasing bitter and unfree. It seemed to me that there might be some envy of his brother's freedom that figures in the mix. Nouwen says that the brother's complaint to his father reveals that "obedience and duty have become a burden, and service has become slavery" And it is this lostness, characterized by judgment and condemnation, anger and resentment, bitterness and jealousy--that is so pernicious and so damaging to the heart." (Return of the Prodigal Son, 70) Outwardly, the son is faultless. But when confronted by his father's joy at the return of his younger brother, a dark power erupts in him and boils to the surface. Suddenly there becomes glaringly visible a resentful, proud, unkind, selfish person, one that had remained deeply hidden even though it had been growing stronger and more powerful over the years"(Return of the Prodigal Son ,71)
His identity is so wrapped up in being the good brother, that he doesn't realize that he is doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons, looking good on the outside, but being eaten up with bitterness, jealousy and resentment on the inside.
The elder son is competing with his brother for the father’s love and he assumes he should have earned it by rigid adherence to a sense of duty.
In turn he becomes rigid and judgmental, and very threatened by the younger son who doesn't play by the same rules.
He just didn't believe that his father would love him if he weren’t dutiful and wonderful
Mr. Superresponsible, more dead than alive, goes through the motions crying, “look how hard I’ve tried”. His payoff has been approval, and he confuses approval with love.
The elder son doesn’t get this, he just doesn’t get it.
Much like the older son in the parable, most of us play by the
rules,
We spend our lives trying to be good citizens, good providers, good people.
Sometimes, like the elder son, we think we can earn love.
We can earn approval,
we can earn success,
we can earn position,
we can earn power,
but we can’t earn love.
And we just don’t get that.
We keep trying to earn love, or keep trying to make others earn our love.
And we forget that guilt is not love,
duty is not love,
obligation is not love,
fear of punishment is not love,
fear of losing someone is not love.
It is guilt, or duty, or obligation, or fear.
Nothing is love but love.
The same can be said of our relationship to God. In the way of the world, in the way many of us have been taught, the fundamental motivation for our relationship to God is that of weakness and need, and the God who can right us is the God of judgment, wrath and punishment.
Our spiritual task is to placate this fearsome God whose anger is infinite and whose vengeance is eternal.
We just don’t understand that God is love and nothing else.
God is not supreme coercive power,
God is not threat,
God is not reward and punishment,
God is not the security of the righteous; God is not law and order,
God is not the wreaker of vengeance,
God is not on the side of any one person over another, God is not validation of moral opinions.
God is love.
GOD IS LOVE.
Period.
Well then, what do we owe God in response to this love?
Right away our church-sponsored answers flood our minds like a catechism free-for-all. We begin to sound like the good brother in the parable:
We owe God obedience, obligation, observance of commandments, sacrifice, self-denial, abnegation of will, loyalty to Church authority.
But really, what do we owe God?
We OWE God nothing.
To suggest that our relationship to God is somehow a debt that must be paid off is to insult God with the cheap language of buying and selling.
But we owe it to ourselves to live as though we are loved.
We owe it to ourselves to live as though there is enough love to go around
How do we do this?
By the choices we make.
We get to choose every day
between judgmentalism and compassion,
between resentment and gratitude
Judgmentalism is the insidious disease of thinking ourselves morally superior because we haven't committed the acts of others.
It is the common flaw of otherwise good people whothink themselves to be morally superior based on a set of esoteric standards they themselves have created.
Their leading comments about people almost always are preceded by a slightly negative put down: " She's not very bright, but awfully pretty." Or "He knows how to work the crowd, and has been amazingly successful. "He's a good guy, but a bit of a self-promoter". Occasionally there are blanket put- downs of those whose religious or political views are not as enlightened or correct as ours.
The hypercritical person can sometimes have a mental yardstick by which she measure others' behavior, and others are always found wanting--they are manipulative, or lucky, or demanding, or selfish or, or or.
Compassion. on the other hand, looks with the eyes of love, with the eyes of a parent, with the eyes of Christ, and sees the pain and regret that often lurks within the heart of another and refuses to make any other response except to say It's ok. Come home. You are mine, and I love you. Thomas Merton said: The saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else. (New Seeds of Contemplation, p57)
We get to choose between resentment and gratitude:
Resentment feeds on the feeling that we somehow were denied our share of something. It can be characterized by jealousy of another's good luck or popularity or happiness because we feel life has passed us by. Resentment complains of insults and slights that may not even have been intended, but which flow out of our sense that we are owed something which others are getting and we are not. Resentment is characterized sometimes by a frozen anger which shuts out others and sees them as "those people" who get good things they haven't really worked to deserve. Even when we desire to be good and virtuous, we are annoyed by what fun the not-so-good seem to be having; it makes us crazy!
Gratitude, on the other hand, is the ability to look on what we have instead of what we are missing. It is virtually impossible to feel resentment and gratitude at the same time. This is one attitude that we can consciously call up, if we choose to do so. Nor matter how bad things are, there is always something to be grateful for. We just need to develop habits of mindfulness that keep us from dwelling on the negative and instead focus on the positive.
According to Phillip Moffit, a Buddhist author, people have reported to him that after practicing gratitude for a while, they have a willingness to share it with others.
One woman reported that she was finding it easier to be kind to difficult persons in her office,
So it seems that acts of gratitude can lead us to acts of compassion. It is all a matter of consciously choosing to focus on what we have instead of what we do not have.
We choose to see God as the source of abundant life and loving, to see that we have been truly graced with experiences that were God's gifts to us. People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but ,BUT, they choose not to live in it. They point each other to flashes of light here and there, remind each other that they reveal the hidden but real presence of God.
As I mentioned at the beginning, the interesting thing about this story is that we do not know what the older brother--the good brother--chooses to do.
Will he stay mired in his misery and resentment or will look upon his brother with the eyes of compassion and upon his father with gratitude?
What is obvious is that the father invites, but will not coerce the older son to attend the party or to change in any way.
The father's love will remain steadfast and hopeful regardless of the choices the son makes.
Isn't that amazing?
The father rejoices.
Not because everything is perfect, or because there will be no problems in the future. The father rejoices because in the moment, this small moment, he sees his son walk home despite his failure, his sadness, his shame. His son has returned to him and that is enough.
Like the older son, we too are invited to a feast of God's making.
A feast where we don't get to create the guest a list
A feast where we don't have to do anything but bring ourselves, as we are.
And our response to this invitation involves challenge and risk. Are we bold enough to take that challenge and strive beyond our known capacities to discover new possibilities in ourselves, or, like the older brother, will we cling to our habitual responses to life and discover nothing of our own powers to grow? Whatever we do with ourselves is dependent upon our own courage. Only the God who is love has the largeness to permit us to become whatever we will become. This is the meaning of love.
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