The story of the Prodigal Son is one of those stories where there’s so much more to it than we think upon an initial reading. Most of us think this story is about how much the father loves his lost, wayward son. And while that’s true, there’s much more to the story than that. For the father has two sons that are lost. One expressed his lostness by asking for his portion of the inheritance early and leaving home, only to go belly up and return. The other stayed at home and maintained a façade of compliance but didn’t have a heart anything like his father’s. One expressed his alienation by rebelling and leaving, and the other expressed it by sticking around and staying put. But both of them were alienated and estranged from their father in terms of the composition and make-up of their heart.
Many of us think of the older brother as Mr. Goody Two Shoes—the guy who wears the white hat. But when you dig in and really understand the story, you realize he’s every bit as alienated from his father as his younger brother was. While he had remained at home and been more responsible in his choices, his heart was nothing like the father’s—in fact, it was so eaten up by resentment, pride, judgmentalism, and self-righteousness that he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, celebrate his younger brother’s return. Not only that, but he embarrassed his father by refusing to go inside and join the celebration—an act that would have been perceived as a slap in the face to the father given the expectations that accompanied being the oldest son in that culture.
What the older brother was doing, it appears, was confusing rewards with celebration. He views this party the father throws in response to his younger brother’s return as rewarding his irresponsibility. He thinks the father’s sending a very negative and potentially dangerous message. So he voiced his dissatisfaction. “You pull out all the stops for this scoundrel son of yours (he won’t even refer to him as “my brother”), but you’ve never done anything remotely like that for me.” There’s a sense in which he was saying, “This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. I’m the hard worker. I’m the responsible one. I deserve the reward. I should be the recipient of this party.” The older son is irritated over actions on the father’s part that he interpreted as sugarcoating his younger brother’s recklessness and indiscretion.
But that wasn’t what the father was doing, for this celebration wasn’t about what the younger son had or hadn’t done. It wasn’t remotely tied to his actions. This party was about the delight in the father’s heart. He was absolutely overjoyed at his younger son’s return … a son he thought he’d never see again … a son he was thinking could very well be dead … a son whose absence left a gaping hole in his heart. And you see this in what the father said to his oldest son in the last couple of verses of the story:
“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 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.’” (Luke 15:31-32, NIV)
The father comes out to the porch and pleads with his son—a twist that, like many of the details in the story, would have been shocking and surprising to the original audience. For this was a very patriarchal society and fathers, in that culture, tended to be men of great dignity who carried themselves in a very stately fashion. The idea a father would go out on the porch and plead with his son was almost unheard of—it was every bit as far-fetched as him earlier hiking up his robes and sprinting out to greet his younger son when his gaunt silhouette appeared on the horizon. What the audience would have expected the father to do, in light of his older son’s rude behavior, was be furious with him and perhaps even disgrace him publicly. But the father does nothing of the sort—in fact, he almost comes off as the one without power … as one who’s hamstrung and handcuffed by his older son’s actions.
The older son rejected his father’s pleadings, blew him off, insulted him, and spoke to him in a very demeaning and disparaging way. But the father didn’t give up. In fact, there’s something about v. 31 that speaks to the tender, loving nature of the father … something that we overlook because we’re not familiar with original language. When the father says to his son, “My son …” in v. 31, the word he uses there is not huios—the common word for son—but rather teknon, which means “little one”. It’s a term of endearment—a word that conveys deep love and affection. Again, given the way men of the father’s standing tended to carry themselves, this would have caught Jesus’ audience by surprise. They wouldn’t have expected a father to speak to his son in such a tender, kind, and endearing way—particularly after he treated his father with the disrespect he did.
But this father did! In front of everyone who’s watching, he takes upon himself the pain, shame, and humiliation of his defiantly rebellious son—an act that, in many ways, foreshadows the cross and hints of what God did for us through the death of Jesus. Earlier, at significant personal expense, the father extended grace to his impulsive, wayward, and immature son. And now here, at great personal cost, he extends grace to his sanctimonious, angry, and self-righteous one.
The father continues—“You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” Remember—the younger son took his share of the inheritance early, so everything the father has now belongs to the older son. So, what the father is in essence saying is, “My son, don’t you realize that living at home with me and walking thru life together—these are the greatest gifts I have to give you? The most important thing I’ve been offering you all these years isn’t the land, the house, or the money. It’s not the clothes, the ring, or the party with the fatted calf. It’s me! And if that’s not enough, then all the parties and property in the world aren’t going to satisfy you. Because every time somebody else is celebrated—every time I’m merciful to someone that in your mind doesn’t deserve it—it’ll stick in your craw.”
The father is infinitely gracious but also infinitely firm. He won’t apologize or shut down the party. He’ll plead, entreat, and implore his older son to come inside, but he won’t close things down because he’s struggling with the situation. He simply states his case: “We had to celebrate. We had to do this because your brother who was as good as dead has come home again.” In other words, “It’s not too late. You can still live as my beloved son. You can still join the party.” There’s almost this feeling, on the father’s part, of, “For a long time I lived in sorrow over one lost son. Now that I’ve got him back, must I lose another? Now that he’s returned, am I going to be deprived of my other son?”
And then—silence! The story just stops. The account of the younger son has a sense of resolution and completion to it. It comes full circle—there’s rebellion, isolation, forgiveness, reconciliation, and celebration that the lost has been found. But the story of the elder brother seems unfinished. It stops abruptly with the father pleading for his oldest son to enter into and experience his joy.
Angie and I aren’t big movie people—we go to maybe two or three movies a year. But a decade or so ago, we went to one starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock called Gravity. We saw it in an IMAX theater wearing those goofy 3-D glasses which made the images just stunning. It’s the story of a couple of astronauts involved in the mid-orbit damaging of their spacecraft because of high-speed debris that incapacitates it greatly, and it details their struggle to survive in the zero-gravity, zero-oxygen environment above the earth. It’s a very intense film and George Clooney’s character, who’s the more veteran and experienced astronaut, dies. So, Sandra Bullock’s character is left to try to figure out how to guide this incredibly complex and enormously crippled spacecraft back to earth. She does so, crash landing in a body of water—presumably a lake—located in what according to the surrounding landscape is a very remote place. She’s able to successfully evacuate the space capsule and make it to shore, where she lays there for a couple of minutes squeezing the mud, catching her breath, and struggling to comprehend that she’s alive and made it back to planet earth and escaped this harrowing experience. She collects herself and stands up, and then the film ends. Was she rescued? Was anybody able to track her return on radar and send a team to retrieve her and return her to civilization? We don’t know, because the credits started to roll once she rose to her feet.
For the next two days all I heard from Angie was, “Gee, I hated the ending. That was terrible. They shouldn’t have left us hanging like that!” But there’s a sense in which the story of the Prodigal Son, particularly as it relates to the older brother, has that same kind of feel. What happened after this heartrending exchange between the father and his oldest son on the porch? Did he stay outside and pout, or did his heart soften to where he begged his dad to forgive him before going inside? Did he walk off and return to his responsibilities in coldness and bitterness of heart, growing to more fully hate both his brother and father with the passing of time? Or did he see the error of his ways and eventually go inside and reconnect with this sibling with whom he’d played and fought and roughhoused together as they were kids? The answer—we don’t know. And Jesus doesn’t say, for the story ends. If you read on into the next chapter, there Jesus is speaking to a different audience—it’s just the disciples. He never finishes the story.
Why didn’t Jesus bring things to closure? Why didn’t he put a bow on the package? I believe this was an intentional and deliberate ploy on his part. I believe the reason the story ended the way it did—so abruptly and suddenly—is because the ending was meant to be written by somebody else. For those standing around listening—for part of his audience … the Pharisees and teachers of the law—Jesus left them hanging because they would supply the ending by what they did with what they heard. He told the story in such a way as to allow them—and us—to finish it with their—and our—choices.
One of the characteristics of a good story is that you find yourself in it. You’re able to identify with the characters and understand their motives and emotions. Most of us probably identify with the older brother in that we try to live principled, dutiful, and dependable lives. We try not to create drama and turmoil for our Heavenly Father but go about our business in a responsible way. We try to do the right thing. But one of the things this story teaches us is that there’s more to being righteous than being right—that being right and being righteous are two very different things. And we can only pursue one of the two. We can only have one or the other as our goal. And which one it is will be our choice.
Ultimately the father’s concern was not with rightness. Right and wrong are pretty obvious—the elder brother did the right thing by staying at home and the younger brother was wrong to demand his inheritance early and leave. Same thing goes for the immediately preceding stories in Luke 15. In the story of the lost sheep, the ninety-nine sheep were in the right place and the one that wandered off was wrong. In the story of the lost coin, the majority of the coins were in the right place and the one that got lost was not where it was supposed to be. And the Pharisees to whom Jesus was speaking—in many ways they were right, and the sinners with whom He often spent time were wrong. That’s all quite clear. But what the Heavenly Father is primarily concerned with is not whether we’re right. What He’s concerned with is whether we’re righteous. And righteousness isn’t a matter of how right we are; it’s a matter of whether our heart resembles his.
The older brother had stayed close to the father’s house, but he’d never acquired the father’s heart. And the same thing can happen to us. We can hang around the church, be a long-time member, and work on her behalf. We can put money in the offering plate, teach Sunday School, and sing on the worship team or serve as a greeter. We can do all the right things. But it’s not primarily about being right; it’s about being righteous. And the only way to be made righteous is by receiving the grace of the Father.
Here’s how you know you’ve received His grace—by how you react when those that are lost come home. If you’re ecstatic and elated when those that have spent some time in a distant country find their way back, that’s a pretty clear sign that the grace of the Father is alive and at work in you. But if you insist on your preferences … your desires … your personal comfort … and your way of doing things without regard for the souls and eternal destiny of those that are lost … that’s typically a sign the father’s heart hasn’t been formed in you and you’re a lot less like him and much more like the older brother.
We never learn how the older brother responded. We don’t know whether he ultimately went inside and joined the celebration or if he stayed outside and continued his pity party. But ultimately that’s not important. What’s important is our choice … how we respond. If, as we’ve been immersed in this story, we realize we’re a lot more “older brotherish” in our outlook and approach than we wish we were, the good news is it can change. Because after all—it’s our choice!