The Older Brother's Wisdom

(Cross-posted at Catholic Women Clergy)

I get to preach at All Saints again this week! Thanks, Janine+! Hope you like my unusual take on the Prodigal Son.
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When one of my grad school friends was fifteen, she was proud and excited to get a waitress job in a restaurant run by her extended family. She worked hard, and was surprised and humiliated when she was told she was doing a rotten job, and fired. Soon afterwards, she received an even more traumatic shock when her father abandoned the family and moved in with a young mistress. As the oldest of four daughters, she had always carried a heavy load of housework and childcare, and this became even more burdensome. But the deepest anguish was the emotional abandonment at a very vulnerable time of her life, compounded by her mother’s badly handled stress, and her worries about her little sisters.

After a year, her father suddenly moved back home, with no explanation and no apology to the daughters he had traumatized. The hell he had put everyone through was swept under the rug and never spoken of again. My friend had started to smoke that year; when she was finally able to quit fifteen years later, she gained a large amount of weight, which magnified her shame, self-hatred, and unhealed grief. And it was many years before anyone bothered to tell her what had been common knowledge among the adults: that she had been an excellent waitress, and was fired only because her father’s mistress worked at the restaurant and he wasn’t ready to go public with his betrayal.

My friend found her way into therapy years later, and with a warrior’s courage, entered the process of grieving and releasing and working through this memory, re-experiencing the anguish and beginning to put together the pieces about just how much damage had been done to her. It became more and more painful to call or visit her parents with this unhealed wound churning within her as she was pressured to obey the three rules of dysfunctional families: don’t talk, don’t trust, and don’t feel. So, after much prayer and preparation with her therapist, she overcame her terror and asked her dad for some time alone. She shared her feelings of grief and anger, honestly but lovingly, and waited, sick to her stomach. Would he respond to the Spirit’s invitation to heal the wounds he had inflicted, whose consequences she still lived with on a daily basis? Or would he compound them by dismissing her feelings and attacking her for speaking the truth?

Tragically, he took the latter course. He angrily told her that the whole situation was long over, and none of her business anyway. He self-righteously proclaimed that he had gone to confession, and apologized to her mother, the only one beside God whose forgiveness he needed. And he ignored and discounted her attempts to explain the terrible damage he had also caused his daughters--both by his initial abandonment, and by forcing them to suppress their feelings and memories when he returned instead of making amends for his behavior. What a tragic missed opportunity for real reconciliation and healing—above all, what a tragic missed opportunity for her father. He had been offered, and refused, greater freedom from the sin that still dwelt in his heart and mind, warping and shrinking them and making him close his ears to the loving, challenging voice of God. My friend returned to South Bend shaken and in need of comfort, listening, and consolation. But she never regretted her choice to speak the truth, and found increased ongoing freedom in having done so in spite of her father’s hurtful reaction—though not as much, and at a higher cost, than if he had responded appropriately. She demonstrates beautifully for us one of the key truths of today’s Gospel story: the wisdom of the older brother.

I realize that this is a radical way to discuss the story of the Prodigal Son, because the older brother is universally acknowledged to be the villain of the piece. Some homilies I have heard on this Gospel focus on his behavior and how we should avoid it, while others use it to emphasize the extravagant love of the father for both sons and how we should imitate it. But in either case the older brother is almost always branded as judgmental, harsh, and unforgiving--a fool who thinks he can earn God’s love and grace, and a dog in the manger who resents it being offered to others. This interpretation is fostered by an allegorical approach to interpreting parables, which looks for—and stops at--a one to one correspondence between the characters in the parable and in the real life situation the Gospel’s writer frames it with. In this case, the younger son equals the tax collectors and sinners who party with Jesus, the older son equals the Pharisees and scribes who criticize this, and the father equals God. Therefore, the father’s every word and action must be perfect, and the older son’s every word and action wrong, with any pain at the father’s choices due purely to a foolish misunderstanding that was his entirely his own fault.

But scripture scholars remind us that Jesus’ parables are not simplistic allegories, and that the stories that present him explaining them as such—for instance, in the case of the parable of the sower—were almost certainly not historical, but added by later oral or written tradition. So I invite you to take another look at the story with a view to seeing all the characters as real, complex people—especially the older brother. He has been badly hurt by the younger brother’s abandonment and rejection—both emotionally, and by a burdensome extra workload on the farm. Remember that there is now one fewer worker to help, and that a third of the family’s resources have been liquidated and sent off with the younger brother as an advance inheritance. He has been feeling unloved and unappreciated by his father, who may well have responded to losing the younger son by retreating into depression and guilt, lashing out at those left behind, or alternating between the two. And now his brother comes home, apologizes to the father but not to him or anyone else, and the father’s immediate response is to cut off the apology and throw a fabulous party. He doesn't even bother to send anyone to the fields to invite the older son, who finds out what's going on only when he hears the boisterous merrymaking and realizes he has been excluded from the celebration of the year. So the older brother is rightfully afraid that will be the end of the story, that the past will be swept under the rug and no one will ever deal with his very real hurts—that, like my friend and her sisters, he’s being told “don’t talk, don’t trust, and don’t feel.”

And he’s far too wise to do that by burying his pain under a false smile and a party hat. He doesn’t punch his brother in the face; he doesn’t bawl him out; he doesn’t make a nasty speech and ruin the party for everyone else—he just stays outside and gives himself a little time to recover. And, when the father comes out to see if he’s okay, he shares his pain and frustration and need for reassurance—in rather stronger terms than would be ideal, certainly, but understandable given what he'd been through. And luckily for him, his father is very different than my friend’s father: he hears the pain, honors it, and responds with love and reassurance rather than attack and judgment. He invites his son to join the celebration, affirming that their loving welcome to the younger son to still be part of the family and not a servant is the first word--but this doesn’t mean it will be the last. By listening and responding to his concerns rather than shaming him and telling him to shut up, he implicitly assures him that this is the beginning of the story, not the end. Though imperfect, this is a fundamentally healthy family open to grace in which the rules are “do talk, do trust, and do feel.” So the older brother—and we--can trust that there will be many more conversations to come in which everyone can cry, laugh, speak their truth, forgive and be forgiven in a healthy and life-giving way.

The reason I am passionate about breaking out of the usual view of this story is that I have so often heard it used in the course of preaching and teaching about forgiveness that is dangerous at best, and spiritually abusive at worst. Too often both Christian and New Age writers and speakers urge us to achieve instant forgiveness of everyone who has hurt us—even if we are still suffering major damage, they have never apologized or made amends, they minimize the severity of the offense, or deny it happened at all. Careless "cheap grace" preaching on this topic can even result in victims being explicitly or implicitly pressured to "forgive" hurtful behavior that is still taking place, rather than lovingly confronting and challenging it as Jesus did. The most egregious example of this is the clergy—fewer now than in the past, but still out there--who twist Jesus’ words and example to encourage battered women to stay in dangerous situations and accept further physical and sexual abuse of themselves and their children rather than seeking justice. Of course, this does not just hurt the victims, but the abusers, whom God longs to heal and free from their slavery to evil and from the underlying wounds which likely fuel their behavior. Remember that in one of Luke's most important stories of Jesus partying with a tax collector, the Spirit moves Zacchaeus to repay his victims with interest, then give half of his remaining funds to the poor. This is the kind of life-giving forgiveness and joyous transformation that She longs to bring about in our own lives in this season of grace.

Lent is a time to check in with our own hearts and spirits and pray for the grace to know if God is calling us to work through unhealed wounds we have received, or inflicted, or both. As the Spirit guides us to ever-deeper healing and conversion, let’s remember the wisdom of all three members of this family. Like the younger son, let’s repent and ask forgiveness for the hurts we have inflicted on others; like the father, let’s listen and respond to others when they share their feelings of hurt and anger;like the older son, let’s request amends and apologies from those who have hurt us. This is a challenging but liberating process, and if we enter into it with good faith we will move ever closer to the reign of God where, as the psalmist says, mercy and truth will meet, justice and peace will embrace. And, as the Jesus who so loved a party tells us, the very angels in heaven will rejoice.