12.06 The elder son
VI. THE ELDER SON This solemn question reminds us that in the parable there is one, the elder son, to whom all the joy of the household is alien, indeed repellent. If we cannot find our own experience at all interpreted by the younger son, is it possible that our place may be with the elder?
Doubtless at the moment when the parable was spoken the elder son was meant to represent the hard, self-satisfied Pharisees who were offended by the spectacle of a Rabbi “receiving sinners and eating with them.” Doubtless, also, we may take him to represent the whole race of the Jews in its self-righteous contempt for the sinful Gentiles. But it is possible and more profitable for us to find him among the men of our own day, or even in our own character. Here is a man who has never left his home: who has been faithful in the discharge of all its duties (v. 29) at the moment of the prodigal’s return he is at work quietly and dutifully in the field. Is he not typical of a very common type of respectable and conventional religion? He resents the disturbance of his home life by all this fuss and noise and unusual excitement over the return of a man “who has devoured his living with harlots.” Have we not met with him, let us say, in the decent regular “member of the congregation” who grumbles at the abnormal excitement and enthusiasm of a Mission for the conversion of the careless, or in the severely respectable churchwoman who “does not wish to hear about all that Rescue work among the fallen”? Truly, there is only too much of this elder-brotherly religion in our churches, and to be quite honest in ourselves.
Consider him, then, as he is presented here in this parable. He shares the life and work of the Home; but plainly his spirit remains hard, thankless, unsympathetic.
Never has the word “Father” left his lips with that cry of personal need, that appeal of awakened love, which filled it when it was upheaved from the broken heart of the younger son in the far country.
“Father” will never mean so much to him until he, too, has learned to add, “I have sinned, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.” There is, indeed, no suggestion that it would be well for him also to go out into that far country and, through tasting the bitterness of its disappointments, to realize the love and peace of home. “O felix culpal” is a dangerous cry. But it is in his own quiet and orderly life that he must find the proofs of his unworthiness and the need of penitence. And this will come to him if he hears in the words, “Child, thou hast ever been with me, and all that is mine is thine,” the accents of a love to which his dull, self-centred life has given but a poor return. He must feel that the very order and quietness of his life has been a call to him to enter into a fellowship of special closeness and joy with his father - a call to which he has made a very grudging response. It is this humility alone which can open out the springs of his love. Again, he ought to have found in that security of the home the ground of a compassion all the more real for the prodigal who had left it; and a longing all the more earnest for his return. “I have bread enough and to spare, and he, my brother, is perishing with hunger” if this had been his thought night and day, then even though he had never left his home he could have shared to the full the joy of the return.
This, my brother, was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”
Thus to apply these thoughts if any of you, my readers, have by God’s goodness been kept from the sins of the far country, if your life has not been harassed or your flesh beset by great temptations, if your observance of religion has been regular and dutiful, then thank God indeed; but always beware of the shadow of the elder brother the hardening of the heart. It is the teaching of Jesus that the sins of the soul are more grievous than the sins of the flesh, and the sin of self-satisfaction is the most damning of all. Those whose lot has been cast in quiet places, whose life has been protected from the grosser sins, whose religion has been orderly, must keep watch against the entry of this danger. There are two main defences against the elder-brotherly spirit which they must use. The first is they must always keep before their consciences the infinite claims of an infinite love. Measured by those claims, there is no life which has not need of the prayer “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Every privilege possessed is only a claim for deeper thankfulness; every point of safety gained is to be the starting-point for a new effort; every temptation overcome is to set the soul free for its quest of a higher holiness; every token of God’s love is to be the call for a deeper, more self-sacrificing love in response. And the second defence against the sin of the elder brother is the charity which seeks to bring back the prodigals who are wandering in the far country. From every blessing received, we ought to look upward in thanks to God who gave it, and around in compassion to those who have lost or never known it. Those whose life is safe and protected are just those who are specially called to succour those whose lives are encompassed by temptation and harassed by struggle. The ever present thought of the greatness of God’s Love and the greatness of man’s need it is this, and this alone, which can save us from the sin of the hard and thankless heart. “From all hardness of heart, good Lord deliver us!”
TAGS: [Parables]