03.20. THE PRODIGAL SON AND HIS ELDER BROTHER

THE PRODIGAL SON AND HIS ELDER BROTHER

Luke 15:11-32 In the Parables of the Lost Sheep and Lost Piece of Money, our Lord has already shown that the very circumstance that men are lost inevitably attracts towards them the greater solicitude on God’s part; that so far from their notoriously bad character and gross breach of all law, human and Divine, putting them beyond God’s love, this really only provokes a more manifest and touching exhibition of God’s love. In this Parable He repeats this lesson, but adds another figure to the dramatis persona; a figure which represents the objecting Pharisees and scribes, and in which they might see the unreasonableness and hatefulness of the spirit which could find fault with the unquestioning welcome and festal reception of the returning penitent. There is also another difference between the Parables. The two former bring into great prominence the loss which God sustains in the lapse and destruction of the sinner, the suffering which His love necessarily endures in being prevented from achieving the happiness of its object. In this Parable of the Prodigal, so much is said of the wretchedness to which the sinner is reduced, that while the central figure it still the father, our attention is strongly directed towards that which was entirely absent from the other Parables, the experience and change of mind in the lost sinner himself. It is, however, to be borne in mind that this description of the sinner’s misery is given still to give point and justification to what might otherwise seem the extravagant joy of the father. Had the son been absent for a year or two on a mercantile mission as his father’s agent, and were he now returning successful, this exultation would be out of place. The miserable plight of the prodigal is detailed to justify the recoil of the father’s feeling from long-suppressed love, compassionate anxiety, and longing to overflowing, unrestrained rejoicing. The few strokes in which the career of the prodigal is sketched have approved themselves at the bar of universal experience, and have become part and parcel of the imagery in which all of us clothe our thoughts. It has, too, been kept alive in the minds of men by the unhappy circumstance that the career here depicted is so often actually reproduced in the lives of young men who start with every advantage and comfort, and who perish miserably in some distant colony, or in a few years run through their health, and come home only to die in sorrow and shame. The beginning is the same in all cases; an incapacity to find the fullest enjoyment in God’s love, God’s presence, and God’s ways. The son grows weary of the father’s home; he desires his goods, but not his presence; he wishes to be his own master, believing that he is cramped and straitened by goodness, and that liberty to do evil is the true emancipation. There is nothing in sin that affects us with a keener sense of degradation than the youthful folly that runs through it all, the inexperienced and thoughtless fancy that unless we sin we have not freedom, and the sense that God would be more to us were He less in Himself. He is too good for us to be quite at home in His presence. His holiness shames us and discomforts us. His presence ceases to be the most grateful, the most enjoyable, the easiest. What answer do you get when you ask yourself, Should I be satisfied were God to give me as my own what would make me independent of Him? Were I sure of life, of power to spend and enjoy it as I pleased, with no interference of punishment or remonstrance from God, would this satisfy me? Or would it be itself a terrible punishment to me to be cast forth from God, even though I had provision for all my future? Were communion with God denied me, would this really make a difference to me, would my life seem a blank? would this take the soul out of all my hopes, all my plans, all my enjoyments? Should I feel as a homeless outcast suddenly ejected into an undesired, bleak, blank world, my heart unable to rest in anything, but turning ever back to the Father I had lost? When the heart is thus alienated, God does not desire a constrained bodily service. He does not compel us to abide with Him. If our real desire is for His portion, and not for Himself, He gives us our desire. He does not treat us as if we had no capacity of choice. He does not save us, whether we will or no. But neither does He let us go without regret or into oblivion. The father by dismissing his son does not help to lose him; but foreseeing that nothing but an experience of the world’s emptiness can bring him to appreciate the home and love of his father, he sadly sends him to this painful school. He sees him away and turns into his house, and who can tell the brokenhearted anguish with which in secret he pictures to himself the probable career of his loved child? What servant on the farm does not well understand the sudden lack of interest in all the work, the absent look as schemes of improvement are detailed to him, the many signs that reveal that his heart is with his lost son, and that all else is matter of indifference to him? But the son, for his part, after the first pang, exults in the freedom he has gained, wantonly puts the greatest distance between his father and himself, does not provide for a return home, nor dreams of needing further help, but boldly launches on the world sufficient for himself. It is thus that in the pride of life when health is unbroken, and the world untried, we reckon only on a life of success and gratification, gather to us all our means and powers of enjoyment, and accept guidance solely from our own casual impulses or shortsighted longings, without a thought of the pain we are inflicting on Him whose love persistently follows us, and with out a thought of the misery we are courting.

How soon the scene shifts, and how utterly! The gay youth who was foremost in every revel, whose bright face and confident bearing seemed the very embodiment of the pride of life, whose wealth gave him command of every form of luxurious living, and to whom no earthly pleasure was unfamiliar — look at him now, blackened with starvation and filth, clothed in the rags that others have thrown out, noticed only by those who gaze with astonishment at him as one who is too sunken to be helped. But to none does he look so miserable as to himself. In his mind alone is there visible the full contrast between what he is and what he was; between what he is and what he might have been. The love he might have enjoyed, the noble uses he might have served, the expansion of his life under the wise enterprise of his father, the growing influence and respect, the share in the real work and permanent rewards of life that might have been his, — all this gone beyond his reach, and in its place cold and filth, hunger and nakedness, neglect and desolate bitterness of soul.

Against how many of us does this picture lift up its parable! For he is not the only prodigal who in riotous pleasure or vain display brings himself to beggary; but he is the prodigal who in any way wastes the powers and means God gave him to effect substantial good and results that might always be looked on with pleasure. It seems a matter of no importance, and gives us not a thought that we are living for ourselves; we think that living for God is a height of consecration that some may aspire to, but that it is no law of life for all; but we come to find that it is just this which makes the difference, and that all we have done on any other footing had far better have been left undone. We have been laboriously carting stones into a moss which quietly absorbs all our labor, and shows absolutely no result. If we have spent our portion, our talents, our opportunities, our life, in striving to please ourselves, — if we have not made common cause and partnership with God, and been content to have our individual portion merged in His, — then manifestly we have as thoroughly alienated ourselves and our portion from God as if we had spent it on riotous living.

Indeed the riotous livers always seem to have more to say for themselves than the more respectable self-pleasers. They say or they feel, There is a great untried sphere, a world that promises enjoyment, away in that direction. Let us try this promising freedom, let us make experiment of that life that lies beyond law and restraint; we shall at least know more. Yes, as John Ruskin says, “You now know the habits of swine and the taste of husks; do you think your father could not have taught you to know better habits and pleasanter tastes, if you had stayed in his house; and that the knowledge you have lost would not have been more, as well as sweeter, than that you have gained?” “No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, nor stronger. You will get wiser and stronger only by doing right, whether forced or not; the prime, the one need is to do that, under whatever compulsion, till you can do it without compulsion.” And this is not a mere critical remark made upon us from without, by one who has different tastes from ourselves; it is a truth that asserts itself in the experience of every prodigal. The famine comes, and the husks won’t satisfy. They may keep down the gnawing pangs of hunger, they may stay the appetite for the hour, but they do not nourish. Take any pleasure or pursuit that is ungodly, and you know that this is all it does. It passes the time, it interests and engages you, it stays an appetite; but your nature is not fed, the deepest parts of your nature are unfilled; yourself in that which is most yourself, is impoverished. You are not growing in any fitness for the future, you are not gaining mastery of your spirit, you are not enlarging in your love of goodness. Do you wish proof of this? Have you never wished that your nature did not require anything better than the world provides? As this poor prodigal lying by the swine’s trough may sometimes have wished that he could fatten on that food as they did, so it is not a wholly unknown desire among us to wish that we were a shade liker the beasts, that every part of our nature might be satisfied with that which only satisfies the lower parts of it, that it were not wrong to enjoy the pleasures of sin, and that God had made us for no higher ends than our own weak and depraved hearts aspire to. But our natures will not remake themselves. They are made for God, and nowhere else can we find eventually aught but famine. You may as well try to feed a horse upon carrion or a lion upon straw. “Man liveth by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” We must have assurance of God’s presence with us, and of His love. He must speak to us words of approbation and encouragement, we must be on terms of the truest affection with Him. We live through all our being when the words and sentiments that come straight and true from the heart of God Himself come home to our hearts, when He manifests Himself to us, — gives us to understand, as with His own lips, what no other can tell us of His love, — conveys to us the inward assurance that He is ours, and that we are His for evermore.

If you have learned that after all enjoyment of this world, there is a something more you must have if enjoyment is to last; if you are not yet wholly citizens of this world, but have still some feelings of the alien, some longings, however faint, after another kind of home, some indications, however slight, that this is not filling and feeding you, that this may do for a while, but would be misery if forever, — if you feel, in short, your need of God, — then look and listen to His Incarnate Word. Christ is sent to speak these words of everlasting life to you, to win you back to your true home and Father, to be the channel through which the whole fulness of God’s love is poured into your famishing spirits, to refresh and invigorate you with undying hope, to loosen the hands that are feely clutching the foul husks, and fill them with the bread that cometh from heaven. The return of the prodigal was perhaps not prompted by the very highest of motives. What high motives could you expect in a man who had lived for his own pleasure, and was now lying starving? But who would be saved if he had to show a repentance void of all selfishness? The chief reason why men turn to God is in the great majority of cases the same as that which prompted the prodigal’s return. The prodigal could not make a better of it; we too have tried everything else, and been disappointed. We do not try God until convinced that nothing else will serve our turn. Health gives way, or the spirit is broken, or hope baffled, or one way or other we find the world is not going to be the paradise we expected. The world sees and says this; it sneers at conversion as if it were unreal, because it is so often the result of disappointment with the world. God sees and says it too; but receives the returning sinner, and in the reception a better mind is produced in him, and his selfishness broken.

Besides, there was even in this compulsory return that belief in the father’s love which condones all offenses. There was the instinctive undying feeling that a parent is still a parent, and will receive when others cast us out. You have, I dare say, read the experience of the great French philosopher Diderot. “The first few years of my life in Paris had been rather irregular, my behavior was enough to irritate my father, without there being any need to make it worse by exaggeration. Still calumny was not wanting. People told him — well, what did they not tell him? An opportunity for going to see him presented itself. I did not give it two thoughts. I set out full of confidence in his goodness. I thought that he would see me, that I should throw myself into his arms, that both of us should shed tears, and that all would be forgotten. I thought rightly.” So thought the prodigal. And whatever his motives were, his action was right. He put himself again within reach of his father’s love, and that love received him without question, exulting in the ample opportunity of uttering itself. It had opportunity now of helping its pitiable object, of doing all for the still loved son. This was no time for inquiry as to why he had come. Here he was, and in need. That is enough for true love.

Nothing can surpass the pathos of the meeting of father and son. While the prodigal was “ yet a great way off,” his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. It is as if he had been watching for him night and day; as when a mother has lost a son, she will start at every ring or footstep, thinking it may perhaps be he. Every feature, every peculiarity of gait, every line of his figure was imprinted on the father’s heart, so that long before another eye could recognize him, the father’s heart had welcomed the son. He saw him, and had compassion, simultaneously; there was no hesitation to be fought against, no pondering whether he should not harden himself against this heartless profligate; but as soon as his eyes rested on him, all his sorrow passed away, the sun of his life shone out again. The rags that would have disguised him from any other eye could not hide him from the father; the rags and misery that would have tempted others to spurn him as a hopeless, abandoned creature, drew forth the father’s love. He ran to meet him, everything else neglected, his own dignity out of the question; he cares not to require a seemly submission on his son’s part that the servants may understand he is justified in receiving him. There is no attempt to impress upon the son a sense of his demerit, nothing done to make sure that he has a sufficient sense of guilt to justify pardon. The reason of the father’s receiving him is not that; is not that the son has a sufficient sense of anything, but only that the father loves him, and the son is now within reach of the father, will suffer him now to show his love. And therefore the father runs as if it were all on his side the blessing were, as if it were he who was to win favors from his son; he runs and falls on his neck, overcome with joy, his heart bounding with happiness, his soul satisfied, his life complete. No words can express the first welcome, the father cannot find language to utter the fulness of his heart; but in that eager embrace, in that kiss of love and peace, the prodigal knows himself a son still, as surely and more vehemently loved by his father than if he had never sinned. This is a picture of the reception the returning sinner receives. You may have wasted the best years of your life in selfish gratification, without a thought of serving God; you may have indulged in sins that fill you with self-loathing; you may have sunk to a state of heart that you would be ashamed to lay bare to the most generous and charitable of men; you may painfully feel that you have nothing to offer to God but the worthless dregs of a wasted life; you may be conscious that even your heart is not given to God as it ought, and that through the whole of your repentance your original selfishness is running; but only put yourself into God’s hands as you are, and as this father was not hindered by the foul and sour rags of his son who came to him from among the swine, but fell on his neck, overcome by joy, so will you find in God no revulsion, but an immediate and hearty welcome that will cause you to rejoice in His love. You need not fear that you are to be put through some preparatory discipline, lodged in some sad and dreary moral quarantine till some of the loathsomeness and defilement of sin be worn off you. You will not be charged with your sins and reminded of your folly. All that will be left to yourself, and what God does is to meet you with the tenderest love, and to do everything to give you assurance of it, and wipe out the past. The father does every, thing to assure the son of his immediate reinstatement as his son, — everything to relieve him from fear, from want, from pain, from sadness; and whatever God must give us, if we are to be delivered from the same sensations, we are warranted in expecting. The father cannot do enough for the son; would like him at this hour of return to tell him of every least way in which help could be given him. It is this that God longs for, that we give Him the opportunity of blessing us, that we learn to trust in His love, and knowing that all else has failed us, believe that it will prove sufficient. And because it is love we have to do with, no one need fear that having been received he will yet make no progress in all that constitutes man’s real growth and happiness; nor need any one suppose that they who are received are suffered to remain just what they were. They have been received because they are loved, and the love of God is not inactive nor ineffective, but does most certainly continue to watch over its objects, and to confer the highest gifts upon them. Whatever more complete severance from old habits and desires is needed, whatever persistence in well-doing, whatever deepening repentance, whatever growth in knowing and loving the Father is requisite, — all this will most certainly be given. And now in contrast to this joy of God in the returning sinner, our Lord sets the cold-hearted jealousy of the Pharisaically righteous man. He not only justifies His own conduct by showing how the father acts, but condemns the objections of the Pharisees by holding up to them in this elder brother a mirror in which they may see their own hateful likeness. The Pharisees had murmured against our Lord, “ This man receiveth sinners;” He shows them an elder brother saying of his father, “This man receiveth a sinner,” and leaves them to draw their own conclusion. Every touch in the description brings out some ungenial, servile, grudging, and envious feature of his character. He was “ in the fields “when his brother came; too busy with his industrious and useful labors to share in his father’s earnest watching for the prodigal’s return; not perceiving from his mercenary point of view that he might have pleased his father immeasurably more by going after and recovering his lost brother than by an ostentatious and punctilious performance of his own private duties; not even having such insight into his father’s heart as would have enabled him to guess the one occurrence that could have given his father such gladness; not even observing that by contrasting his own life of toil with his brother’s riotous living, he betrays his own secret liking for that, and proves that his service had been the heavy, unacceptable task of one who is not in sympathy with either the object of the work or him who set him to it. Thus may a man, after years of respectable living, disclose a heart alien from God, and out of sympathy with Him; thus may he disclose that his whole past life has been unloving and self-seeking. But as the father was patient and loving with the younger brother, so is he with the elder. He answers his bitter words and audacious reproaches in a tone of surprised and pained yet gentle and encouraging remonstrance: “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” Why grudge thy brother this hour of gladness, when the calm and even joy of abundant life has all along been thine? I have never given thee a kid, because all I have is thine. We have mistaken one another. I thought that to be with me from day to day, sharing my thoughts, my plans, my joy, my prosperity, would be enough for you. As I am satisfied in my work, in increasing good, and in thy love, I judged that you also were finding it your joy to be with me, my partner in all things. But now I see you have been serving as a slave, doing your work not for its sake, not for mine, but for reward.

There is sufficient Pharisaism in each of us to justify the application of this to ourselves. They who have long served God with care and diligence and yet find their life a hard struggle, with few bright passages, many disappointments, and never joy such as the penitent at once enters into, naturally feel some soreness that one step should bring a life-long sinner abreast of them. You may have been striving all your days to be useful, and making great sacrifices to further what you believe to be the cause of God, and yet you cannot point to any success; but suddenly a man converted yesterday takes your place, and all things seem to shape themselves to his hand, and the field that was a heart-break to you is fertile to him. You have denied yourself every pleasure that you might know the happiness of communion with God, and you have not known it, but you see a banquet spread in God’s presence for him who has till this hour been delighting in sin. You have had neither the riotous living nor the fatted calf. You have gone among the abandoned and neglected, and striven to enlighten and lift them; you have done violence to your own feelings that you might be helpful to others; and, so far as you can see, nothing has come of it. But another man who has lived irregularly, who has not prepared himself for the work, who is untaught, imprudent, unsatisfactory, has the immediate joy of winning souls to God. Have you not been tempted to say, “Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency”.All this may be needful to convince you that it is not service that wins God’s love; that His love is with you now, and that your acceptance of it will make all that has seemed to you grievous to be light and happy. Take refuge from all failure and disappointment in the words, “Son, I am ever with thee, and all that I have is thine.” Learn to find your joy in Him, and you will be unable to think of any reward.