Our telling of the Prodigal Son parable usually (and rightly) focuses on the runaway younger brother: the lost son returns, and his father joyfully and graciously receives him. But the full story has an additional element: an angry older brother. Jesus uses the older brother to rebuke the religious leaders of His day for their stuffy self-righteousness. Today, the older brother also highlights the incredible opportunities that God has given to the Western Church in our post-Christian culture.
Let’s look a little more closely at the older brother. He comes in from the field, and he’s so angry at the celebration that he won’t even enter the house. When his father comes out to plead with him, the older brother accuses him: “Look, I have served you many years; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him!”
On the surface, it sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Imagine you’re down at the corner pub, and all you’re hearing is the older brother’s side of the story. You might be tempted to wonder if he has a point. Maybe dad has been taking him for granted.
But hear his father’s response: “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.” Notice this: “All that I have is yours.” Son, you could have thrown this same party anytime. All of this, everything you see, is your half of the inheritance. It’s all yours. But there’s been a real lack of parties since your little brother left town, you know?
That puts a different complexion on things. At any point, the older brother could have chosen to kill the fatted calf and throw a party for his friends. Dad wouldn’t have batted an eye. Did he ever do it? By his own admission, not even with a kid goat, let alone the fatted calf. Little brother had his problems, but to give him his due, the man knew how to party. Older brother, not so much.
Viewed with Old Testament eyes, the sin runs much deeper than the older brother’s crankiness about his brother’s return. Going all the way back to Torah, the commands to celebrate and rejoice are frequent throughout Scripture (see Lev. 23:40, Deut. 12, Deut. 14:26, Deut. 16). In fact, failing to serve God with joy for all He has given is a serious sin, and the occasion for a covenantal threat: “Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joy and gladness of heart, for the abundance of everything, therefore you shall serve your enemies, whom the LORD will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in need of everything….” Likewise in the wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes encourages us to enjoy God’s good gifts fully while holding them lightly.
What about the New Covenant? Jesus gives us the first clue with His rough treatment of the older brother. Far from steering us away from the Old Covenant practice of celebration, the New doubles down on it. Jesus Himself famously enjoyed a good feast (Luke 7:32-34), even going so far as to provide the best wine (John 2). Not content with that, He also taught us to celebrate when we suffer: “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
James follows in Jesus’ footsteps: “Count it all joy when you fall into various trials.” We rightly interpret those commands to require a joyful heart even in circumstances of material privation, but too often we don’t think beyond that: if we rejoice on a bad day, how much more on a good one? If we should cultivate joyful hearts when we don’t have enough for a feast, what should we be doing when we do?
Paul speaks along similar lines: Not only do we “glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance,” but God “gives us all things richly to enjoy.” “Everything God made is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving, for the word of God and prayer make it holy.” Paul can be content in any state, he tells the Philippians, because he knows how to be abased and how to abound.
The older son has everything, except the ability to enjoy it. He knows how to be abased in his father’s service, but unlike Paul and Jesus, he does not know how to abound.
Our culture, the West as a whole, is the younger son. After a thousand years of Christendom, the West ran away from home with a bunch of Dad’s accumulated wealth. It has been frantically squandering the capital for centuries, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the spree can’t go on forever. The bills are coming due, and the principalities and powers circle like hungry sharks.
But the Western church is much closer to the older son. We haven’t run away from home, we’ve stayed loyal to Dad. So let’s ask ourselves: what should be happening back on the homestead while we pray for little brother to come to his senses?
Remember, all the father has also belongs to the older brother. Did he gratefully enjoy all that his father had laid up for him? Did he throw a party and share with his friends and neighbors? By his own admission, not even once. Let’s not be like him.
In the church, we are the children of the King of the Universe, the Father from whom the whole family in heaven and earth derives its name. The Father has committed everything to the Son, and we are complete in Him. The wisdom and wealth of our Father are available to us. The Spirit guides us. The Scriptures school us in ways of living that fit the world God made. All this wealth that we possess creates a striking paradox as our surrounding world departs from reality and becomes correspondingly impoverished.
On the one hand, we look dangerously retrograde. They have moved from being at war with morality to being at war with reality, and we look and sound like all the things they’ve been catechized to hate. On the other hand, even in an age where lying about basic realities is universal practice, the realities themselves do not go away. Their game of socially constructed make-believe has created a society where we who can deal with those “invisible” realities have superpowers. Their project is socially constructed; ours is not. They can’t afford to even admit the existence of the stepping stones we dance on. The minute they do, their whole project falls apart.
Behold the superpowers: we know that God’s created gifts have a particular character no matter what language games people play. Pine and hickory are not the same, and only one of them makes a good sledgehammer handle. Constraints are built into the world; God made different things different, and it is the glory of kings to search out all the variety God has given us. Your most extreme and consistent secular neighbor—the pink-haired member of the throuple that lives down the street—will probably not try to use pine for a hammer handle…not literally. But in a thousand metaphorical ways, he will do exactly that.
We, on the other hand, deal in reality. We know what a woman is, and what a man is. We know why we’re different, what that difference is for, and how to enjoy it for a lifetime. Our people, relating to men as men and women as women, know that sex is no more socially constructed than gravity. We understand that even the parts of gender relations that really are socially constructed rely heavily on created realities that are good gifts given to us by a loving Father: “All I have is yours.”
We don’t deny those realities; we celebrate them! They, on the other hand…the younger generation not only doesn’t get married and have kids, they’re having less sex than any generation in recent memory. Facing fewer sexual constraints than Caligula, they just can’t be bothered. It turns out, when you suck all the created difference out of the sexes, you suck all the joy out of relating to one another. Stuck in a world of arbitrarily complicated, commercialized, and joyless sexuality, told that they’re really just interchangeably androgynous meat legos (Mary Harrington’s term), young adults are opting out, and who can blame them? We, on the other hand…we have kids. Jeepers, do we have kids! As in Isaiah’s time on the eve of the Assyrian invasion, having children is a sign and a wonder, an overflow of joy and an embodiment of hope that can’t be faked (Isa. 8:18 and Heb. 2:13). We’re taking what the Father gave us, and throwing a party.
Let’s invite our friends and neighbors to the party! Despite the best consensus-manufacturing efforts, nobody actually is an androgynous meat lego, because that’s not what God made. Our neighbors are exhausted by their attempts to live in high defiance of reality. There’s a wide gap between the visible, obvious truth and what they’re allowed to think and say. Maintaining pretenses is just exhausting. And they are, in fact, exhausted. No wonder they give up.
In the face of that exhaustion, we offer respite that they can enjoy well before they begin to understand why they enjoy it. We should be savoring everything about the delicious sexual polarity between husband and wife, the constant movement and holy noise of our children, and our rambunctiously fruitful households. We should be inviting the lost and childless wanderers of our culture to come over on a Sunday afternoon and enjoy God’s good gifts with us.
And then think: in how many other domains do we have similar superpowers, if only we will live into the richness of what God has already given to us?
- We know that we were put here as the image of God to have dominion over the earth, to rule it wisely. We know that satisfaction in meaningful work is a gift from God, and so we embrace competence in everything we touch. Why not invite our neighbors mired in “b——t jobs” to join us in the satisfaction of meaningful work?
- We know that materialism and gnosticism are lies; humans are made of dust and breath. Our healthcare providers should be embracing the whole person as a creation of God, as ready to address a broken heart as a spasming muscle, poorly functioning organ, or broken bone, able to see the connections between them, and praying as they treat.
- We know that sin is more than just a social construct; warranted guilt is a moral injury, much too heavy a burden for anyone to carry. We know that Jesus handled it all on the cross, God is about the business of reconciling the world to Himself, and He has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. He commissioned us through the Spirit to forgive and retain sins (John 20:22-23).
- We know that our external, social struggles are artifacts of the lusts at war in our hearts (James 4:1). We know that changing structures can help but never solve social conflicts; conversely, we are in a position to address the real poison, which is in the human heart.
Many of these things come naturally just as we go about our obedient lives. We gather in worship, we sing the Psalms, we confess our sins and receive absolution from them. We love one another tangibly, in music and food, in word and touch, in care and kindness and forgiveness. We engage in meaningful work in the world, build houses and households, and embrace competence in everything we touch. These are things that human beings were made to need, and when we follow God’s instructions, those needs are met.
In Christendom, many of those needs were met by the general culture, which had been shaped by generations of Christian obedience to revealed truth. As our post-Christian culture rejects more of reality, it loses more common grace and becomes less able to meet, or even recognize, human needs. But within the Church, all that the Father has is ours in Christ. We should be relishing all of it, and the more publicly, the better.
Practically speaking, what does that look like? I can’t tell you exactly what you’ll experience, but here are some of the things that I’ve seen in my town:
- A pansexual neighbor took me aside one day to thank me for my marriage: “Thank you for just being together and being yourselves. You two give me hope.”
- I look around at my close community and see expertise in skills that matter: car repair, video editing, locksmithing, graphic design, carpentry,tree trimming, teaching reading, bodywork, tax preparation, nursing, crochet, baking, sewing…you name it.
- Compromised evangelicals envy the robust families and close communities: “I can’t work out whose kids are whose—it seems all the adults know all the kids, and any of your kids can go to any of the adults for help. It’s weird, but it’s a good weird.”
- Disease-terrified neighbors (yes, still!) will peek longly out their windows at your front yard feast or music night or church service: “It’s so life-giving to see the kids singing and dancing and you guys hugging and eating together and just not afraid.”
The whole Western Church has an opportunity here. Let’s not waste it!
Tim Nichols is a minister, teacher, bodyworker, martial arts instructor, and the co-author with Joe Anderson of Loving: Spiritual Exercises in Tangibly Loving Your Literal Neighbors, the Victorious Bible curriculum, and the forthcoming book Boniface in the Front Yard. He lives with his wife Kimberly in Englewood, Colorado.