Luke 15: 11-32 

A man has two sons. One abandons his sonship and goes far away. In chasing after pleasure, he ends up degrading himself and others. His father’s money spent, he wastes away in physical and emotional poverty. He crawls back to his father’s home hoping to be welcomed as a servant, and receives instead the most loving embrace. 

The other son stays obediently home the whole time. When his brother returns, though, it becomes clear that he too has been wasting away. He has been obedient, but he has not experienced his father’s love for the free gift it is. In his resentment over the celebration for his brother, he shows just how far he is from the truth of what it means to be loved, without limit or condition, by his father. 

I’ve been savoring Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son, which meditates on Rembrandt’s interpretation of the return (pictured above) in dialogue with the story from Luke’s gospel. It has taken me a really long time to get through the book because every sentence is a gem, and I keep feeling the need to fill my journal with quotes. Nouwen makes millions of points that resonate deeply with me, so I’m letting myself off the hook from giving any kind of summary or review with this blog. All I’m going to write about today is the elder brother. 

Two weeks ago, I was taking a walk in Westminster (the borough, not the cathedral), and I was chatting casually with God. I happened to ask, “why am I here this year?”   

“To be loved.” 

I have to admit, usually when I ask questions like this, the answer I’m hoping for is something tangible. I’d be comfortable with a direction to walk in, with an instruction for something I ought to do. But for some reason, whenever I ask these questions, the answers God seems to give me require my receptivity rather than my action. I am asked to relinquish control instead of do more. (If you’re curious, ask me sometime the story of what I heard when I asked God, “What do you want from me?”) 

I think it was about two years ago that I was having a conversation with some family members about teenage rebellion. I said something like, “I think it’s necessary for everyone, in some way, to run away from what’s familiar and comfortable, to at least try out being someone they’re not.” 

My little sister looked up at me, puzzled. I can still hear her voice- “Gabi, you never were not.” 

I think I laughed, but I know that deep down I was hurt. I immediately launched into a speech on how I really had rebelled. I tried to justify how my “breakdown” with music surrounding the organ major I ended up not pursuing and the piano I’d somehow ended up hating was a rebellion. Back to the prodigal son story, I tried to make it seem like I had left my Father’s house. I made a passionate case for how I had been the younger son, but my sister just didn’t see it. 

In truth, my “running away from music” is perhaps a pitiful example of the kind of life-draining rebellion that the younger son undergoes. My relationship with God grew through the confusion, instead of disintegrating. My wrist injury wasn’t from seeking after pleasure and ending up broken; it was prolonged by trying too hard to be obedient. 

And realizing that, at least in her eyes, I was the elder son in the story, really hurt. Because the elder son seems much blinder than the younger. At the end of the story, the Father says that his son who was lost is found; he was blind but now he sees. But the elder son remains in limbo, perhaps still blind to his father’s love. He thinks he has clear vision because of his exacting obedience, but he does not see with the eyes of love. 

Henri Nouwen spends a lot of time with the elder son in his book. Nouwen, like me, identifies a lot with the elder son. Growing up in a religious context, in a faithful family, practically never missing a Sunday of church in my life, only to be told that God doesn’t require this to love me. 

For so long, I’ve been resentful of this whole parable itself because I feel like God won’t accept me for who I am. I wish I had some dramatic story about going to a distant country and needing to repent of everything, of feeling the floodgates of love opened. Now, there are certainly parts of me and my story that resonate with the younger son, but on the whole this just isn’t my experience. I struggle with feeling that I have to become the younger son in order to be loved. The older son just doesn’t get the point- so how can I? 

Nouwen challenges this. Nouwen says that how the older son in us reacts is up to us. We’re left hanging at the end of the parable- we don’t know if he’ll join the party or sulk.  

The other day, I was expressing my struggles with my “older son” life experience to someone in my community, and she said the most profound thing. In the midst of a lot of Christ’s love she showed me, she said, “your story is holy, because it is your story.”  

“Holy?” Not how it feels- it feels like messing things up with God by trying too hard constantly. But Henri Nouwen, my mentor here, and the father of Jesus’ parable tell me something different. They have all invited me to stop focusing on myself and to focus on the Father’s love. The older son is so worried about getting what he deserves that he doesn’t realize his entire life with his father is undeserved. 

It is a total perspective shift. There is no way for me to create this shift; it has to come from God. My role, at least as I see it now, is to allow the space for Christ to be in the center of my story. It is stepping aside from my consuming inner world, and guilt, to embrace a reality of relationship– with God and others- that is much greater than my limited consciousness. It is allowing God to see me and thereby give me the sight that the younger son gains by the end of the parable. It means accepting that my life is not at heart a lonely existence, though loneliness will surely be part of it. At heart, it is a shared existence. It means, as Nouwen writes, turning in Rembrandt’s painting from the cold light illuminating the face of the older son to the warm light emanating from the father.  

Jesus’ parable doesn’t describe in detail how the elder son makes his journey home. I know in some ways the journey is short; God’s love is already here and now. But the Way in this love for me is Christ- the Person, the Relationship, the Companionship, the Suffering. This relationship will be a lifetime to discover and cultivate. (If you’re reading this and want to throw a little prayer my way, patience is something I lack!) I am both already home, in the center of this labyrinth, and also on this long and difficult journey toward living from that center. My prayer is that I can accept both- the eternal immediacy and simplicity of Love and the winding path of discipleship- as a gift.