Now, as we are assuming that everyone is telling the truth here, it means that the good son was never given any sort of recognition for obeying his father all this time, just taken for granted. I’d be pissed if that happened to me, too. You say, “oh, but he lived in a fine place with lots of food, etc.”, but the prodigal son still seems to think it preferable to run off and spend the father’s money on whores than to work as the good son did, and although the father said “everything I have is yours” he did not give the good son a young goat, i.e., he never celebrated the good son’s faithfulness like he did the prodigal son’s return.
Be happy that your lost son has returned. But also celebrate the sons who stay by your side. It is not like there is a limited amount of love, or that the father could not have spared a goat for the good son. To me, the story still reads like a great conversion technique, but pretty poor parenting, whether from a father or the Father.
My love, my sweet sweet sister. Do you believe in earnest that I overlooked that “very important part” — not once, not twice, but dozens of times? Fair enough. You’ve no reason to believe I’m perfect, or even 0.01% perfect.
My take on that very important part is summarized in the section I labelled “Backfire”. When I was a MEA, I’m sure I would have looked at it, had I known about it, just as you do. But therein lies the nature of the thing, and therein lies the very reason God does not bop us over the head to make Himself manifest to us. He is not interested in whose leg will jerk when he taps under our knee with a hammer.
Imagine that (way) down the road you have two sons. One day, you receive a call that one of them has been in an accident. He was driving drunk and veered off the road, hitting a tree. You rush to the hospital and spend every waking moment of your life, forsaking all else so you can hold the hand of your son and be there when he comes out of his coma. In a few days, your other son walks into the room, and says, “Mother, what are you doing here night and day? I never left your side, yet you never sat with me for days on end holding my hand. But when this son who took off driving drunk gets his just reward, you abandon the rest of us.” If you can manage the restraint and compassion shown by the father in the story, you are a good woman indeed.
I know, I know. You’ll say the story is not the same. But the love is.
Many of the Pharisees of the day likely viewed the prodigal son the same way as the good brother in the parable did. But like I told you, speaking for myself, I would have been as delighted as my father about my brother’s return. Do you think that would mean I was evil or weak? Perhaps our reactions to this wonderful story of the Prodigal Son practically define what we’re looking for when we look for God.
That the father was well off, this we know. If living with and obeying the father was so great, then why did the prodigal son prefer to run off? When the good son heard the celebrating, he had been working in the fields, as he had always done. It was not as if he sat around all day, and I do not think your assumption that he lived a life of pure leisure and luxury is warranted. And the father never celebrated the good son as he did the shiftless one who ran off to spend the father’s money on whores. Even if you have every luxury, if your father does not show appreciation for your efforts to please him, you are poorer than a pauper’s son. Look at it from the good son’s perpective; you work hard and do your best to please your father, and he never gives you even one tiny little goat, your brother runs off and spends the father’s money, manages finances so bad that he is starving, and finally is forced to come crawling back, not apparently due to true remorse but because he’s hungry, and the father throws a huge party while you dutifully slave away in the fields. Do not limit your empathy to the feelings of the prodigal son and the father, and do not expect perfection from the good son. I think the good son has a perfect right to be resentful. Again, I do not object to celebrating the prodigal son’s return; I object to your dismissing the sacrifices the good son made to be good as “not being Herculean effort” to justify the fact that the father apparently never, in all that time, showed his appeciation to the good son.
The story is not the same. If the mother never appreciated the good son’s goodness, it would be more of a parallel. Yes, the mother should stay at her son’s side. But if she has never showed appreciation to the good son for not driving drunk, I consider her wrong as well.
It’s interesting how we interpret what Jesus left to our imaginations. (The son, as he pouts, doesn’t give any us information as to what he might have wanted to celebrate with his friends, nor whether he had ever even asked his father for what he never was given. After all, he, too, got his inheritance. Nothing forbade him from killing a goat and celebrating. He was not pouting that his father never celebrated him, but that he, the son, never celebrated with his friends.)
Thanks, Gaudere. Once again, you’ve helped to open my eyes to new understanding. I would be so thrilled to see my brother come home that resentment would never occur to me. But then, my moral journey is not yours.
I was once the prodigal son. When I returned, more out of having no place else to go than any other reason, there was no party thrown in my honor. Oh, my parents were grateful I was alive and all, but it was just, “Here’s your room, just as you left it. Get a job, all right?”
After some years had passed, I left again, but when I returned, it was because I wanted to be there, not because I had nowhere else to go. My mother was far more grateful to see me. (My father was dead by this time.)
So I guess my parents were not true Christians.
(In the case of my father, that’s no real surprise. I am as skeptical about the divinity of Jesus as he was. The only times I ever saw him in church were for weddings and funerals, including his own funeral.)
I think Lib and Tris could both get nice jobs at Hallmark writing valentines.
I don’t think much about the road not traveled. The lack of a time machine (which would enable me to go back and change the past) makes it a pointless exercise, IMHO.
Er, what??? Einstein had a wardrobe full of identical or similar clothes. And he had pretty weird hair. And Newton spent far more time on alchemy than he did on Gravitation.
Not to say thought experiments aren’t good, but I’ll join Jab1 in pointing out that deep love, God’s goodwill, allegories, analogies of Jesus, the heart, the spirit, and so forth are all very well and good, but so far they are vague and not terribly convincing arguments. Must be their subjectivity to interpretation.
I’ve been away for a long time, first to do a lecture, then for the weekend, and then because I had a very hard time posting — the interface kept on timing out (has this happened to anyone else?) I wrote a long response on this thread that just plain got lost thanks to a time out. Let’s hope this one makes it through.
I am going to skip the first part of what I originally wrote; we have moved far beyond the OP, and into parable land. But I do want to say: thanks, Libertarian, for the good words way back when. I appreciate them.
We might be able to take this attitude — a kind of “kink” in the parable that we can ignore for the sake of the main message (which is the joy of the return of the lost son) — if the message were not hammered home so often in other parables. Take, for example, one that really hits us between the eyes with the same message, but even more severely with the unfairness of it all: the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. In this parable, the master of the vineyard goes out at the beginning of the day, picks up a bunch of laborers, tells them that he will pay them one coin (whatever) if they will work for him, and sets them to work in the hot sun. He does the same at midmorning, at noon, at midafternoon, and one hour before quitting time. Then he lines them up in the reverse order from when he hired them (last first), and pays them each one coin. When he came to the ones he hired first thing, they were all set to get paid extra, but he paid them what he agreed — one coin. When they groused that they had been working all day, but those who had worked only one hour got the same wage, his response was, “What’s your beef? We agreed on one coin, you got one coin. Kwitcherbelliachin.” (Barton translation.)
If Timothy McVeigh realizes one hour before he gets the needle just what he has done, just exactly how bad it truly is, and really, really repents of it, confesses to God just how bad it was, and asks for forgiveness with all the miserable self-knowledge that he can, then he will get precisely what Mother Theresa will get for a lifetime of devoted service to her God — infinite Love and infinite Grace. And I’ll bet it will taste a lot sweeter to McVeigh than to Mother Theresa — he needs it a lot more, just as a man dying of thirst needs water more than I do, about twenty feet from a water cooler. The water tastes good to me, but to that man dying of thirst a glass of water would be the greatest pleasure of a lifetime. But depriving myself of water to get the pleasure is the act of a madman.
I have hammered on this before, in other posts, and I’ll say it again: what seemed idiotic when looked at from a legalistic viewpoint makes perfect sense when looked at from a relationship point of view. If someone tried to do in a factory what that man in the vineyard did, the Department of Labor would be all over him (or her). But Love is Love. We are not here to strike deals, or walk the straight and narrow line, or follow the Law. We are here to love and be loved, literally to become little gods, reflections of Him, loving as much as possible as He loves. It is in this sense that we are to judge angels.
The older brother should be happy, not because he should be grateful for all that his father has already done for him, but because he should be like his father, in that he should love his brother and be grateful for his return as his father is. If we concentrate on Heaven and Hell, instead of God, we miss the point. The thing that really irks the hell out of me about the Left Behind series is not the eschatology, or the fundamentalist viewpoint, but the fact that everyone in the entire damn series comes to be a Christian because they are scared to death of going to Hell, not because they love God. The sufi saint Rabia prayed, “Lord, if I come to thee out of fear of Hell, throw me into Hell; if I love thee for the love of Heaven, deny me Heaven,” (paraphrased from memory).
One of the things you learn when you’ve been a Christian for a while that is a bit puzzling is that the sin of sins, the real lollapolooza, is Pride, and the virtue of virtues, right up there with Love, is Humility (which is a kind of self-forgetfulness, not a bad opinion of yourself). If you’re like me, this really is a bit puzzling; pride outweighs all the real nasties like murder, sex (sins of sensuousness are actually down on the scale), and all the other bombastic ones that fundie preachers like to make much of. After a while, it begins to make more sense. Pride means putting yourself first, and as long as you do that it doesn’t matter what good works you do, what rules you follow, or how “good” you are by the world’s standards — you are blocked from really turning to God because you are in your own way. Also you begin to understand why Humility is so important; it means you are getting out of your own way, and getting your priorities in order. Pharisees cannot see this, because the Law is all important. When Relationship is important, it makes sense.
We are not supposed to follow a certain rule. We are supposed to be a certain kind of people. We are to love as God loves. The rule is supposed to help us do that (and it is for that reason that Jesus said he did not come to overthrow the Law; when we love, the law happens automatically).
So look at the parable as relationship, not law. It makes sense that way.
Do you believe in earnest that I overlooked that “very important part” — not once, not twice, but dozens of times? Fair enough. You’ve no reason to believe I’m perfect, or even 0.01% perfect. 
Einstein had a wardrobe full of identical or similar clothes. And he had pretty weird hair. And Newton spent far more time on alchemy than he did on Gravitation.