The most pointed insight I ever gained into the Prodigal Son story (Luke 15:11-32) came during a retreat skit performed by a group of West Chester University Newman Center students.
I remember no context—only that they’d been put into groups and assigned parables to act out. (BTW I can’t believe I made them do this. I skipped my own college orientation because I heard there were skits!)
Truly, I remember nothing about the enactment of the Prodigal Son until right after the guy playing the older brother—scandalized by the fatted calf’s having been killed to celebrate his rascally sibling’s return—turned on his father, saying, “You never gave me so much as a kid goat to celebrate with my friends.” Christopher Jowett, the tall, ponytailed dude who was playing the father (and who surely wouldn’t mind my quoting him without permission here, because it was awesome), spun around and thundered:
“YOU NEVER ASKED ME FOR A KID GOAT!”
I’m sure the skit went on from there, but I was done. Mic drop done. Convicted done.
Here’s what I grasped, in an instant. The younger boy’s departure had been a dagger in the heart, sure. “Give me the share of your estate that should come to me” was was just a polite way of saying, “I (literally) can’t wait for you to die.” But the older one’s reaction to his brother’s reappearance? That was a knife in the back.
The one who had seemed to serve faithfully by his side was actually in it for the reward? The one about whom he could say “you are with me always, and everything I have is yours” wanted more? The one who had borne witness to the depths of his grief still did not know him well enough to share his heart’s rejoicing?
This was a stranger.
The one who had borne witness to the depths of his grief still did not know him well enough to share his heart’s rejoicing.
Over the course of our lives, we may all vacillate along the continuum from the younger brother’s “dissolute living” to the elder brother’s life of “dutiful service,” with readers of this blog probably mostly avoiding the more dissolute end. We can’t be on our high horses about that, though, because it only means that’s not where our temptation lies.
That’s not where our temptation lies.
Our temptation—should you recognize yourself among the “older brother” types—is to serve dutifully but resentfully. Keeping careful records. Believing all the things that go right in our lives are because of our hard work and responsibility. Not recognizing the four hundred things a day that go right because of happenstance, privilege, or mercy.
Each time we fail to share God’s parental distress over every lost and suffering soul, or wholeheartedly celebrate each return to grace, we are the older brother.
I suspect there’s something there to convict us all, so I’ll end simply with this beautiful poem by Rumi, which I first encountered in Marilyn Lacey RSM’s marvelous book This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers. May we all recognize God’s flowing toward us today.
For sixty years I have been forgetful,
every minute, but not for a second
has this flowing toward me stopped or slowed.
I deserve nothing. Today I recognize
that I am the guest the mystics talk about.
I play this living music for my host.
Everything today is for the host.
Christine Marie Eberle 