The Parable of the Lone Bro?????
Jesus is a Master story teller. After twenty centuries, many consider today’s parable (zinger of a story) “His Magnum Opus” in narrative creativity. After 2,000 years, the Parable escapes a definitive name. About whom is the parable?
Since we are told that Jesus directed 3 parables to those who resented the fact that Jesus had outreach to sinners, etc., who had been written off by the respectable church people, more feel that the true subject of the parable is the unforgiving brother. When one thinks about it, this elder brother was a “sad dude”.
Each of the three parables (the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son) represents the theme that God is crazy by human standards. What shepherd would leave 99 sheep to find one? What “domestic engineer or technician” would sweep the house for a lost coin? What self-respecting father would welcome a wayward son home after the son had dyssed and deserted him? God does and then, throws a party. (Read Eucharist!)
In the shocking beginning of the parable, the two sons both got half of the father’s stuff (that is the word, ousia, that appears in the original Greek). The older son got his inheritance, just as the younger brother did, even before the father died. Toward the end of the story, when we start to hear his whining (which he probably had done all along), he is filled with complaints and criticism and carping. Did he spend any of the inheritance?
His complaint sounds almost immature and childish. Still, when you think of it, the older son had enough of his own money to buy his own goat if he wanted to have a party with his friends. (One might wonder if he had any friends because he is such an angry person.)
He criticizes both his father and younger brother when he tells the father that the younger brother had squandered the father’s wealth with prostitutes. (We did not hear this fact anywhere else in the story.) Did the father (or we) have to have that sad item thrown into the mix? We get the story without painting all the details.
He carps when he berates the jubilant father about the unseemly (which it was in that patriarchal culture!) behavior on the part of the father. The father brought out the fatted calf and put the best attire on his returning son.
The older brother has serious problems. He has been alienated from his father. He seems to refer to the father as his employer, not his father. With the stuff that he had already received, he has been rewarded already, still the father is seen by the older brother as a boss.
He has alienated himself from the younger brother (Whose gall got both sons their inheritance prematurely). He refers to the younger son as this son of yours, not as my brother.
Finally, he has alienated himself from the entire village. When the father ordered the slaughter of the fatted calf, it was before the days of putting leftovers in the fridge for meals in the days ahead. Therefore, the father had to invite the village because the fatted calf would feed an entire village. In addition, many in the village were probably related to the dysfunctional family. Now, the resentment has alienated as well from his extended family and village, who are inside dancing and eating the fatted calf.
Yes. the older brother is a sorry case. Did he ever go in? Only you can answer the question. Sadly, the personality of the older brother was replicated by the arrogant attitude of those who feel that they are the good ones, the self-assured ones certain of their own moral superiority, while those others, well you know! Sadly, the older brother has many replicates in our own church and world. Fifteen hundred years ago, St Augustine of Hippo said that the church had many that God did not have and God had many that the church did not have. Whatever did St Augustine mean? More recently, the saying went, “The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for the saints.” Sadly, many “good Catholics” forget that when checking out who receives communion and who doesn’t. In these days of quantum theology, Catholics are urged to reject binary, viz., polar thinking. There is my side and your side and I always am correct in my analysis and there is something wrong with you when you don’t see the way that I do. Two ways in which contemporary Catholics are urged to view reality can be remedies to the pathology of good people. First, you never know what is going on in the minds and hearts of other people. Psychologists speak of what they call “epiphenomenological behavior”. What we see and hear on the surface with people is merely an expression of many factors which shape what a person does or says. Twenty years ago, Dominican theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx said that, de facto, your Experience is not necessarily Reality as God sees it. It is merely your spin on a situation. Second, rather than “either..or thinking” (the binary system, which culture has instilled in us particularly in an individualistic West, we should substitute (and use, with God’s Help) ternary thinking. There are, at least, three sides to every story, 1) my spin, 2) his or her spin (almost always wrong in binary thinking), 3) God’s spin. What is really happening here and why?
Did the older brother go in? Again, only you can answer the question. 031013AD jfq
