Our daughter, Clare, has an illustrated Bible that she enjoys. From time to time, she likes for Lauren or me to read her stories from this Bible. Without fail, she requests the story of the Prodigal Son. When I ask her what she likes about this story, her response has always focused on the love of the father for his younger son. She has even made the intuitive leap, without any prompting, that the father in this story represents God. However, the last time I read this story from the illustrated Bible, it clicked with Clare that in this version the story ends when the father welcomes home the younger son. Nothing more is said about the older son.
For most of my adult life, I have empathized with the older brother. At a fairly early age, I chose to follow the call that God placed upon my heart and have sought to do what the Lord desires as best I can. Sometimes, however, I look around at other people and become jealous, asking, “Why do they have x, y, or z, and I don’t?” or the even deeper question, “Don’t I deserve more since I’ve made sacrifices to follow God’s call?” The ironic part of these questions in moments of jealousy is that in asking them I clearly fall short of God’s call to me.
All too often, we fail to admit that our lives are more complex than they appear to be. We would like simply to identify with the older brother or the younger brother or the father. What we cannot see is that each one of us has a little bit of all three of them within us. Whenever I think that I understand what the older son has gone through in his life, I have to admit that there have been moments in my life when I turned my back on what I knew to be good and right. Thanks be to God that our Lord and our King never forgets we all need His grace each and every day!