A feast for siblings

Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

There was a man who had two sons…,” the story begins. It’s a story nesting inside another, one that begins with muttered complaints about Jesus, grumbling voices, saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Yes, he does. Thank God, he does. Where would we be if he didn’t? This fellow is the love of God in human flesh. And inside his story all of our stories nest.

“There was a man who had two sons…,” the story begins. Most of us have heard it many times. We’ve identified with one brother, perhaps at some point with the other, perhaps with the father. Some of us have wondered about the mother who is conspicuously absent throughout. We don’t know why she’s not in the picture. Is it for reasons of narrative economy, to help us focus on just the one triangle of relationships? Or is it because of a cultural bias that sees no need for stories about a mother who had two sons or a father who had two daughters? There are lots of stories in the Bible about sibling relationships, but most of them by far are about brothers. Can you think of stories with sisters in them? There’s Mary and Martha, and there’s Leah and Rachel, but I can’t think of any stories that focus on a parent and two sisters.[1]

I grew up the younger of two sons and the brother of a younger sister. My brother, he was three when I was born, never tired of telling me how easy I had it compared to him. He was the pioneer who cleared a path through the thickets of parental insecurity all by himself. “I know, I know,” I used to tell him, “it’s hard to be the crown prince.”

When we grew up, parents took about as many pictures of their kids between birth and graduation as today’s parents take in a week, but there are photos of both my brother and I on the first day of first grade. We both look cautiously optimistic, and the Sunday coat that brother #1 wore on his first day of school was still good three years later for brother #2. My sister stood in the entrance of our Elementary School four years later, and chances are, had she been a boy, she would have donned that coat a third time.

Anyway, Carly Simon wrote a softly swinging song, My Older Sister, a song that captures snippets of a little girl’s thoughts and observations in lines like,

She rides in the front seat, she’s my older sister
She knows her power over me
She goes to bed an hour later than I do
When she turns the lights out
What does she think about?
And what does she do in the daylight
That makes her so great? …
She flies through the back door, she’s my older sister
She throws French phrases ‘round the room
She has ice skates and legs that fit right in…
She turns everybody’s heads
While I wear her last year’s threads
With patches and stitches and a turned-up hem
Oh, but to be … just once to be
My older sister

I did wear my brother’s last year’s threads a lot, but my song about us wouldn’t be softly swinging, it would be more like the shouted lyrics and pounding beat of you’re not the boss of me now by They Might Be Giants.[2]

One of the first stories in the Bible is about two brothers, Cain and Abel, and we know how that one ended for the younger of the two. The book of Genesis tells the stories of our deepest roots and our oldest wounds, and in every generation of Abraham’s children we encounter the pattern of the two brothers—there are Ishmael and Isaac, then there are Esau and Jacob, then there are the older sons of Jacob (who act like one) and their little brother Joseph—and in each generation, it’s the little brother whose story is remembered. It’s like there is a desire at work to rewrite the story of the first brothers, that painful story of rivalry and death.

“There was a man who had two sons…,” Jesus’ parable begins. At some point after the invention of the printing press, Bible publishers started adding section headings to the text. Stories were given titles, and titles suggest how to read. “The parable of the prodigal son” it was called and that’s how we’ve read it, leaving the older brother standing in the field as though he wasn’t really part of the story anyway. No one thought of calling it “the parable of the prodigal father” or “the parable of the lost boys.” What would you call it?

You take a look at the two sons, and you notice that neither is a particularly attractive character. The younger is disrespectful, self-absorbed and reckless, perhaps manipulative. The older comes across as heartless, resentful, and jealous. But whether we like it or not, we can identify, at least to a degree, with either. We wonder what it might be like to be so brave and leave home to explore life far beyond the horizon. Sure, he is reckless, but he follows his dream. Perhaps you were once just like him, or perhaps you wish you had been more like him, just a little.

Or do you find it easier to relate to the firstborn, the responsible one, the one who does what he says and shows up on time and takes care of the family farm? “Doesn’t he have a point?” you say to yourself. Perhaps you know all too well what it’s like to make sacrifices every day and no one seems to notice, let alone appreciate or celebrate what you do. Is it too much to ask to be treated fairly? The property had been divided, and each had been given his fair share, and the younger chose to cash it all in and squander it. It may be good and right to give somebody a second chance, sure, give him work to do and food to eat, give him a roof over his head—but a party? And this was no fried chicken and a sheet cake from Publix for dessert kind of party. They killed the fatted calf—enough BBQ to invite the whole town.

Then there’s the father who apparently doesn’t believe that children who are old enough to go away should also be ready to live with the consequences of their choices. When his son comes home—broke, humiliated, and hungry—dad is beside himself, acting like a fool. He runs down the road and throws his arms around the young man, shouting orders over his shoulder between hugs,

“The robe—the best one—quickly. The ring—bring me the ring. And sandals, bring sandals—And the calf, kill the calf! Invite the neighbors! It’s my son; he was dead and is alive again!”

Only Jesus could come up with a story like this. In our version of the story, the father would be waiting in the house, sitting in his chair, Dad’s chair, arms folded, with a stern look on his face. He would listen to what the young man had to say for himself, and then, perhaps, he would look at him and say,

“Well, I’m glad you’ve come to see the error of your ways; I hope you learned your lesson. Now go and help your brother in the field.” In our story, there probably wouldn’t be a party. But it’s not our story. It’s Jesus’ story for us.

Sinners felt at home in the company of Jesus; even notorious sinners who were shunned by everybody in town came near to listen to him, or just to be around him. He didn’t mind being seen with them; he even broke bread with them, openly. And of course, some who were witnessing his interactions were pulled back and forth between a genuine desire to understand and loudly demanding that he explain himself.

In response, Jesus told stories of a shepherd who searched the hills for one lost sheep until he found it, and of a woman who swept the house from the attic to the basement, searching diligently for one lost coin until she found it. What Jesus taught and lived, and continues to teach and live, is that every human being, every last one of us, is a beloved child of God. You belong, they belong. This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them—you, me, all of us. God’s love, Jesus teaches us with his whole life, God’s love is not the special reward for the good boys and girls. God’s love is the beginning and the end of all things, a love that frees us to be who we were created to be in the one household of God.

The younger son in the parable did everything he could not to think of himself as a child of his father or a sibling to his brother. But the father never stopped thinking of him as a beloved child. Never.

And the elder? We are at the end of the parable. The elder brother is standing outside the house; light, laughter and music are pouring through the windows, but he can’t move. Or is it that he doesn’t want to move? No one has asked him whether he wants to be reconciled with this good-for-nothing wastrel. No one has asked him how he feels about wearing the second-best robe, since the best one apparently had been given to the wanderer, the squanderer. He is standing outside, arms crossed, fists clenched, fury in the belly. He refuses to go inside. It feels good to know who’s in the right and who’s not.

But then the father comes outside and pleads with him to come in. The father doesn’t want this to end with one brother rejoicing and the other grumbling. The father wants this to end with a feast, a feast which fairness cannot host, but which love never tires to prepare.

The story, it turns out, is not about who is the golden boy and who is the other one. The story within the story, and indeed the whole story, is about God’s reckless extravagance in embracing us.

It doesn’t matter if we got lost wandering to a distant country or if we got lost never leaving at all. It doesn’t matter how we forgot that we are not solitary strangers or each other’s keepers, but siblings, members of the one household of God.

What matters is that God delights in looking for us and calling us, in finding and reminding us, in pleading with us, waiting with us, rejoicing with us. What matters is that in Jesus’ story life becomes the feast it was meant to be from the beginning. So let us turn to God, with gratitude and joy, and welcome one another as we have been welcomed.

[1] The daughters of Zelophehad successfully petitioned Moses for a change in inheritance law. They were five sisters, Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah (Numbers 27).

[2] The song became the opening theme song for Malcolm in the Middle.

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