Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.
--The Elder Son
Way back in the early 1970's a new phrase entered the American lexicon. That phrase was “having it all.” It arose from what was then called the “Women’s Lib” movement and it articulated the perception that while men were living lives of vision, adventure, and achievement, women’s lives were somehow sterile, narrow and tightly controlled by others. Women lacked some very basic rights and privileges. Married women could not take out loans without their husband’s permission. Women with legal degrees worked as legal secretaries. A woman was expected to choose between career and family. While their husbands and children adventured off to far countries and spread their wings, women were expected to stay home and wait for them. By the early 1970's the time had come for us, too, to rise up and claim our inheritance.
Thus the phrase “having it all.” To have it all meant that a woman was free to enjoy the satisfactions of her own career and income and the joys and romance of family life.
I don’t know how many of you remember the seventies. The seventies turned the social reforms of the sixties into an orgy of self indulgence. ‘If people are having fun,’ reasoned society, ‘they won’t riot.’ So the seventies gave us singles bars, the famous hot tubs and peacock feathers of Marin County, country communes, open marriage, disco, Werner Erhard and the human potential movement, weird cults and crystal gazers. It was called the “me” decade because its greatest expressions were self gratification, self image, self esteem. This was the decade when many liberals traded the constraints and seemingly outdated morality of organized religion for the individual flights of “peak experience.” It was a decade when the freedom to be me meant far more than the webs that connect and bind me to others. But by the time this decade was over, America had become a land of broken lives and broken relationships. As my eighth grade students reminded me in their history papers, Harvey Milk and George Moscone lay dead in city hall. Congressman Leo Ryan was shot and 900 drank poisoned Kool Aid in Jonestown. AIDS was beginning its deadly odyssey, and Ronald Reagan ascended to power in what was called the second American revolution.
Meanwhile, “having it all” turned out to be a bittersweet dream. People began to see that it was even a dangerous dream. But by then, it was already in motion, no longer a dream of women seeking freedom, but of global corporations seeking markets, developers seeking natural resources, special interest groups seeking entitlements. The new value of the ‘80's was wealth. It seemed an antidote to the strangeness of the seventies, just as hedonism had seemed an antidote to the social protest of the sixties. Money was colorblind and morally neutral. It didn’t give you AIDS or cancer. It wasn’t a cult that would steal your children; indeed, it would guarantee your children an inheritance. Celebrities, CEO’s and sports figures began to command huge salaries and a chasm opened between rich and poor. New laws and tax cuts were passed protecting the rights of the wealthy to keep what they had and subsidizing business. Our image of the church, once the prophetic home of Thomas Merton, Dr. Martin Luther King and the Berrigans, passed away and in its place, at least in the eyes of popular culture, came the Religious Right, full of condemnation of evolutionary science, sexual difference, women’s rights, and its odd ideology of Biblical inerrancy and imminent apocalypse.
We had become a nation of two warring camps.
And so, once upon a time there were two brothers. The younger of the two decided he wanted to have it all, so he asked his father for his share of the inheritance. Although by traditional standards this was a scandalous thing to ask, his father gave him the money and off he went in search of adventure. While he basked in peacock feathers and recreational drugs, his elder brother stayed home and helped his father manage the estate. Now one of the meanings of prodigal is “to squander,” and since self indulgence creates nothing, the younger brother reached the point where all was spent. Reduced to near death, he crawled home in terrible humility and defeat. And his father, who had worried so much about this lost and careless son, and who loved him, welcomed him home. But when the elder brother heard that his brother had been welcomed, he was angry and refused have any part in it. “His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.’
These are not the words of a loving and dutiful son. These are the words of someone who is just as obsessed with the inheritance as his younger brother, but who didn’t have the courage to voice what he truly thought. His devotion to his father is not a free gift, as the father’s devotion is to him, but is given in expectation of reward. The elder’s bitterness at his brother’s return is just as centered upon what his father failed to give him as it is upon his moral outrage against his brother. As if “having” were the goal of life. Without ever leaving home, the elder brother shows us by his words that he, too, lives in a distant country. But unlike his younger brother, he refuses to come home.
The second meaning of the word “prodigal” is to “drive away,” from a Latin verb of the same meaning. If the younger brother is prodigal because he squanders his inheritance, the elder brother is prodigal as well, for his righteous indignation drives away love.
The parable of the prodigal son leaves us with an unsatisfactory, unresolved end. We fear this family will not live happily ever after. Will the younger brother remain repentant? Will his older brother make his life miserable? For they are so much alike. It’s one of those interesting facts that it is not people who are very different who split into factions, but people who are only a little bit different. The First Avenue Baptist Church does not rage against the Buddhists on the corner, but saves their most vitriolic words for the infidels at the Second Avenue Baptist Church. Families and nations, tribes, churches and worlds turn into rivals, not when we live in healthy difference and diversity, but when we begin to compete, in different ways, for the same prize.
God, like the father in this parable, does not wish us to be divided. God calls us always to be reconciled. God calls us to love our enemies, both personal and national, for to love our enemies is to be able to love what we most hate and fear about ourselves. Our enemies reveal surprising things about ourselves. Would the elder brother have realized how much he lived for his father’s wealth had his younger brother not returned home and been given the fatted calf? Would I have ever realized how much I depend upon material goods had I not stood side by side in prayer with a Muslim woman whose tradition was steeped in respect for the spiritual? Would I have ever understood my fearful attachment to survival had I not kept watch by the bed of someone who was dying? Would I have ever learned to curb my temper had I not worked for an obnoxiously temperamental boss?
It’s hard to face these things. I’m sure many of us can understand how the older brother chooses to nurse his resentment rather than face his younger brother. How often do we turn away from someone we don’t approve of? How often do we blame others for the state our world is in? How often do we prefer to stand in the field and refuse the gift of love, because love is not enough, not when that guy over there has gotten away with so much?
Now since I’ve opened that can of worms called “having it all,” I must add that St. Paul reminds us that Jesus is the one who truly had it all. Jesus is the son that neither of the two brothers could be. Jesus unites those who are not afraid to be united. Thus it is to the fractious and factional church in Corinth that Paul writes these beautiful words:
If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:
everything old has passed away; see, everything
has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled
us to himself through Christ, and has given us the
ministry of reconciliation. . . For our sake he made
him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might
become the righteousness of God.
When everything old has become new, there are no more prodigal brothers, no more masters, no more slaves, no more warring Democrats and Republicans. For the Prodigal Son is not just a parable about individuals in a family. It is also a parable about societies, about the difficulty of change, the difficulty of difference, the things that drive us apart, the hopes that call us together, the tendency of human beings to be dishonest with ourselves and each other, casting blame upon someone else rather than coming face to face with our own tarnished truth, the great effort of giving birth to a new vision. The Prodigal Son teaches us the dangers of “having it all,” in a possessive sense, for when we put “having” at the center of our lives we will inevitably lose. Our lives are a gift, after all. Our lives are an inheritance which we did nothing to deserve. As the father in the parable shows, God cares less whether we are righteous or successful than whether we are open to the possibility of love. If we’re too convinced of our own goodness, we close up. Deep love comes not from self-sufficiency, but from the mystery and miracle of interdependence. It asserts that “having it all” may be the worst thing we could ever strive for. What we have can’t save us, for we can’t take that with us. All that we can have is God, and God is not a possession.
Lent is the season in which God calls us to get real, to come out of the field and sit at the table with all those parts of ourselves that we’d rather not meet. As this story says so clearly, God isn’t afraid of our sins, so why are we? The Parable of the Prodigal Son shows us that the reason our world is so torn by conflict is not because we are different, but because we have all grown too much alike. And we’re not supposed to be alike. We were created to be different, unique, each an irreplaceable part of a great a magical story, not interchangeable workers, mothers and executives or whatever. Jesus was unique. He walked in love as God loved us and gave his entire inheritance away that we all might be saved. Lent asks us to try this at home. If we dare.
AMEN.