Luke 15:25-32
“You can leave without a bus ticket, of course. You can depart in your heart and take an existential journey to anywhere but the ‘here’ that’s stifling you. You can be sleeping in the same bed and be a million miles away from your partner. You can still be living in your childhood bedroom and have departed for a distant country. You can play the role of the ‘good son’ with a heart that roams in a twilight beyond good and evil. You can even show up to church every week with a voracious appetite for idols. Not all prodigals need a passport.” ~ James K.A. Smith
Main Idea: Self-righteousness is a dangerous, blinding, and suffocating sin that must be remedied through an encounter with the grace of God.
I. The Evidences of Self-Righteousness (15:25-30)
The older brother’s attitude & actions reveal 4 evidences of self-righteousness:
Instead of joy, there is skepticism (15:26). The son does not trust his father’s judgment and refuses to enter into the party until further investigation.
Instead of celebration, there is anger (15:28a). His younger brother has graciously been welcomed home “safe and sound” (‘clean’), and he is enraged by this perceived injustice.
Instead of assurance, there is insecurity (15:29). Rather than being confident in his father’s love, he feels slighted and is jealous.
Instead of love, there is distance (15:30). Self-righteousness inevitably leads to tribalism, as we stand over others in judgment and superiority.
Jesus is trying to show that even though the older brother never leaves home, he is lost too. Where are we seeing these evidences in our own life? Might we be lost, even though we’ve never left “home?”
II. The Danger of Self-Righteousness (15:28-29)
While both the younger and the older son are lost, only one of them realizes it. This is the great danger of self-righteousness: it blinds us from our true spiritual state and leaves us more lost than those who know their more obvious need for grace.
“It may be that Jesus is trying to say that while both forms of the self-salvation project are equally wrong, each one is not equally dangerous. One of the ironies of the parable is now revealed. The younger son’s flight from the father was crashingly obvious. He left the father literally, physically, and morally. Though the older son stayed at home, he was actually more distant and alienated from the father than his brother, because he was blind to his true condition… If anything, the idolatry and slavery of religion is more dangerous than the idolatry and slavery of irreligion, because it is less obvious. The irreligious person knows he is far away from God, but the religious person does not.” ~ Tim Keller
The younger brother knows his lostness, but the older brother can’t recognize this in his own life. He is blind to his own sin and need for mercy while simultaneously being praised by others for his morality. His “goodness” causes him to have a warped view of his Father, and his words betray him: “all these years I have served (lit. “slaved”) you…
“The obedient and dutiful life of which I am proud or for which I am praised feels, sometimes, like a burden that was laid on my shoulders and continues to oppress me, even when I have accepted it to such a degree that I cannot throw it off. I have no difficulty identifying with the elder son of the parable who complained: ‘All these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed any orders of yours, yet you never offered me so much as a young goat for me to celebrate with my friends.’ In this complaint, obedience and duty have become a burden, and service has become slavery… With all of that, there came a seriousness, a moralistic intensity - and even a touch of fanaticism- that made it increasingly difficult to feel at home in my Father’s house. I became less free, less spontaneous, less playful, and others came to see me more and more as a somewhat ‘heavy’ person.” ~ Henri Nouwen
These feelings cause the older son to weaponize his obedience and his goodness against his Father. He thinks that the father owes him for his service. Similar to the younger brother, he ultimately just wanted the Father’s stuff, but not the Father himself.
The most haunting part of the whole passage is that the younger son never enters the party. The ending is a cliffhanger. This is intentional from Jesus, as he tells this story to a group of older-brother types (Pharisees & Scribes - 15:1-3), inviting them to consider their own response to the celebration.
III. The Remedy for Self-Righteousness (15:28a, 31-32)
The remedy for both younger brother & older bother lostness is the same: it is an encounter with the love of the Father (cf. Rom. 2:4). Just as the Father bore the shame of running to meet his younger son, he embarrassingly left his own celebration to compassionately deal with his pouting sin.
He goes outside to “entreat” (lit. come alongside) the older brother (15:28b)
He reminds him of his status of son; he is not a servant or a slave but his very own heir (15:31a)
He reminds his son of his presence (“you are always with me”) and “all that is mine is yours”
He invites his son to see that it was “fitting” and necessary to celebrate his brother’s return; he was dead, but now alive; lost, but now found. How could we do anything else but celebrate?
There is a glaring difference between this parable and the two preceding. In the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, a diligent search is conducted to find that which was lost. In the case of the lost son, no one goes on a search. It’s a glaring and obvious omission from Jesus.
The older son refuses to go on a search for his younger brother and refuses to celebrate his homecoming because it was going to come at a great cost to himself. If his son is truly welcomed back into the family, his inheritance would be divided once more, and it would be costly relationally.
The good news of the gospel is that we have not been given a Pharisee for a brother, but instead we have a true and better older brother in Jesus! He was willing to cross from heaven to earth on a rescue mission to “seek and save the lost” (Lk. 19:10). He has “not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance”
