remembering the original context of the story. This parable, we said, was not primarily designed as a therapeutic word of comfort to those sinners Jesus was eating with. It was a Stealth bomber charged with the mission of exploding the complacency of those so-called 'saints' who were criticizing him for eating with the 'sinners'. And it is those so-called 'saints' that this elder brother so clearly represents. This is evident from what he says about himself.
‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders’ (Luke 15:29).
There is the perfect son for you. Surely he has to be Jesus' ideal. For years he'd been serving his father, and had never rebelled. Or had he? Is there perhaps just a hint of petulance, of whining self-pity, in that phrase, 'All these years I've been slaving for you'? Are we wrong to detect the thinly veiled resentment of one who'd been 'working my fingers to the bone for you'? We know exactly what people mean when they talk like that. His do-gooding, you see, has no more liberated him as a personality than his brother's licentiousness had. Rather, it has rendered him humourless, prudish, constrained in his affections, incapable of enjoying himself, repressed, inhibited, pouting, and censorious. He condemns his brother, not because he really feels outraged by his brother's behaviour, but because he envies him. Listen to what he says about him: 'He has squandered your property with prostitutes' (Luke 15:30)—the unspoken grudge being, 'I would like to have done that, but I never did. And you've never rewarded me with a roast goat so that I could celebrate with my friends.' He's jealous of his brother—it is as simple as that.
There are hundreds of people like that today: respectable, conventional, good people. They look down their noses at the permissive society; they curl their lip at the
