By Reverend Laurie DeMott

When I was a teenager, I hated the prayer of confession in worship because I never felt that I had done anything in need of absolution. I was basically a good and boring child, and so I would sit in my pew silently contradicting the minister's words, "I didn't do that, and I didn't do that, and I certainly didn't do that." While I have grown to a little less self-righteousness as I've gotten older, there are still times when all of us must come to church feeling that this week we actually had a pretty good week doing what is right and giving of ourselves to others in sacrificial love, and so if we have anything to confess, it's that our sympathies today lie with the older brother. We ask with him, "Is God's amazing grace only for the wretches after all? What about the rest of us, whose sins are less glamorous because frankly we have always believed in behaving ourselves and would never have been so rude as to take advantage of our father's generosity in the first place? What then, must we sin so that grace may abound?"

Today I am not preaching on the parable of the prodigal son. Today I am preaching on the parable of the older, responsible, and embittered brother. I am preaching to all of you who listen to Jesus' story and secretly mutter under your breath, "That older brother has a point. I mean, all of that stuff about forgiveness is nice and all but when it comes down to it, it doesn't exactly seem fair, does it?"

Too often, if the older brother is mentioned at all in sermons, he gets a dressing down for being such a curmudgeon that he can't share in the joy of his younger brother's salvation, but in fact, I think that the older brother's frustration is one that many of us experience, not out of envy or self-pity, but because we honestly believe that God is a God of justice and that flagrantly selfish behavior should be disciplined not rewarded if we are to ensure a society based on equity and fair dealings with one another. In other words, in this parable, Jesus is presenting a story not just about two brothers but about two competing values -- mercy and justice -- both values that are promoted in the biblical testimony as being part of the character of God. When the older brother resists the father's forgiveness of his younger brother, he is appealing to the God of justice. He's appealing to the God of justice who delivers the Ten Commandments to Moses so that the Hebrew people will create a society that is impartial and fair. He's appealing to the God of justice spoken of by the prophets who promise that the powerful will not be able to exploit the weak. He is appealing to the God of justice who metes out discipline in the exile to the wayward Israel when they run after other gods and ignore the prophets' warnings.

For Israel to see God as a God of justice was to believe, unlike many other societies at the time, that their God was predictable and steadfast. Other cultures' gods might toy with their mortals, tricking them or thwarting them on a whim and exercising their power over their charges like puppet masters, but Israel believed that their God was ultimately trustworthy. You knew what you were going to get from God because God had told you and God would stick to the rules. In a time when people were often at the mercy of the uncontrollable forces of nature and the arbitrary moods of the powerful, a constant, consistent, and always fair God was a God to be cherished.

Israel's belief in a God of justice and fair dealings was carried into the Christian faith and came eventually to inform our own system of law and equitable dealings. While there are times when we may cynically say, “Whoever said that life is fair?” the reality is that we do expect fairness in our social dealings. I assume, for example, that if the police ticket me, it’s because I am breaking the law and not just because the police are in a bad mood that day or because I’m the wrong color or because they decided that on Tuesdays they were going to ticket every fifth blue car that went by. We expect fairness in the way rewards and punishments are given out. And we try to treat our children with reasonable equity: when we hear of a family that lavishes gifts and attention on one child while cursing or ignoring the other, we are offended by their unbalanced treatment knowing the years of therapy in store for that neglected sibling. The God of the older brother, the God of justice who tries to make sure things are square for all of us, is our God too and is part of what we love about our God and count on in our dealings with one another. God is just; God's commandments are fair; and we will each be treated equally in the eyes of God.

And so the older brother's reaction is a reasonable one because he raises the legitimate question of what happens to justice when mercy enters the picture? Is the God of justice always trumped by the God of mercy? Does forgiveness win out over fairness every time? If so, then why preach a God of justice at all?

The elder brother stood in his neatly plowed field where he had spent months and months of labor trying to do what was right, while his brother lived the good life, and he thought to himself, "If in the end, we both get rewarded, then why am I sweating my life away in this field? If mercy always trumps justice, then why not just sin so that grace may abound?"

God is a just God. God is a merciful God. Can these two faces of God co-exist or shall we all simply sin so that grace may abound?

I believe that these two aspects of God's nature do co-exist and that Jesus' whole ministry was his attempt to teach us that not only is God a God of both justice and mercy but that God's very justice depends on God's mercy. God's justice cannot happen, cannot be manifested, is in fact meaningless, without God laying down a foundation of mercy first. God's grace is not justice ignored; God's grace is justice restored.

Robert Schuller tells a story of a time when his son Bob lied to him. He writes, "Bob was still [a teenager], dating Linda, [the woman he later married but in these early years he was still] only allowed to see her on certain nights. Well, one night he wanted to see her without permission and [so he lied and] told us he was at his friend's house. When we found out the truth, [I was angry and he was rebellious refusing to see the seriousness of the offense.] Finally I took a fine English tea cup, smashed it, and told Bob that as his punishment he had to glue that cup back together again. He look at the pile of tiny pieces and said, 'I don't know if I can do that," and I said, "Well, that's how hard it is to build confidence and trust again." The outcome was that Bob spent literally weeks carefully gluing the pieces together until he finished and he learned a very important lesson."

In Jesus’ parable, the bitter older brother saw only that his brother who had squandered everything was seemingly completely restored and it felt unfair. He thought his younger brother was beating the system -- having his fun and getting his reward as well. What he could not or would not see, however, was that even the embrace of his father would never erase the consequences of the younger son’s past. The younger brother had not only squandered his wealth, he had also squandered the trust of his friends and community; he had thrown away his self-regard; he had stripped himself of any illusion that he was a man of strong character. The father couldn’t give those things back to the younger son because he couldn’t wipe away the memories from others of what the son had done. There is no such thing really as “forgive and forget” because even when wounds heal, the scars marking their memory remain.

The older brother, on the other hand, had these things still. Trusted by his community, knowing in his own heart that he was a man of integrity, the older brother had no ghosts to contend with that would plague him in sleepless nights. He could walk around his town knowing that he would receive respect from others. His relationships with his friends and family remained whole with no past history to carefully avoid. Most of the “younger sons” I have known are all too aware of the pain they have caused to others and themselves, pain that will never be completely erased. What Jesus offered was simply a way to restore the balance. The older son holds in his hands trust, self worth, integrity, and confidence while the younger son has only one thing in his otherwise empty hands: forgiveness.

God's mercy restores the balance so that all people may stand equally before God's justice offering either our righteousness or our forgiveness as proof of our love and commitment to Christ and to one another. I don’t know about you, but that seems more than fair to me.

1. Dr. Robert H. Schuller, Homemade, Jan 1985, paraphrased.