But the son answered his father and exclaimed, “WTF!!!” Luke 15:29 (my translation)

This midweek post tacks on to my previous post about the Prodigal Son. There, we talked about the father’s reckless love for his son and how this resembles God’s reckless love for us. Today we’ll reflect on the brother’s reaction to all this, which I think is actually our reaction to this…which can be summarized in the intentionally extreme interpretation of verse 29 offered above.

God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, our Faith – are all deeply countercultural. We live today in a world dominated by – perhaps even obsessed with – merit. We reward hard work. We celebrate success.  We love triumph.  We talked on Sunday about how this is reflected in parenting. Think about parenting today for a minute.  How much are we pushing for success?  How deeply do we want our kids to go to great colleges?  Think about youth sports, which in years past were largely limited to playgrounds during free time.  They are now full-on, year-round commitments.   

Rarely do we question any of this. After all, what is there to question about getting good grades, or maybe swimming a great butterfly?  What could be wrong with hustling for great results?

Nothing, in and of itself, except when, in doing all this hustling, we lose track of a crucial fact that the Prodigal Son story reminds us of: that God actually, and always, celebrates us.  He specifically celebrates us in our lacking of achievement. He delights in us even when we screw up. He embraces us not in our return from Harvard, or from getting an Olympic Gold medal, but simply in our return, and specifically in our return from failure and wretchedness and disgrace, even if those things are supposedly self-inflicted. 

Almost scandalously, God does not compare.  He doesn’t look at the people who worked hard and did all the right things more favorably that those who went astray.  He simply loves.

Well, this all gets the Prodigal Son’s brother super bent. You are celebrating that fool while I’ve been working away all these years? You’re gonna go on and roast the fattened calf I raised for him? The same guy who asked for your inheritance and then spent it all? We are throwing a party for that guy?

Is this not us? What would we say if at the high school graduation we let the kids who barely got over the proverbial line do the commencement address? What if the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to survivors of drug addiction?  How do we look at the dutiful children when compared to the no-so-dutiful ones?  The high achievers versus the low achievers?  What do we think we deserve relative to what others deserve? 

God doesn’t want us to fail our classes or stop doing things like sports. God doesn’t want us to not throw graduation parties or not compete or not achieve. But what the Gospel reminds us of is that these things cannot be conditions to love; they are certainly not conditions to God’s love.  As the father says to the brother, “everything I have is already yours.” 

We don’t earn God’s love.  We already have it and it is universal.  It extends to the marginalized, the friendless, those without any followers on Instagram or whatever the medium is, and those who have completely screwed up.  That could be others or that could be us.  In all our busy schedules and various stressors, I think this is Good News we might hold on to and find grounding in.