Tolle Lege

     Tim Keller recently published a book called Prodigal God, in which he takes a new look at the familiar Biblical parable of the prodigal son. For anyone who might be unfamiliar with this story, it begins with a young man who asks his father to give him his inheritance immediately. When his father agrees, the son takes the money and spends it all in short order on decadent living. Then a famine comes and the son has spent all of his money; all of his friends abandon him, and he is starving. Finally, he finds a job as a pig keeper, but even the pigs have more food than he does. The son decides that he will return to his father and ask to be allowed to be made a servant in his household, because he knows that he is not worthy to be reinstated as his son. So the son sets out to return home, and when his father sees him coming, he runs out to his son and kisses him. The son tries to tell his father that he wants to be his servant, but his father instead calls the servants to kill the fattened calf and feast because his son who has been lost has returned home. 

     This is the story as it is usually told, but as Keller points out, this is really only half of the parable, because in the story that Jesus tells, there are two brothers. The younger brother is the prodigal, but his older brother stays at home when the younger brother leaves. When the younger son comes home, the older brother is out in the fields, diligently working for their father. He comes home and finds a party going on in his house, so he asks a servant what the cause for celebration is. The servant tells him that his lost brother has come home, but rather than rejoicing, the older brother becomes angry and refuses to go in to the party. His father comes out to ask him to come in, but the older brother still refuses. He tells his father that it isn’t fair that the fattened calf should be killed for his brother who left home, when he has worked faithfully for his father the whole time, and yet his father has never even given him and his friends so much as a goat for them to celebrate with. But the father says only that they must rejoice because their son and brother was lost and has been found again.

     Keller points out in Prodigal God that too much attention has been paid to the younger brother in this story to the exclusion of the elder. Instead of just a story of God’s mercy in accepting repentant sinners like the prodigal brother, Keller says that the parable is about two different ways of being alienated from God. When Jesus told his parables, his audience consisted of both the people who the Bible calls “tax collectors and sinners” and the “Pharisees and teachers of the law.” Keller says that the younger brother represents the way that the tax collectors and sinners behave towards God, and the Pharisees and teachers of the law are represented by the older brother. 

     Like the younger brother, some of Jesus’ listeners are sinners who have not tried to live righteous lives and who do what they want to do. These are the people who need to realize that the way that they live is not in accordance with God’s will and that they do not deserve to be accepted as God’s children. They need to repent of their sins and, like the younger brother, ask to be let in to the Kingdom of God. As Jesus makes clear in this parable, such a repentant sinner will be welcomed into the Kingdom with open arms. The older brother, on the other hand, is someone who has followed the teachings of the law for his entire life. He has followed all of the rules, and to everyone around him, he seems like a righteous man. However, as the parable demonstrates, such a person nevertheless has a warped understanding of how to relate to God. The older brother thinks that by living a good life and following the rules that God has given him, he has earned himself a place in the Kingdom of God. Keller points out that even more than the younger brother, the older brother has cut himself off from the love and forgiveness of God. Since no one can truly attain to a level of righteousness that holy enough to reach God, the legalistic attitude of the older brother prevents him from repenting and receiving the forgiveness that he needs just as much as the younger brother does. In Prodigal God, Keller points out that though both living for ourselves an trying to prove our righteousness to God result in alienation from God, believing that one is righteous by following the law is the more dangerous position. It is so because it denies that the sinner is in need of the unconditional forgiveness that a prodigal brother embraces.