"Return of the Prodigal Son • Part 2
"MISSING THE PARTY: The Journey of the Elder Son" (Luke 15:11–32)
Introduction: Return to Rembrandt’s Painting (17th c)
Thank you for inviting me back for Part Two of the parable and painting. I've enjoyed preaching the gospel and sharing my faith with you. And the core of my faith is this conviction: At the heart of the universe is a parental heart of unconditional Love; a Living God of Wisdom and Compassionate who desires healing and restoration of all creation, and will not rest until all God's people are home.
Let’s look again at Rembrandt’s masterpiece. (slide 1) At least five figures — maybe others in the background. A platform where the central drama occurs in the spotlight. A darker platform with a dark divide between the two sons.
Let’s focus on the shadowed figure to the right, which most commentators identify as the elder son.(slide 2). He’s upright, composed, watching. His expression is hard to read: withdrawn, perhaps judgmental, perhaps something closer to longing. He stands apart from the reunion, hands clasped in a tight, controlled way, across a dark divide that Rembrandt painted deliberately.
Last week we followed the journey of the younger son (back to slide 1): his rebellion, the far country, ruin, comes to his senses, returns home — met not with probation but with a robe, a ring, a feast. We understand that journey. A simple ‘lost and found’ story.
And we understand something of Rembrandt’s own journey — from the reckless young painter of his early self-portraits to the old, humbled, half-blind man who finally got in touch with a tenderness and compassion to welcome a family member home.
But today we consider the other figure. The one standing silently in the dark. The one who never left home.
The Elder Son: Never Left, Lost at Home
There’s something familiar about the elder son. His journey is a more complicated story.
The elder son did everything right. While his younger brother was off squandering the family inheritance in reckless living, the elder son stayed home and held things together. He worked the land. He managed the estate. He kept the accounts, honored his father’s name in the community, and showed up day after day without complaint. Dutiful. Obedient. Faithful. Committed. His father relied on him completely.
And yet — when the music starts and the celebration begins for his returning brother, the elder son is outside in the dark. And he will not go in. He never left home. But he lost his way. Lost at Home.
How many of us know that way of being lost? Faithful, responsible, present — and yet somehow not quite at the party. Maybe you are the oldest child in your family; or grew up in a home where the older sibling was expected to be the standard-bearer while the younger ones seemed to get away with everything. Different expectations. Double standards. Not quite fair. It can breed resentment. And judgment. And sometimes a bitterness that can last for decades. There’s probably a bit of the elder brother in all of us.
I. The Elder Son’s Story: Coming in from the Field
The Gospel text begins right at the peak of the father’s joy:
“For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”
And then:
“Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing.” (Luke 15:25)
Of course he was in the field. Where else would he be? That’s who he is. While his brother was doing his thing and finding himself, the elder son was here — working the land, keeping faith, holding everything together. For years. Without recognition. Without reward.
He hears music. Asks a servant what’s going on. When he learns that his brother has come home and his father has thrown a party, something hardens in him. He will not go in.
The Father Goes Out to Him— just as he ran down the road for the younger son, now he comes out to find the elder son standing in the dark.
And then we hear everything the elder son has been holding for years, finally said out loud:
“Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back — who has devoured your property with prostitutes — you killed the fatted calf for him!” (Luke 15:29–30)
Notice how the younger sibling: “this son of yours” — not “my brother.” And how he identifies himself: “working like a slave” — feeling like a hired hand. Obedience without intimacy. Duty without delight. Earning what was always freely given.
Hear the Father’s Word
“Son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” (Luke 15:31)
The father does not rebuke him. He does not defend the party. He simply reminds him of what has been true all along: You are always with me. You have had what your brother was starving for — presence, proximity, relationship — every single day. The inheritance was never at risk. Everything I have is yours.
The elder son has been living in his father’s house as though he were a hired hand. He has had access to the feast all along and never claimed it. He has been so busy being faithful, he forgot that he was loved. And somehow the spirit of resentment got a hold of him.
II. What Is Resentment--My Teacher Henri Nouwen
My Teacher
I want to tell you about my teacher, Henri Nouwen (you may have read one of his books). He was my major professor in seminary, and remained my teacher and friend all my professional life — a spiritual guide and model for how to be honest about the inner life. He was the kind of teacher who noticed you, and if you were struggling a bit and needed encouragement… (first lunch with Henri story)
Fr. Henri Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, a psychologist, and a professor of theology at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. Then he left it all to become a pastor to people with severe disabilities at L’Arche Daybreak community in Toronto. One of the most widely read spiritual writers of the twentieth century. Here is one of his forty published books: The Return of the Prodigal Son.
I’ve learned so much from him about Rembrandt, and about Jesus.
Henri spent 3 days sitting with Rembrandt’s painting at the Hermitage, and meditating on this parable — and gradually recognizing himself in the portrait. Not only as the younger son, always searching for home in the wrong places. But also, as the elder son who was lost while still at home.
Henri was in fact the eldest son in his Dutch Catholic family. Dutiful, obedient, careful to follow the proper path: called to the priesthood, he says, at age six. Ordained as a young man. Earned advanced degrees. A prestigious academic career as “priest-psychologist.” He did everything right. But never felt fully appreciated.
Yet underneath all of that faithfulness, something was quietly accumulating that he could barely name.
He finally wrote about it:
“All my life I have harbored a strange curiosity for the disobedient life that I myself didn’t dare to live, but which I saw being lived by many around me. I did all the proper things, mostly complying with the agendas set by the many parental figures in my life — teachers, spiritual directors, bishops, and popes — but at the same time I often wondered why I didn’t have the courage to ‘run away’ as the younger son did.” — Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 70
And then his deeper admission:
“The more I reflect on the elder son in me, the more I realize how deeply rooted this form of lostness really is and how hard it is to return home from there. My resentment is not… [rational]. It is far more pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue.” — Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son
Attached itself to the underside of my virtue. I have turned that phrase over many times since Henri first said it. The resentment doesn’t wear the face of anger. It wears the face of virtue (fairness, legitimate grievance). And that is exactly why it is so hard to see, and so hard to let go of.
Resentment Is Cold Anger
Henri defined resentment clinically as well as pastorally: resentment is cold anger.
Hot anger, when we name it honestly, loses some of its power over us. But when we swallow those feelings — when we don’t name them, don’t express them safely — they linger. They harden. They become cold anger. Resentment.
“Resentment, the curse of the faithful, the virtuous, the obedient, and the hardworking, settles itself in the human heart and causes havoc.” — Henri Nouwen, Home Tonight
The curse of the faithful. Not the rebels, not the prodigals — they crash and come home and the party is for them. The ones most at risk are the ones who stayed. The ones who did everything right and watched someone else receive what they felt they had earned.
Henri noticed this in himself with painful clarity. He said that at the very moment he wanted to act from his most generous self, he would find himself caught in resentment. Just when he was doing his best work, he found himself wondering why others didn’t give as much as he did. He called it the problem of the virtuous complainer.
There is something strangely liberating about naming that. If the great Henri Nouwen struggled with the elder son in himself, then perhaps I need not be quite so ashamed of it in myself.
[The Heavy Burden
The Desert Fathers understood this. In the fifth-century Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Abba John turned to his monks one day and asked: “Why don’t you throw off the heavy burden and take the light burden?”
The puzzled monks asked what he meant. Abba John replied:
“The heavy burden is judging other people, and the light burden is accepting the judgment of others.” — Abba John — quoted in Nouwen, Spiritual Formation, p. 97 Keeping score. Maintaining the ledger of who deserves what. Measuring your faithfulness against someone else’s failure. That is the heaviest load a person can carry. And it is exactly the burden the elder son has been carrying through all those years in the field.]
III. What Is Gratitude?
The opposite of resentment is gratitude. The word comes from the Latin gratia — favor, grace. Gratitude and grace share the same root, and that is not an accident. Gratitude is not counting your blessings or comparing yourself favorably to someone worse off.
Henri described it this way:
“Gratitude is the attitude that enables us to let go of anger, receive the hidden gifts of those we want to serve, and make these gifts visible to the community as a source of celebration. Gratitude is at the heart of celebration and ministry.”
But here is where I want to go further than the self-help version of this teaching.
Some people say: just choose gratitude. Just be grateful. And they mean well. But for many people in deep resentment, that counsel is unhelpful — it can feel like one more thing they’ve failed at.
You cannot will your way out of resentment any more than you can will yourself to fall asleep. The harder you try, the more awake you are.
Gratitude is not a switch you flip. It is a gift — not fully within our power to choose.
The gift of gratitude, when it comes, is God’s to give. In God’s good time.
IV. Moving from Resentment to Gratitude
So is there anything we can do to loosen our hold on resentment and open ourselves to gratitude?
Here is a simple three-step practice. It won’t get us all the way there by itself — only grace can do that — but it prepares the way. We can’t make it rain. But we can cultivate the ground.
1. Name It
The elder son names his resentment to his father’s face. All of it — the years, the labor, the lack of recognition, the goat never given, the fatted calf for the prodigal. He doesn’t stuff it. He says it out loud.
[Personal Illustration]: To say outloud to God: “Listen! honestly: this is where I am. This is what I am holding…”
That honesty — that naming — is the beginning of the journey. Not its end.
2. Accept It
This is what I’ve got in my hands. Maybe I’m holding it too tightly. But right now, it’s here — in my hands, in my gut — and I accept it. I own it. It’s mine.
Acceptance is not resignation. It is not saying the resentment is right, or that the grievance isn’t real — it is. It is simply honesty about what is true right now. And it is the necessary step before surrender becomes possible. Acceptance is facing what is. With open hands, not clenched fists.
3. Surrender It
This is the hardest part. And the most important.
We do what the 12-step tradition has always known: we admit we are powerless over this. We come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us. We make a decision — not to change ourselves by an act of will, but to stop defending the resentment. To release our grip. To say to God:
I cannot move from here on my own. But I am willing. Make me willing to be willing.
That is not the same as choosing gratitude. It is something more like surrender. It is standing at the door of the party and saying: I cannot make myself go in. But I am not going to walk away from the house.
A simple gesture: turn your hands over. Palms down. Let what you have been clutching fall into the hands of God.
And then — wait. Trust. Hope. Stay open. There may be something on the other side of that surrender. Joy.
Joy and resentment cannot coexist. One of them has to go. And the invitation of the father — standing outside in the dark, beside the elder son — is the invitation to let resentment go, and move toward gratitude.
As Reba McEntire often said to her friends in her old TV sitcom: "I've got just one word for you: LETITGO.
Or, as the 'hot Rabbi" in the current TV series "Nobody Wants This" advises his Gentile girl friend and others who are tempted to get angry or hold a grudge: 1) Accept, 2) Let Go, 3) Move On!
Conclusion
What happened to the elder son? Did he miss the party? Did he come in from the cold? Was he persuaded by the father to walk through that door? Did he sit at the same table as his brother?
The Gospel doesn’t say. Rembrandt’s painting gives no clue. The elder brother’s story ends without resolution. Jesus leaves it open.
The parable is addressed to everyone standing outside in the dark right now, hearing the music, feeling the cold.
“Child, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. Come in. You are home.”
• We cannot make ourselves go in. But we can stay close to the door.
• We can name what holds us back.
• We can accept our humanness and our limited power to change.
• We can be willing to be made willing.
• [We can hope, and even pray, for the grace to exchange the heavy burden for the lighter one — and to receive the gift of gratitude in God’s good time.]
One more thing.
It’s not in the text, and Rembrandt doesn’t show it. But here is what I believe:
The Father is not going back inside without us. The party is not a party until all his children are home.
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