Always in the Right
These last couple of weeks, I have spent more time than usual with my twin four-year-old nephews, Nathan and Matthew. I’ve built a lot of towers with blocks. I’ve make-believed a lot of visits to the restaurant. And I’ve played a lot of games: board games, guessing games, run-around-outside games. Nathan and Matthew love life right now, and I love it sharing it with them. And as I watch them, I regularly glean insight into myself because they are like me, but they’re more transparent. They don’t hide their feelings as much. Their desires are a little more obvious.
One thing that I’ve observed, is the rather one-sided nature of their justice system. Each one of them is always in the right! When there is a dispute of ownership, I hear angry complaints and accusations, “But it’s mine! I was playing with it first!” Yet moments later, the helpless victim becomes the offender. And when he is confronted with his wrongdoing, there appears on his face a look of pure innocence, as he justifies his behavior in the most creative of ways. “Oh, well, Uncle Jonny…he doesn’t really want to play with this toy. I think he wants to play with that toy!” All of this while his brother smolders and looks with envy at the toy that has been taken from his hand. Needless to say, stories like this one do not hold up in the court of Uncle Jonny.
Life Is Not Fair!
So, when I read today’s scripture, I am convicted. Because I am not sure that the case of the prodigal son would hold up in the court of Uncle Jonny either. Of course, this fraternal conflict has escalated way beyond a disputed toy. It is a matter of disputed inheritance. The dutiful older brother has watched his younger brother disrespect his father by demanding his inheritance early. He has watched him waste his inheritance in shameful behavior, bringing dishonor to the family’s name. But when he returns, his father gives him still more. I hope we can all be honest enough to sympathize a little with the older brother, because I think we all probably feel the same way from time to time. Life just isn’t fair!
According to the desert tradition of early Christianity, anger is the deadly thought that life should be fair. Good deeds should meet with reward, bad deeds should meet with punishment. The catch is that anger always presumes itself to be the proper judge. What is easy to spot in four-year-olds, may be a bit more difficult to spot in ourselves, but it’s true of anger at any age. The angry person is always in the right. Just a coincidence?
A close cousin of anger is envy, or what the desert tradition originally identified simply as sadness. Envy is the peculiar sadness that originates in another person’s blessing or success. Usually operating by means of comparison and competition, envy feels “less than” because someone else has more. It is the deadly thought that we are the center of the universe, the standard by which life ought to be dealt out. Notice how the older brother weighs his younger brother’s behavior up against his own and finds it wanting.
But his envy and his anger distort reality. The older brother feels like a slave, like life is all work, no reward. He is blind to his father’s love: all the meals prepared for him, all the wisdom shared with him, companionship in days of difficulty—everything his brother had lived without. He has forgotten all of this.
If we boil them down, anger and envy behave in the world a little bit like a petty police officer who has taken something personally, who cannot see the bigger picture. Their concern is not the wellbeing of everyone. Their concern is the settlement of a personal grievance. The tragic result is what I saw in my nephews. One becomes angry and refuses to play with the other. We see the same tragic result in Jesus’ parable. “He became angry and refused to go in” (15:28). Envy and anger hold us back from God’s feast, God’s table of reconciliation. They hold us back from relationship, from communion, from the joy of God’s salvation.
Acceptance
If anger and envy behave a little bit like a narrow-minded cop, then what is the opposite? How does God respond to the hurt and conflict in our world? There are two divine metaphors that predominate in scripture. There is the divine shepherd who cares for all his flock. And there is the divine parent: several times scripture compares God to a mother eagle (e.g., Isa 31:5), and Jesus regularly refers to God as a loving father. So maybe our image of God is one practical place to begin repenting from anger and envy. How do we see God? As a cosmic cop, out to write tickets and dole out punishments? If this is the case, then we may be predisposed to anger and envy. We may risk reducing God to a spiritual sidekick who validates our self-centered agendas. But what if we were to know God as a parent, who cares for her all her children?
The Desert tradition of early Christianity proposes two remedies for envy and anger: kindness for envy and patience for anger. At their root, kindness and patience are what we might call acceptance. Acceptance of God’s kingdom in place of our own. Accepting God’s kingdom means accepting that life is not fair, as Jesus makes clear in his parables. There is the wasteful son who is embraced and given everything; there is the worker who receives for one hour the same wages as the one who worked all day. That life is not fair is also made clear in the beatitudes, where Jesus declares blessing for the poor and the persecuted and the grieving, everyone who seems to have ended up on the wrong side of life. Accepting that life is not fair is not, however, just a passive resignation. It is an active trust in the divine parent who loves and cares for us all. It is accepting that God’s justice is not fairness but grace. It does not happen through force, but through love. It does not happen with a sword or a gun, but with a cross—one that we are all called to bear in love.
Right or Happy?
I want to share one other observation from my extended time with my nephews. One afternoon, I went to wake them up from their nap. As I opened the door, I was immediately given a fright. Nathan was not in his bed. Nor could I find him anywhere else in the room! But before my worry could grow into outright terror, I spotted two lumps underneath the blankets in Matthew’s bed. Nathan had crawled out of his bed and joined his brother. They looked as though they might have in the womb, both curled against one another, both faces content and at rest. It was perhaps the happiest I’d seen them.
And I thought of that old saying, “Would you rather be right or happy?” Because being right all the time is an exhausting and lonely endeavor. Just look at the older brother, filled with envy and anger, feeling like a slave. The older brother in Jesus’ parable is right in every way, yet he is bitterly unhappy. His story is a tragedy. He refuses to go into his father’s home because life isn’t fair.
It is a helpful lesson for us who may occasionally confuse ourselves as always being in the right. The kingdom of God is not about fairness and a God who measures out consequences. It is better than that. The kingdom of God is about justice. It is a kingdom where God the loving parent seeks the wellbeing of all his children, where consequences do not have the final word. It is a kingdom where the offended are blessed and lifted up, where the offenders are forgiven and invited back into the fullness of life. It is a kingdom that happens not by force but by nurture and care, like a seed planted and watered and tended, as it grows and grows.
To repent from anger and envy, to begin thinking differently, I am encouraged to ask myself a couple of questions. First, the tried and true: “Would I rather be right or happy?” (And I might find it helpful to remember Nathan and Matthew, how they were happiest when they were together.) And as I take a deep breath, and as I remember that I’m not the center of the universe and it’s not all about me, I may ask myself a second question: “Would I rather live in God’s kingdom or my own?”
Prayer
God of infinite nurture,Like a mother eagle brooding upon her young,
Like a loving father who declares,
“Child, you are always with me,
And all that is mine is yours”—
Soften our hearts
To let go of our ways
Of comparison, judgment, and retribution
…
And to accept your strange ways
Of love and grace.
In Christ, brother of all: Amen.
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