The Shame of Two Brothers

I want to look at one of Jesus’ most famous parables to dive a little deeper into how we try to project strength (trying to live in the long shadow of the law) and see the two main ways we often react when dealing with and trying to manage shame in our lives.

It is classically called the parable of the Prodigal Son found in Luke 15, but this can be misleading as it keeps the focus primarily on the younger son. At first glance, the younger son does seem like the bigger offender in the story and the grace he is given is undeniably astounding, but Jesus is making a very significant point about the older brother too. In truth, we should probably just follow Tim Keller’s example and call the parable The Prodigal God because the father in the story is truly the recklessly extravagant one in this story. To save space I am going to just provide you with the link to the text here if you haven’t read it before or in a long time.

Each son in Jesus’ masterful story represents how we often react to shame in our lives. While we look at this, I am going to be drawing on some common family dynamics that I believe transcend culture – they are part of the original culture of family, and we see them play out across Scripture. Jesus in his genius knew that getting into the family would have the most universal application because no matter where we are right now with our family relationships we all still come from some kind of family. Dr. Murray Bowen was the first to fully develop the family systems theory (which I commend to you if you want to gain more understanding of yourself and your family of origin), and we will see how it plays a huge factor in this story.

First, the older brother. The story begins with the younger brother, but I want to start with the older brother because he was the firstborn and I think his behavior can help us fill in some of the back story. The older brother is a typical firstborn child in that he is the rule follower – firstborn children don’t have to do much to gain the attention of their parents but they learn pretty quickly that to get the right kind of attention, namely praise and approval, they just need to follow the rules. They need to do the right things to please their parents – so they do, and it works beautifully until a younger sibling is born

When a sibling is thrown into the mix the firstborn usually doubles-down on this behavior to draw their parent’s attention back to themselves. The younger sibling is a competitor that can unseat them as the focus of their parent. And so, we see the arena in which shame begins to operate for the older sibling. They start to doubt their parents’ love for them – Do they really approve of me? Am I still important to them? I need to do more to make them love me more. To make it feel like it used to before my stupid brother came along.

If you read between the lines when the older brother is talking to his father you can hear that he behaved the way he did, always being the good rule follower, to get his father’s approval. . .and you can hear the implicit message of shame. My father doesn’t care about me as much as my younger brother. He loves him more, and this party proves it. You’ve killed the fattened calf for this disobedient jerk of son of yours, and you never even gave me a young goat! Can you hear that internal message? No matter what I do it’s never enough. It is the lie of Satan and our sin. He didn’t really know his father – he wasn’t sure of his father’s love – he thought he had to earn it – to perform. And that lie drove him onto the path of self-righteousness, which ended up causing him to actually despise and resent his father’s grace. He hated that his father was merciful to his brother, and it caused him to disown his brother. He had no mercy for him, no compassion for him. In fact, he was like those worldly leaders from my last post that projected strength and control, but inside he was filled with insecurity and jealousy.

He was jealous that the younger brother got to go off and do everything that the he wished he could do, but never did because he was too busy keeping the rules thinking that would make him the father’s favorite. But his brother comes back gets away with rebelling against everything! Such injustice! That lie of having to earn his father’s approval through performance blinded him to the truth of his own situation – that all that the father had was his. He never lacked anything. You can miss it sometimes when you read the story, but at the beginning when the younger son comes asking for his inheritance early the father doesn’t just give it to him alone. Jesus tells us the father splits his wealth between the two sons. Jesus says, “And he divided his property between them” (Luke 15:12). He gives both of them their inheritance early. SO, the older brother was completely wrong in his assessment of the situation. His self-righteousness, as a result of his shame, blinded him to his father’s radical love and provision for him too. There was no preferential treatment here.

Second, the younger brother. The second-born (or third or fourth, etc.) differs from the first in that they have an example to follow. Some else paved the way for them and blazed the trail, but as a result they also have never known the undivided attention of their parents. They have always had someone to compete with in order to get the praise and approval they so need from their parents. It’s important to note that this is a legitimate need that every child has. Every child needs connection with their parents. Every child needs repeated affirmation, praise, and love from their parents. It is a good need that God has built into us, that we need each other. So much of our sin and brokenness manifests as a result of trying to get a legitimate need met in illegitimate ways.

The drawback to this for the younger siblings is that they can reach a place where they feel like they are never going to catch up to their older sibling, especially if that older sibling is really good at following the rules, which in this story the older brother clearly was. So as a result, some second-borns, and certainly the younger brother in this story, give up on trying to meet their parents’ expectations and turn to an alternative means of getting attention. At times this can be relatively harmless…maybe it’s through humor and being the joker of the family, but what begins as fun-seeking and small rule-breaking can end up being full on rebellion and self-destructive. A more light-hearted illustration of this is in the excellent 1995 movie Sabrina. If you haven’t watched it that’s your homework this week.

And so we hear his arena of shame come into focus too. I’m never going to be as good as my older brother so why even try? I’ll never be able to please father the way he does. Father obviously loves him more than me because he does everything right. He’s the golden child. I’m just the black sheep. Why would they even want me around? I bet they don’t. I’m just gonna ask for what’s coming to me and leave and get it over with and find some people that like me for me.

Dr. Bowen calls this the emotional cutoff:

“how people manage their unresolved emotional issues with parents, siblings, and other family members by reducing or totally cutting off emotional contact with them. Emotional contact can be reduced by moving away from family and rarely going home, or it can be reduced by staying in physical contact with family but avoiding sensitive issues. Relationships may look “better” if people cutoff to manage them, but the problems are dormant, not resolved” (https://www.thebowencenter.org/emotional-cutoff).

Shame is driving the ship in both sons. And we hear how the younger brother’s running away solution didn’t solve anything, but only multiplied the shame even more to the point where he doesn’t think his father would ever want him back as a son. He thinks he’d only want him back as a slave. He didn’t know his father either. Just like his older brother, he thought he had to earn his father’s love too, and it drove him in the opposite direction from self-righteousness in to rebellion. The consequences are similar. In his rebellion he essentially wished his father were dead by asking for his inheritance early. He despised his father’s rules. He resented his brother for being so good at following them. BUT, in his own way he also projected strength and confidence by acting as if the rules didn’t matter to him, that his Father and his brother didn’t matter to him – kind of the strong loaner. But in truth he cared deeply, so much so that it was dominating his life to the point where everything he did was in reaction to his father and brother. He too was filled with insecurity and jealousy. And he was blinded from the truth of his own situation as well – that his father loved him, protected him, and gave him everything he needed – to the point of giving him his inheritance early. It’s that same lie from Satan that is controlling both of their worlds and distorting their view of their Father.

These are the two main ways we try to deal with shame in our lives – self-righteousness and rebellion. They are our main reflexive reactions and usually there is a mix of them in our lives. In some areas in life we are working hard and doing our best to follow the rules, and we’re probably convinced we’re doing a pretty good job. We think we’re pleasing our Father, but unwittingly we’re making ourselves resistant to his grace because we think we are not supposed to need it. We’re supposed to be good and do the right thing and not screw up, etc. This is always the consequence of self-righteousness, by the way – we end up hating grace. Jesus ran into this all the time with the dutiful folks around him. It wasn’t just the Pharisees…Peter resisted Jesus’ grace multiple times (Matt. 16:21-23, John 13:1-20, Acts 10:9-48). When we react with self-righteousness we’re living in denial of how bad our need really is, and we have an anemic view of how amazing his love and grace for us really is.

In other areas of our lives we have probably given up trying. We’ve run away to a far-off country and have tried to hide and isolate ourselves and numb out from feeling the crippling shame. And nowadays we don’t have to travel to a far-off place to get there. The far-off country is just sitting in our pocket, on our phones, right at our fingertips. We can immediately run off and squander our inheritance in just a moment with pornography or gambling or texting with someone that isn’t our spouse or compulsively playing games or by tuning out the physical world around us for the carefully curated world of social media. Our phones basically allow us to live in fantasy at any given moment of our day. Then there are always the old staples of alcohol, drugs, food, compulsive spending, etc. We may have different coping tools due to technological advancement, but the substance of our coping mechanisms hasn’t changed much. We are just like the older and younger brothers.

I have done both. For a long time, my view of God and subsequently all my primary relationships were based on performance (another phrase for it is people-pleasing), and it resulted in a secret life of fantasy to numb out and eventually crippling anxiety when my system couldn’t take any more. We go to these places because they temporarily work! In the beginning they actually do take away the pain. They seem to give us relief from the crushing voice of shame even if just for a little bit. In the last few decades of neurological science researchers have learned that all of this takes place in the same part of the brain – the limbic system, which I have mentioned in other posts. It is the fight or flight part of the brain – the part of the brain that helps you to survive a threatening situation. If you’re faced with a lion running at you, your choices get pretty simple: I can either stand and try to fight this thing or I can run as fast as I can to find a tree to climb. Neuroscientists tell us that the limbic system is also the place where we process pleasure too, so turning to pleasurable things like sex and food and drugs all release the same powerful chemical called dopamine in that limbic part of our brain. Dopamine is designed to bring relief to our stressed central nervous system. That’s the third option – fight, flight, or numb – it all happens in that same part of the brain. And anyone one of those does bring temporary relief. It feels good. The problem is that it becomes addictive, and it actually robs us of the things we really wanted in the first place. Our substance of choice actually hijacks us ever getting our legitimate needs met.

The two sons wanted the love and approval of their father – they wanted deep relationship with him and probably with each other too deep down inside. They wanted true intimacy. But both of their solutions ended up destroying relationship in the end. They broke their relationship with their father and with each other. Fighting, flighting, and numbing are not long-term relational solutions. No one wants to stay with someone whose response is always to fight and argue. No one wants to try to be with someone who always runs away when things get hard. And no one wants to be with someone who doesn’t want to feel and eventually cannot feel anything. That’s exactly what all our coping techniques and habits like binging on food or pornography or compulsive spending or always being argumentative or always avoiding conflict do – they rob us of the intimacy we so desperately need. This is Satan’s end game – to isolate you to the point of death. The only thing that breaks this cycle of trying to cope with our shame in these self-destructive ways is another word from outside.

Look how the father responds to both of his sons. He is nothing but gracious and merciful to both of them. And in both instances he actually takes the shame of their behavior upon himself. This time we begin with the younger brother. First, instead of disowning his son for making such a request and essentially wishing him dead, he gives the younger brother the inheritance early. The father absorbs that shame and gives his sons his fortune. Second, instead of rejecting his son, which he should have done in the first place according to Ancient Near Eastern norms, he constantly keeps an eye out for him. You can imagine the neighbors watching all of this, which they would have done. The late Middle-East expert and New Testament professor Dr. Ken Bailey brought light to this in his writing and teaching. This story would have played out in the midst of the community. Jesus knew his audience and set the story up perfectly to drive home the scandalous nature of his grace. The neighbors would have watched and thought: what a poor sap this father is…always watching and waiting for his rebellious son to return. The father absorbed that public shame.

Third, when he sees his son far off he runs to him. A self-respecting middle eastern man would never run in public much less to meet and greet a son that brought so much shame upon his family. Dr. Bailey explains that in doing so that father was protecting the son from even more public shaming. The father, being the wealthy land owner of the area, most likely would have had the main road lead up to his estate and the village would have been on the road to his house. So, the son would have had to walk through the town, in his rags, dirty and smelling like a pig – literally being unclean according to the law. It was truly a walk of shame. But the father runs out to him! He absorbs the shame by doing the disgraceful thing of running in public and taking the town’s attention off of his son and onto himself. AND then he embraces his son and actually covers his shame with his cloak and puts his ring on him and shoes on his feet – he takes all of his shame upon himself and covers him with his righteousness. Then he proclaims to all watching the truth of who his son was. “Bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found!” (Luke 15:23-24) He’s no slave! He’s no outcast! He’s my son! The father undoes the shame of the son in every way.

Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son

The older brother is a little less obvious, but still just as powerful. First, as we noted, when the father gives the younger son his inheritance he also gives the older brother his share. He does not deprive the older brother in anyway. He does not play favorites with the younger. He blesses the older brother exactly the same and takes the shame upon himself. Second, he searches for the older son and goes out to him just as he did to his younger son. The older brother has his own little running away rebellion here, (as we said, you don’t have to go a far distance to reach that far off country). He disobeys the father and rejects his desire to celebrate his younger brother by staying outside. The father absorbs this shame too and goes to him, when it should have been the other way around. Third, he then entreats him – he pleads with him. When my children are being disobedient and belligerent, like the older son here, I usually do NOT want to humble myself and go plead with them. My first inclination is to point out their error and demand some obedience. Not here, the father absorbs the shame and pleads with the older brother to join them. Finally, the father reiterates his love and care for the older son and invites him back into his party – in other words he gives him the same grace he gave to the younger son, just applied differently to the older son’s need in the moment. Come celebrate with me. Share in my joy.

The father does all the work to restore the relationship in bother cases – the relationship that both sons broke in their own way. The father absorbs the shame, takes it off of his sons, and gives them new life in relationship with him. It is only God’s word of grace and forgiveness that breaks this cycle of shame in our lives – the word of the gospel. The word of Jesus Christ has the power to drown out the sermon of shame and fill our ears with something new – His word of freedom, His word of healing, His word of resurrection and restoration. And for the purposes of the topic I raised last week…what does it mean to be strong and courageous, what does it mean to be a man according to the gospel – we see something completely different from what the world would have us believe. The father does not assert his control, he does not strive to re-establish his authority, he does not try to put down any rebellion or any hint of rebellion against him. The father is not afraid or insecure in the slightest here – shame is not running his world. Rather, he is nothing but pure love and grace to his sons to the point where he lays down his perceived strength in the face of the onlooking community. He disgraces himself for the sake of his sons, to forgive them and welcome them home. He takes their shame upon himself for he cares about nothing more than them. He cares about nothing more than you! He cares about nothing more than having you home with him. Amen.

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