An Angry Brother
Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. And he was angry, and would not go in.” — Luke xv. 25-28.
Mirth within, murmurs without; joy in heaven over sinners repenting, on earth jealousy — even amongst respectable professors of religion decided disapproval: Such are the contrasts here presented.
They had begun to be merry. The fatted calf had disappeared, but the table was still groaning with good things, and still from storehouse and vineyard the eager attendants kept piling the board; whilst every time that it rested on the worn face at his side, and through tears and smiles predicted a happy future, the fathers eye glistened, and as the first embrace was repeated again and again,, friends and neighbours would look to one another and say, “Is he not happy?”
But in the midst of it all — so loud that, though amidst the clash of the cymbals and the strain of the harp-strings, bounding feet and busy talk were scarcely audible, the discord at once pierced through the melody — in came the noise of altercation from without. When the prodigal arrived, the elder brother had been in the field “— at another farm, or on a distant part of the estate; and it is not a good sign of him that no one volunteered to go after him and carry the tidings. We suspect his sullen humour must have been too well known; for even when he was seen approaching, no one ran forward in the hope of giving him an agreeable surprise. Accordingly, it was not till he came near enough to notice the bustle and hear the music and dancing that he demanded,” What does all this mean?” ‘’ Thy brother is come,” was the hearty straightforward answer; “and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.” To his cold and loveless nature, with its mean and mercenary spirit, the announcement was gall and wormwood. What did he care for his brother? a thorough scapegrace, whose absence was good company! after all his bad behaviour, how wrong to give him this reception! And then, as he thought of his own sober life and steady conduct, his sense of justice was aggrieved, and he could not curb his indignation. Has it been for this that the fatted calf was kept? and is this the recompense of long years of service? It was positively unfair: he did well to be angry. No indeed, he did not want to go in: he would rather go away. And there he stood, storming and scolding, till the angry words disturbed the guests and brought out his father.
Who is this elder son? Doubtless, it was intended that the murmurers then present should recognise in him their own portrait; just as they should see in this picture of paternal magnanimity the principle on which, in receiving publicans and sinners, Christ and His Father proceeded. ‘’ Conceding what you claim — granting that you Scribes and Pharisees are ‘just persons who need no repentance ’ — should you not be glad to see sinners repenting, and wanderers restored to the paths of righteousness? “But, with its divine and far-reaching comprehensiveness, the parable suits every case of that sour self-complacency, which, ignorant of God’s law, thinks it has established a claim on God’s justice, and which, unable to sympathise with divine generosity, resents as a wrong to itself the kindness extended to others. It suits the Hebrew Church in the apostolic age, looking askance at Gentile Christendom, and grudging that the fatted calf, the portion of Israel, God’s first-born, should be given to the heathen prodigal. It suits the dry and pedantic professor in a time of religious awakening, who does not like the excitement and the Interruption of the ordinary tranquil routine, and who likes least of all the ragged reprobate, the outcast newly reclaimed, his younger brother. It suits the Pharisee, who till near the close keeps lurking in almost every heart.” Who is this elder son? “The question was once asked in an assembly of ministers, at Elberfeldt: Daniel Krummacher made answer,” I know him very well: I met him yesterday.” “Who is he?” they asked eagerly, and he replied solemnly, “Myself.” He then explained that on the previous day, hearing that a very ill-conditioned person had received a very gracious visitation of God’s goodness, he had felt not a little envy and irritation *
“God’s’thoughts are not as ours — we gird our breast
With the cold iron of complacent pride;
Our charities and kindness are comprest
With earth’s hard bands, that check our love’s soft tide; And we to sinners say, with scornful brow,
‘Stand off, for I am holier than thou! ’
“Oh! ’tis not thus with God: His arms of love
Yearn for the thankless prodigal’s embrace j
He sees him yet afar. He longs to prove
His love and pity and forgiving grace:
The Holy Dove spreads soft His peaceful wings,
And joy in heaven tunes high the seraph’s strings.” t
Latent in the parable, this brings to light the true Elder Brother. Shut up and frigid, with no candle of the Lord shining in his conscience, no coal from the altar glowing in his heart, the Pharisee has neither the sense of sin which sympathises with the penitent, nor the lovingkindness which enters into the joy of a sin-forgiving God. “Every one that loveth is born of God. He that loveth not knoweth not God: for God is love.” Even although it had been by nothing else, by His infinite faculty of love the Lord Jesus proved Himself the divinest of all men, whilst at the same time He became to us the most brotherly. With no connivance at evil, with no compromise of the law’s requirement, His was
* Stier’s Words of Jesus (Clark’s Lib.) vol. iv. p. 142. f Poems, by the late Mrs. T. D. Crewdson.
that vast compassion which overcomes our evil with its good — that holy pity which softens into penitence and helps on to new obedience the heavy-laden transgressor. Here “in the midst” — here in the gospel of His grace, and here in His unchanging omnipresence — O sinner, behold your Saviour. It is He who from the Father’s bosom has come to the far country seeking the wanderer. It is He who assures you that, all provocations notwithstanding, the heart of God is still fatherly. It is He who holds out His hand and says to you, wearied of husks and weak with hunger, “Come, for all things are ready.” It is He who, when you faintly rejoin, “I fain would arise and go, but I know not the way,” makes answer, “I am the way,” and bids you “come boldly.” And when you droop the head and feel that you cannot so much as lift up your eyes to heaven, it is He who declares that He is not ashamed to call you brother, and who. Himself giving the word, bids you say in His name “Our Father.”
In the elder son of the parable the frightful feature is the total lack of affection. Unforgiving towards his brother, petulant to his father, it turns out that his vaunted obedience has all along been mercenary, and with his sulky looks and saucy words he stands before us utterly unamiable — the impersonation of that darkest, dreariest thing in all the universe — a loveless self-centered being.
It is a disposition which needs to be guarded against: for in our fallen nature there are terrible tendencies towards it. With some it takes the form of a cold calculatmg selfishness; and just as people who do not want the swallows to build in their windows take the brush and coat the corners with oil; so the thorough worldling is varnished all over. Friends may be useful, but attachments and sympathies are inconvenient, and therefore he is careful not to permit them. Even his parents, if they grow old and it is suggested that he might do something towards promoting their comfort — he Is sorry that the money which might have been otherwise available for them “is corban ^’ — dedicated to another use, or so locked up that he cannot get at it. Every appeal to generosity, to gratitude, to pity. Is like the poor martin’s best-tempered mortar applied to the unctuous marble: met by refusals polite and plausible, from the surface of a heart fat as grease and hard as stone it falls off ineffectual; and thus, shutting up his compassions. If there ever was In him aught like the love of God, it dies away, and his gloomy soul goes out in the blackness of darkness. Whilst with others the same sombre spirit assumes a form more malignant and virulent. With nothing which they can love — for even their self Is to itself unlovable — they lead the demon’s life, and seek a bitter satisfaction in making others wretched. “Full of envy, murder, debate, backbiters, haters of God, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful,” in the acetous fermentation of their own perversity the bounties of providence, the assiduities of kinsfolk and dependants, only sour the temper which they intended to sweeten; and disdainful of love, yet indignant at its absence, and for the sake of gratifying a fierce vindictiveness, courting insult, almost glad to be misunderstood or disobeyed, they pass through life fretting and fuming, grumbling and growling, and in their reign of terror give a frightful facsimile of Apollyon s dark dominion.
To be brought into intimate, perhaps life-long relations, with such heartless or malevolent natures, is one of the heaviest crosses which any one can carry. Even simple wrong-headedness is a considerable trial; and there are in the world a good many ‘’ utterly unmanageable persons. You cannot say they are madmen. You cannot say they are idiots. But rationality flickers about them in so strange a way that they are often more difficult to deal with than the utterly irrational.”* Yet, perplexing or provoking as such impracticable people may be, and humiliating as are the positions into which their impulsiveness brings us, their folly is often compensated by noble attributes, and the ministering spirit may find the difficult task of guiding and guarding them a labour of love. But alas for the helpmate of a savage! alas for the child or the servant of a churl! alas for the human heart on which a swart Vulcan forges his thunderbolts! alas for the head at which an explosive Jupiter hurls them! Although even here, in the perfect work of patience and in the maturing of meek and long-suffering graces, there is a certain compensation, and the long * Friends in Council, second series, vol. ii. p. 18.
bondage is usually cheered by fits of rough kindness or gleams of better feeling. But to be “mated to a clown;” to “radiate affection into a clod:” to waste not merely the wealth of a playful fancy but the riches of a fond and self-devoting spirit on dull irresponsive earthhness, with no compensation in the present, with no hope in the future, this is the sorrow of sorrows. The father in the parable had a son seemingly void of affection, and we have known sons with a father so dreary that they found it difficult to fulfil the fifth command. And who is there over whose spirit there has not flitted a feeling like what Richter has described as his own, riding part of the road with a rustic bridegroom taking home his young bride? — “Oh, be not so joyful, poor sacrifice! Thy husband will soon demand of thee neither tenderness nor a light heart, but only rough working fingers, feet never weary, labouring arms, and a silent paralytic tongue.” When it comes to that, for heart, for soul, for thoughts which might be accepted if not exchanged, there is no longer any use; and if they know not to go up to God, the best affections of our nature must just run to waste till the freshness of feeling has exhaled, or till the weariful existence has burned itself away.
All true love is one. The first commandment is very great, but the second is not little. They are upper and nether pools, and the same fountain fills them. He who is richest in the love of God has the greatest advantage for loving his neighbour — for loving his family, his household, his country, and the world. And that is the best and happiest state of things — the primal and truly natural — where, springing from under the throne of God, with a bright and heaven-reflecting piety love fills the upper pool; then through the open flower-fringed channel of filial affection and the domestic charities flows softly till it again expands in neighbourly kindness and unreserved philanthropy. The channel may be choked. The devotee may close it up in the hope of raising the level in the first and great reservoir; but by arresting the current he causes an overflow, and converts into swamp the surrounding garden. In the same way, the materialist or worldling, content with the lower pool, may fill up the conduit and declare that he is no longer dependent on the upper magazine; but from the isolated cistern quickly evaporates the scanty supply, and thick with slime, weltering with worms, the stagnant residue mocks the thirsty owner, or as over the bubbling malaria he persists to linger, it fills his frame with the mortal fever. Cut off from living water, receiving from on high no consecrating element, human affection is too sure to end in the disgust of a disappointed Idolatry or the mad despair of a total bereavement: whilst the mystic theopathy which, in order to give the whole heart to God, gives none to its fellows, will soon have no heart at all.
Love is of God, and all true love is one. The piety which is not humane will soon grow superstitious and gloomy; in cases like Dominie and Philip the Second we see that it may soon grow bloodthirsty and cruel: nor, on the other hand, will brotherly love long continue If the love of God Is not shed abroad abundantly. And it is as the cradle of either affection — It Is In order that life may begin in the sweet union of affection and worship, that God created and in a fallen world perpetuates the home.
To use the words of a thoughtful writer: “God made the first man after a divine original, and after a divine original, too, He made the first home... God has not borrowed these images — ’ father,” children,’ * home, It is heaven that lends to earth, not earth to heaven. The things that are upon earth, the things which have root In humanity as God made it, and which are not the devil’s work, are first there. Heaven but reclaims Its own when it takes these images, and applies them again to heavenly use.“”’^ And although the downward tendencies of human nature often make the task tremendous — although the best-Intentioned members of the home are after all only sinful beings surrounded by others of like passions and like infirmities — the Institution is so holy, and the calling of each member so high, that no effort should be spared, no prayer cease, till it become what God designed and will assuredly help us to make it, a nursery for heaven, by becoming ever nearer and nearer to a heaven on earth.
* The Home Life: in the Light of its Divine Ldea. By J. Baldwin Brown, p. 8.
Dr. Livingstone mentions a place where the people have never seen flowers.“‘How you pity their children! But on man made after His own image God has bestowed a power corresponding to His own creative faculty; and although — like ants which throw off their wings in becoming workers — most grown people have discarded their imagination before entering on actual life, the little ones still have it; and if there are no flowers, they will quickly make them. If the surrounding atmosphere be warm and genial, wakeful life will be a ceaseless joy: invention will never be exhausted, and the materials of pastime will never be far to seek: a few corks will improvise a navy, and sticks and stones a palace. Only you must keep up the temperature. The fairy-world of the little “makers” — as we used to call the poets — collapses in chill weather, and if, in the shape of a sullen nurse or non-sympathetic mother, a glacier invades the play-room, the frost-bitten Eden is soon replaced by bleak reality, and the expatriated exiles, waking up in an old-people’s world, grow joyless and cross, and begin to quarrel with one another.
Very precious is that power which the little children have, and which, when we become as little children, we sometimes get again. It is not entirely creative. There is in it something of the open vision. The cradle of the race was in the midst of beauty, God smiling over it, nature smiling round it; and of a vague blessedness and * Missionary Travels p. loi.
beauty enough still lingers to make the infant smile back again. When Blake the artist was ten years old he saw at Peckham Rye “a tree full of angels/* His father beat and scolded, but young William would not shut his eyes, and all through life kept sight of the angels. And just as “their angels do always behold the face of the Father,” so God comes very near them. No check upon their sports, at mention of His name there may be a momentary sedateness, a moment of awed wonder: but still very near, and still notwithstanding all their naughtiness very kind, their faith gives freedom, and the truest reverence is their love. We knew a little girl not three years old. She put into her prayers real desires. One night before lying down, after praying for papa, mama, and her nurse by name, she prayed with the same solemnity for the new kitten. ‘’ O God, open little pussy’s eyes, and make its tail grow.” She was not told that this was wrong, or bidden pray for the Jews and the heathen instead; and perhaps it was better to let the prayer grow with her growth, for when she was older and became interested in them, of her own accord she prayed for both Jews and Gentiles; and if she had been told that it was not proper to pray about such little things as kittens, she might next have doubted whether it was right for little things to pray.
Let the children’s home be bright and beautiful and very gladsome. It was brightly that the existence of the race began; and with all that you can do to embellish and enliven the nursery, It will not be so charming as the first place which our Heavenly Father prepared for His children: it will not come up to the garden God planted on the banks of Hiddekel. But when bleak days arrive, it is good to have sweet and sunny memories; for fancy gives them wings and sends them on before, and in the guise of hope they invite us into the future. What we call Idealism Is really Edenism: it Is partly the reminiscence of one paradise, partly the effort after another. And In that home the very brightest, gladdest, holiest thing, let it be the name of Jesus, the presence of God. In psalms and hymns sweetly sung, In the going up to the house of God, in Sabbaths crowned with special joys, in Bible stories and good books, let there be not only the didactic but the endearing; and even If some loveless nature should be the sad exception, and pass through It all as sullen as that elder brother, it may well be hoped that few will ever wander; and if there should be some hapless prodigal, — carrying such recollections with him, who can doubt that In the, far country they will at last awaken an irresistible longing, and end in exclaiming, “■ I will arise and go to my Father?”
Be this your aim. Father, mother, brothers, sisters, as the years advance, join your efforts to upbuild and beautify the home. Let it be the abode of peace, and love, and mutual helpfulness, and let those nights be the happiest when no one needs to leave it.
“How calm, how blest this tranquil hour
Of household evening joy!
The world shut out, with all its power
To trouble or annoy.
“The world shut out, and love shut in,,
With youth and gentle mirth,
Which ever make their pleasant din
Best by the household hearth.
“The duties of the day are done,
Its toil and burden o’er.
To claim, until the rising sun,
Our anxious hearts no more.
“Then let us rest amid the gifts
God’s tenderness hath given.
And bless each blessing as it lifts
Our grateful hearts to heaven.” *
A scene like that, a shadow of still better things, to the heart which has ever known it will be a charm for ever: — a magnet, the force of which will be felt across the hemisphere — a saving memory which in the darkest hour will sustain the wanderers faith in goodness and
in God.
* Monsell.