The Elder Prodigal: Sons and Slaves

In the story of the prodigals the younger son runs away with his inheritance and spends it all, only to come back to his father, humbled. His father throws a big party for him, which irks the responsible elder brother, because dad never threw him a party. “All these years I’ve been slaving for you,” he says, “and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15).

We’ve heard a lot about this story in Sunday school over the years: in the extended metaphor, we are both of the brothers, and the father is God. We are both the obvious and the secretive sinner, and God runs to welcome us back no matter what kind of sinner we are on any particular day. It is the secretive sinner, of course, that is more interesting to me.

There are a lot of sins we could accuse the elder brother of. Jealousy and entitlement come to mind—he let someone else’s happy be his sad, and I do think that God generally tries to nudge us away from this conception of the world. “For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare,” the Lord declares in the D&C (D&C 104:17). Presumably God includes His love and parties among the natural resources He’s referencing. There is abundance, I hear this verse saying. There is enough. You don’t have to squabble over my blessings, they are coming, rushing, for you all. Calm down.

I think, though, the more basic problem may be that the elder brother has misconstrued his relationship with work and with his father. He’s thinking of work as a means instead of an end, and he’s trying to use it to earn his father’s love, approval, and recognition.

Trying to earn what you already have has a note of Greek irony in it. Everything the elder brother wanted was right there in front of him, but his determination to earn it, to have just desserts all around, kept him away from what was probably a very lovely party.

Adam Miller says that trying to earn love through work is one of the worst thing we can use work to do. He says that you “must trust in God’s perfect love and you must wear out your life in the pursuit of what is excellent, but if you try to secure God’s love through your excellence then, no matter how excellent your work, you will fail. Your work will only become an expression of your failure to trust that God’s love for you is already palpable and perfect” (Letters to a Young Mormon 7). Work is for glorifying God, it is for the pleasure of creating and learning and being—it is not so that people give you gold stars and so that God (and everyone else) loves you more. The elder brother wanted to earn his love, and he probably wanted to be loved more than his younger brother was, and he used his work to try and make that happen. That’s where the big problem is.

This drive to earn love is a problem that I resonate with on an unfortunate level. We’ve done enough psychoanalysis of my schooling on this blog for it to be clear that I enjoy the illusion that I earn the things I get. I liked school for its apparent predictability, for it consistently making space for me to talk myself into thinking that I somehow deserved the success I got. I knew it wasn’t true, but, of course, I believed it a little bit anyway.

Being graduated and unemployed has throughly punctured that myth. So much of how I understand myself has been based on what I produce and how other people respond to it. Being stuck at home depressed during a pandemic, I’ve produced almost nothing. I often have very little to report at the end of the day. I list everything for Austin when we go to bed in an effort to make myself feel like something happened, that I did something. Some days it’s just, “I drank enough water today.”

As a result, I don’t feel like I’ve earned anything. When Austin told me he was proud of me a few days ago, I said, “Why?” Right now, when people give praise or love to me, it’s hard for me not to push back. I don’t deserve it, and I want to believe in deserving.

Like the elder son, I’ve tried to earn my way up, and like him, I’ve found that the system doesn’t work. He found it out through doing excellent work and not receiving what he thought he deserved; I’ve done it by being undeserving and still, in the midst of it, receiving love and gratitude and trust. According to Joseph Spencer, the elder prodigal and I missed the scriptural narrative arc, the whole purpose of creation and the Atonement. Joseph Spencer says, “The Messianic triumph does not only trump death and the order of things over which it holds sway. It also introduces the possibility of making children from slaves, of accomplishing a kind of adoption that brings the faithful directly into the family of God” (For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope 42). The Atonement means that I don’t have to earn my way in to being in God’s family, that I don’t have to deserve His love. I’m already in the family. I already have His love. I’m a child, not a slave. Nothing I ever do, negative or positive, will change that. Nothing will make it more or less true.

This, of course, does not mean that I do not have to work. It just redefines work’s purpose: the point is not to earn things, but to be part of them. We do the work of God not to avoid punishment or earn rewards, but because being part of the work of God, delving into good work in whatever way we can, is joyful. It’s part of being fully ourselves, recognizing and developing our own divinity.

The elder brother was a prodigal too because he hadn’t gotten that yet. “I’ve been slaving for you,” he says. The elder prodigal’s main problem was identifying as a slave, not realizing that he was already a son. He hadn’t realized yet that he already had what he’d been working so hard for, that what he was working for could not be earned and was already given.

“My son,“ the father answers, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” It’s the same answer the master of the vineyard gives his workers in Matthew 20. Being with me is the point, the Father says. Working with me is the point.

Being with God and doing His work isn’t the work you do to get to heaven, these stories tell us—it is heaven.