Listening to “Toes” by the Zac Brown Band. I didn’t realize the title of the song was “Toes,” but it fits. Maybe you know the premise:
Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand
Life is good today, life is good today”
I loved Jimmy Buffett music in the 1970s (still do), and the whole Caribbean beach vibe, kind of carefree, hedonistic attitude of his songs, an attitude that I’ve never really had but like the idea of. For that matter, I really don’t like the beach (although I do love the Caribbean). But Buffett kind of begat Kenny Chesney (at least his stuff from the last 20 years or so) which led to songs like this one by Zac Brown, and I’m drawn to those.
And for some reason, in my warped brain, as I listened to “Toes” I couldn’t help but think of the story of the Prodigal Son.
Who doesn’t like the story of the prodigal son?
It may be one of the most used parables from Jesus. The younger son demanded his share of his inheritance from his father. He uses what he’s given to go live the high life. The money runs out, so does the fun (as Zac Brown sings in “Toes” – “The señoritas don’t care-o when there’s no dinero, yeah I got no money to stay”). He decides there is nothing left to do but tuck his tail between his legs and go back and see if his father will take him on as a servant, knowing he doesn’t deserve to be treated like a son.
But the father has apparently been looking, hoping every day for the son’s return, and when he sees him coming, drops everything and runs out to welcome him home. The son gives his “I am unworthy” speech but the father cuts him off, cleans him up and puts him in fine clothes, and throws a party to celebrate his return.
Then the story takes a dark turn. The older brother is coming in from a long day in the fields, doing what he had been doing every day since long before his worthless little brother ran off. He’s been working while the other brother has been playing. And when he sees the party going on and finds out why, he’s bitter. He doesn’t think it’s fair.
“‘My son,’’ the father says to the older son, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” (Luke 15).
There are so many applications to this story. We love the lost son returning and being forgiven and welcomed back into the family. We love that because many of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in a tough situation, feeling deserted, maybe close to being broken, with nowhere to turn.
If the younger son still had money, would he have come back? No, he had to be brought to a place of abandonment – like the Zac Brown song: he was no longer welcome when there was no more money. His friends disappeared when the credit card was declined.
In that situation, what the younger son realized was he needed a real relationship with someone, the kind of relationship that survives hard times and difficulties, that isn’t built on ‘what can you do for me.’
So the younger son goes from “I don’t need anybody” to “I’m don’t have anybody.” I think a lot of us have, at times, been there.
Then we have the older brother. If you read the story in Luke, you realize Jesus was really talking to the “Pharisees and teachers of the law,” the “older brothers” of the Jewish culture. They would have been the ones who would have seen God (in the physical form of Jesus) embracing “the tax collectors and sinners” as it says, welcoming them back into the family. And they don’t think its fair.
It reminds me of those of us who have grown up in the Church and don’t have a previous life of chasing “tequila and pretty señoritas” (to quote Zac Brown again). We’re the ones who have remained faithful, doing our duty, trying to make Dad proud of us.
It’s easy to have this uneasy feeling that as hard as we have worked, as much sacrifice we have made to be faithful, have we really pleased God? And in this story that we know as “the Prodigal Son,’’ there is a suggestion that, while the father loves both sons, he seems really pleased with the younger son. That’s the one he throws the party for, while the older son says, “You never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.”
There is a lot to unpack; I know that. But here is what “the restless brain of an ordinary guy, wondering about an extraordinary God” (as I explain my reasons for these writings) started wondering about.
We know God loves us. Of course He does. He loves everybody! And that means He loves even the people that will reject Him and wind up in Hell. He doesn’t want them to make that choice (with apologies to the predestination folks). It breaks His heart.
But what I sometimes struggle with is the question, not does God love me – again, he loves everybody - but does God approve of me? Am I really pleasing Him?
Can I picture the Lord – God – the Father – running to me, throwing His arms around me, killing the fatted calf and calling everyone to a big party celebrating me!
Maybe I think too much, but I can’t help but feel sometimes – no, very often – that what I do is not enough. That I do it for the wrong reasons. Perhaps like the older brother, I can’t help but go through my life of attempted loyalty and somewhat obedience wondering, “When do I get my party?”
Thinking that, somehow, God owes me!
That’s when the mask comes off. That’s when I see myself as I really am.
And I realize that I am as lost as the younger brother. It doesn’t look the same. But then, are there degrees of sin? In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5), Jesus mentions two sins that we’d consider “big” – murder and adultery – and equates them with unjustified anger and lust. Going back to the story of the Prodigal Son, the younger son may well have committed one or both of those “big” sins; but there is an equal chance the older brother committed both of what we’d consider the “lesser” ones. And Jesus seems to say they are, in God’s eyes, equal.
That is hard for us self-righteous types to recognize and admit.
But when I do, when I recognize and confess … remember what the younger brother said when he saw his father? “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” Just as the younger brother confessed, so too must the older brother recognize his own pride, his own sin, and repent.
Sometimes we pass over what the father told the older son: “Everything I have is yours.” When you really look at the story, even though it doesn’t say the father ran to get the older brother as he did the younger, it does say that the father came out and went to the older son. He didn’t send a servant to go get him; he didn’t yell out to him to come on inside. The father wasn’t so caught up the welcoming party for the younger son that he forgot about the older one. The father pursued both the one who chased harlots as well as the hypocrite.
If God accepts us at all, He accepts us completely. Wholeheartedly. No half measures.
Then it hit me: the Apostle Paul was the older brother. Paul – when he was Saul – was the law-keeper, the pharisee, the one who faithfully kept all the rules and did everything to “earn” God’s favor. Saul saw God as the command-giver, and Saul was the command-keeper. If anyone deserved the party with the fatted calf, it was Saul.
Until one day, on the Damascus Road, God came out and met Saul. And suddenly Saul – now Paul - recognized his own hypocrisy. From then on, Paul dedicated his life to going after the younger brothers, the wayward sons.
Paul rejected his own self-righteousness.
I want “the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith” (Phillippians 3:9). I want what was said of Abraham in Romans, “If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. What does Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’” In other words, as Paul writes later in that same chapter, “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed.”
In this story, the wandering prodigal came home, while the homebound prodigal did not.
I can hear the younger brother now.
“Adiós and vaya con Dios. Going home now to stay.” (Zac Brown, “Toes,” 2008)
Now that’s a party.
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