Elder Son Part 11

The Elder son said, “All these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed
any orders of yours, yet you never offered me so much as a kid form me to
celebrate with my friends.”
The Elder son attacks the father.  The complaint of the elder son comes from deep within his heart; he has never received a thank you from his father.  Sadly this builds up to resentment.  It is a
cry that is directed to the father to hear him because he seems to listen to
others and not him. In all of us there is the elder son. We are given to
complaining. We grumble and we are crabby because things have not gone our way. The danger is that the more we
dwell on these things the worst it becomes. Sometimes the things we are dwelling
upon are a small ant hill and later the human imagination takes over and things
are blown out of proportion. It is easy to complain, and then to be pro- active.
It is easy to blame, then to take responsibility.  The heart of this snobbish culture of complaining is borne from the fact
that we do not want to be accountable. I am not saying that one should not
complain but one has to be on guard on endless stream of complaints in the
process one is lost and we can almost reach a place where we feel that the world
is against us.  The elder’s son reaction to the party that was going on in honour of the younger son was
understandable. He had not known.  However, because complaining had become a cancer and finding fault, he
failed to be spontaneous which is expected in such occasions. Instead he goes
into a Litany of complaints. ‘Why was I not told of this?” His anger got the
better of him and he did not go in.  The joy he heard had led him to be resentful of his younger brother. Darkness took hold of the elder son and he could not see or feel the joy others were feeling. The parable does not tell
us how the story ends, whether the elder son embraced the young brother or resentment continued to grow?  One would like to belive that the father got better of his elder son and he too was able to feel the joy and experience the spontaneity of laughter and the warm embrace not only of his young brother but ultimately his father.
Fr. Barnabas Nqindi