The last couple weeks of Lent are difficult for the Older Brother — you know the one whose family includes the Forgiving Father and the Prodigal Son.
He is the one who stayed behind, the one who did what was expected, the one who never wandered far from the rules that ordered the household. If there was work to be done, he did it. If there was a standard to be met, he met it. If there was a line not to be crossed, he kept a careful distance from it. The Older Brother is the one who tried, sincerely and earnestly, to be practically perfect in every way.
It is not surprising, then, that he approached Lent with the same seriousness. He made thoughtful resolutions — things to give up and things to take on — all with the desire to grow closer to God. He committed to fasting, almsgiving and the meticulous examination of conscience.
And now, he’s kicking himself because he’s not managed to keep those disciplines perfectly, and he doesn’t feel any closer to God. The early fervor of Ash Wednesday has given way to the ordinary fatigue of March. The interior sense of progress — the subtle reassurance that one is growing holier — has not materialized.
Outwardly, of course, very little appears amiss. The Older Brother has always been capable of maintaining order. From the outside, his life still looks steady, responsible and faithful. But beneath the surface, there is a nagging sense that he has somehow failed at the very thing he set out to do.
For Older Brothers among us, be they Eldest Daughters or Babies of the Family, Lent has a way of exposing something we would rather not see. Hidden beneath our sincerity can lie a quiet assumption: if we do the right things, God will respond in recognizable ways. If “do Lent well,” we expect — perhaps without even admitting it — a certain return. We hope for clarity, for peace, for the reassuring sense that the spiritual life is working.
But what happens when it doesn’t and the disciplines falter halfway through March? When prayer feels no more fruitful than it did on Ash Wednesday, and when the interior landscape appears no holier than it did before Lent began?
To the Older Brother, this feels like failure. Yet, the parable Jesus tells suggests something else.
When the Prodigal Son returns and the celebration begins, the Older Brother refuses to go inside. He stands outside the house, angry and wounded, reciting the long ledger of everything he has done correctly. For years, he has worked faithfully in the fields, he has obeyed and he has stayed.
And what does the father do?
He goes out to him.
Just as the father once ran down the road to meet the younger son returning from the far country, he now leaves the music and the dancing to seek the son who never left home. The mercy of the father is not reserved only for the obvious sinner whose mistakes are visible to everyone. It also reaches for the dutiful son whose heart has slowly grown weary beneath the weight of his own effort.
The father’s words are tender and almost disarming: “My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.”
Notice what the father does not do. He does not praise the son’s discipline or congratulate him on his obedience. Nor does he reward his careful record or compare him favorably to his brother. Instead, he gently invites him back into relationship.
The tragedy of the Older Brother is not that he tried too hard. The tragedy is that, somewhere along the way, he began living in the father’s house as a servant rather than a son. The work was done faithfully, but the joy of belonging had quietly slipped away.
Lent has a way of revealing such things. The season strips away the illusion that spiritual growth can be engineered through effort alone. Sometimes the real grace of Lent is not that we kept our resolutions perfectly, but that we discovered how much we were relying on them.
The conversion of the Older Brother is quieter than that of the prodigal. There are no distant countries, no famine, no dramatic return from ruin. Instead, the turning happens in a far subtler place: the moment when a good and faithful person begins to understand that love was never meant to be earned in the first place.
Eventually, every one of us — whether we resemble the prodigal or the rule keeper — must decide what to do with the Forgiving Father who comes out to meet us. We can remain outside the celebration, counting our efforts and rehearsing our disappointments. Or we can step across the threshold and receive the joy that was waiting for us all along.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
