Brief synopsis of the readings: We begin today in the Old Testament book of Joshua. It takes place shortly after Moses’ death but before Joshua (Moses’ successor) leads the Israelites into the Promised Land. Here they celebrated Passover and ate of the produce of the land. Because they had enough, God stopped providing the manna from heaven. Luke’s Gospel recounts the parable of the Prodigal Son (sometimes called the parable of the Loving Father). As Jesus taught, some in the group grumbled that Jesus welcomed and ate with sinners. In response Jesus spoke about a man who had two sons and an estate. The younger son asked his father for his inheritance immediately and the father gave it to him. The son then left and squandered everything. He was left in desperate straights when he was penniless. Desperate, he had no choice but to take a job feeding pigs (which were unclean to him). He realized his father’s servants lived better than he did and resolved to beg his father to take him back as a servant. But on his return he father rejoiced to find his son alive. He planned a celebration to welcome him home. Meanwhile, the man’s older son saw the preparations and grew angry with his father. The older son reminded his father that he had always done what he was told but he wasn’t given a party, yet his brother (who broke all the rules) is now celebrated. Their father responded: “My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours. But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”

Last week I spoke about the value and the limits of fairness and it appears we are not done with this topic. The parable in today’s Gospel tends to elicit strong emotions among many readers, and to be fair it gives us three strong characters. In different situations, and in different stages of life, I think we can identify with both the sons and the father. We’ve all had the experience of messing up and asking forgiveness. We’ve all had the experience of great joy in finding a loved one safe, even when his troubles were self inflicted. And we’ve all experienced the feeling of “no good deed goes unpunished” when we’ve done nothing wrong and it appears that bad behavior is rewarded.

And we have to acknowledge that the older son has a point. When the younger son asked for his inheritance while his father was still alive, he was really telling the father that he wasn’t willing to wait until his father’s death to inherit his share. We can only imagine the pain the father felt and we can assume the younger son then sold his part of the estate as he didn’t stick around to tend the land. Meanwhile, the older son did what a son was supposed to do. When the younger son returned and asked to be hired as a servant that must have seemed fair to the older son.

But the father wasn’t fair. Instead he was overjoyed that his son, who he had given up for dead, was back. In fairness we don’t see what happens with any of them in the long term but it is worth noting that the father told the older son: “My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours.” That tells me that while the younger son got a party, he didn’t get half of what’s left. Presumably when the father dies, he will have nothing. Of course, we don’t know for certain and there is no clear answer about inheritance rules back then.

If we don’t know the rules of inheritance then, we know even less about the relationship between the sons. We have a snapshot of the jealousy and conflict between the two here but I wonder how their relationship went going forward. I’d like to think the older son grew comfortable with the knowledge that he did the right thing and will get what he expects (half the father’s property) and I’d like to think the younger son learned his lesson and started over again. But I’ve seen this go wrong so many times in so many families. I can’t tell how many times I’ve seen responsible siblings grow angry when their parents bail out an irresponsible brother or sister.

While the father was able to forgive his younger son, the older son was simply not on board. He clearly needs to forgive his younger brother because this is exactly the type of resentment that could eat away at him for the rest of his life. Easier said than done. A few years ago I attended a meeting of hospice chaplains and this question came up: how do you know when you’ve forgiven someone? I suggested that you know you’ve forgiven someone when you’re OK with God’s generosity to that person.

I suspect the older son will have achieved forgiveness when he’s no longer angry with his father’s generosity toward his brother. Given these events I suspect that it will take some time, if it happens at all. Forgiveness doesn’t limit itself to things that others do to hurt us. We can see how it also can cover those times when someone else has gotten an undeserved break, because in fact generosity itself isn’t fair.

We act generously when we put aside our idea of what someone deserves. Obviously this isn’t universally true: when we donate to people whose home were lost in a fire we do act generously. But we also bail out “undeserved” people. We find a job for a friend to lost the latest in a long service of jobs. We slip a few dollars to someone in the hopes that they won’t keep buying $10.00 lattes and actually fill their gas tank.

However we feel about the two sons and what they deserve, I think we can all admire the generosity of the father. The fact that his son was “back from the dead” mattered more to him than anything else and I hope he modeled forgiveness for his other son.

So maybe generosity is better than fairness.