Setting a Place for Him

The good plates are down out of the top cupboard, the ones that only come out for funerals and this, and she is at the sink doing potatoes because somebody has to do potatoes.

Dale is coming. That is the news, and it has been the news since Tuesday, and it has changed the whole house. Her mother has been up since six. Somebody has put flowers in the middle of the table, actual flowers, bought ones.

She has been the one here. Not as a complaint, it is just the fact of it: hers is the number they call, hers is the car that goes to the appointments, hers is the hand that has been on the door of this house through every ordinary week nobody made a supper about.

She dries her hands and starts setting the table, and she does his place the way she does everybody's, fork, knife, glass, and she puts him near their mother because that is where he should sit.

And there is a knot in her chest while she does it that she would not describe to a living soul.

It is not that she wants him not to come. She does want him to come. It is that something in her is keeping a total, and the total says the flowers are new, and she hates that she knows this, and she cannot make the counting stop by deciding to.

The oven is on. The house smells like it does at Christmas. She sets the last glass down and stands there with her hand on the back of his chair.

You are the one at the table with the good plates out. You are not bitter, and you would tell anyone that, and there is a total running in you tonight that you have never once said out loud.

Nobody in this kitchen is the villain

The first thing to say is about you, and I want it said before anything else.

The one who stayed is not the bad character in this story. The whole way that parable gets told, the elder brother turns up at the end as the sour note, the man who spoils the party, and people preach him like a warning. Look at what actually happens in the text. The father comes out. He leaves his own feast, goes out into the yard where the elder son is standing, and pleads with him. He does not send a servant. He comes out himself, exactly the way he ran down the road, and the running and the coming out are the same love pointed in two directions.

You are being come out to tonight, in the yard, by name, and you are not the problem that needs handling. That is written into the story and it is not my softening of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you honest enough to feel the knot rather than paper over it. The knot is not wickedness. It is grief with nowhere to put itself.

And notice the elder son is not scolded for the years he worked. Not one word of the reply says he was wrong to stay.

The counting is what keeps a person in the yard

Now let me say the hard part, plainly, and it is not an accusation.

There is a ledger running in you, and it is accurate. That is what makes it so hard to put down. You could produce the figures: the phone calls, the appointments, the ordinary weeks. An honest account of who did what is not a sin, and I would never tell you the numbers are wrong.

But a ledger is a poor way to sit at a table with your own family, because a ledger has to be balanced and a family cannot be. And here is the thing about the elder son that breaks my heart every time: while he was outside doing the arithmetic, everything in the house was already his. Not promised. His. He was standing in the yard of a farm he owned, arguing about a goat.

You have not been left out of anything, and the total you are running was never the measure of what belongs to you. That is what Scripture puts under a child of God, and the Holy Spirit is the one bearing witness with your spirit while you stand there with your hand on that chair. The counting has not been protecting you. It has been keeping you standing outside a house you have the keys to.

Everything He has has been yours the whole while

Here is the ground under all of this, and it is not a consolation prize handed to the one who missed out.

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.Romans 8:16-17

Heirs of God. Not employees with long service. Not the reliable one who gets thanked in a speech. An heir owns what the house owns, and joint-heirs is Paul's word, which means no one else's portion comes out of yours. When the robe went on that boy, nothing at all left the elder son's account, because it was never that kind of account.

You are an heir of God tonight, and everything that is His has been yours the whole time you were out in the yard doing sums. That is Romans 8 and not my kindness, and the same Spirit who bears witness that you are a child is the one who brought you to the end of this page. Nothing given to anybody else has ever been subtracted from you. There is no such subtraction in that house.

So the invitation is not to feel differently about your brother by Tuesday. It is to come in. The father's line to the elder son was not you are wrong, it was son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. That is a fact being handed to a man who did not know he was standing in it.