They Are Cooking for Him Again

There is a cake. Somebody has bought a cake, which is the detail she keeps coming back to, because a cake is a decision. Somebody went out and chose one.

The kitchen is full. Her aunt is here and both cousins and the noise is the good kind, the kind that means people are pleased.

Her brother is at the table with a mug and everybody keeps touching his shoulder as they go past.

She is doing the plates. That is not a complaint, it is a fact, she is doing the plates because she is standing nearest the plates and because it is what she does at every gathering in this family and has for about fifteen years.

Four years he was gone. Not gone in a dramatic way. Gone in the way that means you hear things from other people, and a phone that was off, and one Christmas where his name was not said.

In those four years she did every hospital run. She did the forms for the attendance allowance, twice, because the first lot were lost. She sat with their mother the night in February when nobody thought it would be all right and it was. She sold the car for her and dealt with the man about it.

She has never once said any of that out loud to anybody and she would be mortified if it were said for her.

And she is at the sink with her back to the room and she can hear him being funny and she can hear them laughing, and she is glad, and she cannot make her face do the right thing, and she is not going to turn round until it does.

If you are the one who stayed, you know that sink. And you know the sentence, which she would rather die than say: I have been here the entire time and there was never a cake.

The word, and the son who did not leave

Let me stand at the sink beside you and say the plain thing, because nobody in that room is going to.

The problem is not the cake. You would have bought the cake. You are glad he is at that table, and you were the one who kept saying his name in the year they stopped.

The problem is that a warmth has come into that room that has never come for you, and you have been telling yourself for four years that you do not need it, and it turns out at the sink on a Tuesday that you do, and finding that out about yourself in a kitchen full of your own family is the actual injury.

So let me put the word straight and then take you to the field.

Blessed does not mean the family throws you a party. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking, and He was looking at you every one of those hospital runs and nobody in that kitchen was.

Now, Luke 15, and I want to be careful, because this parable gets used to tell people like you off and I am not going to do that.

And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends.Luke 15:29

Read what he actually says and read who he says it to.

He does not say it to the brother. He says it to the father. He does not sabotage the party. He stands outside it and tells the truth about what is in him to the one person entitled to hear it.

And here is the thing nobody says about that parable: the father comes out.

The father is inside a party for a son who has just come home from a disaster, and the text says he came out and entreated him. He left his own celebration and went out into the yard for the one who was standing in it.

You have a Father who comes out of the room to where you are standing, and He did it in that parable while the party was going on inside. Luke 15:28 says he came out and entreated him, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the way that coming out happens now, at a sink, with your back to a kitchen.

The sentence he gets, which is the largest in the parable

Now what the father actually says to him, because it is bigger than anything the younger son is given.

Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.Luke 15:31

Two things in that sentence and both of them are enormous.

Thou art ever with me. Ever. The whole time. The four years, the hospital runs, the February night, the forms that were lost. All of that was not you waiting outside a relationship, it was you inside one, and the father names it.

And all that I have is thine. The younger son got a robe and a ring and a calf. The elder son is told he owns the estate. Nobody at that party is being given what the man in the yard is being told he already has.

You have been in the room the whole time, and the being with was never the consolation prize in that story. Luke 15:31 gives the elder son the larger sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the earnest of the inheritance, a deposit on the all that I have rather than a lesser portion of it.

And notice what the father does not do. He does not tell him off for the feeling. He does not say the feeling is ingratitude. He answers it, directly, with two facts, and then he tells him what the party is for, which is that a brother was dead and is alive.

He gives him the facts and then he gives him a reason. He never once tells him to feel differently.

You are not being asked to produce a feeling before you are allowed to be told the truth about your standing. The written word has the father answering rather than correcting, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who moves a person's affections in His own order, which is never the order a person would choose at a sink.

The two things I will not say

Now, plainly, because this parable is misused constantly and always at the expense of somebody like you.

I am not going to tell you that you are the bad one in the story. That reading is everywhere and it is lazy. Jesus is telling this to Pharisees who were refusing to sit down with people, and the elder brother in the parable is doing something specific and public, and there is no version of it that maps onto a woman who has done four years of hospital runs and is standing at a sink being glad and unable to look like it.

And I am not going to tell you to be grateful for the four years. They cost you. There is a life you did not have in there and nobody has ever named it.

And I will not tell you the family notices. They may not. They probably will not, and you would not accept it if they did because you would be mortified, and that is its own knot and it is not one I can untie from here.

Both halves. The years are not a debt God owes you and they are not nothing.

You are favored and there was never a cake, and neither of those is evidence about the other. Scripture has the father naming the years directly rather than the brother having to raise them, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness with your spirit about what those four years actually were.