WHAT IS "RIGHTEOUSNESS"?

"Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing. And ht called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him. 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: But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf." — Luke xv. 25-30 (A.V.).

"Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called to him one of the servants, and inquired what these things might be. And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fitted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. But he was angry, and would not go in: and his father came oat, and intreated him. But he answered and said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, and I never transgressed a commandment of thine: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: but when this thy son came, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou killedst for him the fatted calf" (R.V.)

The title of the parable, The Prodigal Son, ignores the existence of, and so diverts our attention from, the elder brother. And yet, as has already been suggested, it is the picture of the elder brother which is more important for Jesus' purpose than the picture of the prodigal. Here we have the portrait of the Pharisee, the opponent of Jesus, the description of what was esteemed righteousness in the Jewish nation. When Jesus uses the term, as in the sayings, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners," He is not referring to such goodness as He could approve, but to what was generally esteemed goodness in His own age. Another portrait of the "righteous" pictured here in the elder brother is presented to us in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. There is the same conceit and the same censoriousness. The details of a parable are not to be pressed. It is appropriate that the father in the parable should say to the elder brother, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine"; but we must not understand that as a declaration by Jesus that the Pharisee had the proper communion with God, or was enjoying the full possession of the blessings of the right relation to God. The words may be taken, however, as a tender appeal to the "righteous," an assurance that for them also there was waiting the love of God with all its fulness of blessing as soon as they would be ready to welcome and receive it. In reality, the elder brother in Jesus' estimate was even further from the father's house and heart, and had less hope of return, than the prodigal in the far country, for Jesus regarded this "righteousness" as a greater barrier to salvation than "sin." We must then look more closely at the righteousness that hinders human penitence and divine forgiveness. Conceit and censoriousness are its more evident features, but the root of these lies in the calculation of claims upon God.

1. Calculation.

(1) The prodigal thought of asking the father to make him one of the hired servants, but the father's forgiveness silenced that petition; but the elder brother is in feeling and aim represented as a hired servant. "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." There is no love of the father, no delight in doing his will, no thankfulness for his gifts, no trustfulness in his kindness, but only estranged desire and enforced obedience. The elder brother would have enjoyed himself with his companions, if he had dared to ask for the means. He would not have served, if he had not feared the results of transgression of the father's commandments. This is a fundamentally false relation between God and man; for it misrepresents the character and the purpose of God. God is not merely Lawgiver, Ruler, Judge, and He does not desire first of all obedience, but faith, trust in His goodness and His grace. A false conception of God leads inevitably to a wrong relation to Him. Servitude is the characteristic of the life lived under the control of law and not the constraint of love. Evil desire is not destroyed by pure affection, but only restrained by fear of consequences. The companions are more than the father; and the kid would have been more prized than his companionship.

(2) This moral and religious peril is not confined to the days of Jesus on earth. Even within Christendom there is the constant peril of a lapse into this attitude; God's favour is to be won by the merit of good works. In Roman Catholicism the evangelical conception has been displaced by the legal; but even in Protestantism the Old Testament standpoint has sometimes been taken instead of the Outlook of the New Testament. Take Scottish Sabbatarianism as an instance; how much more of the legal than the evangelical conception and relation! Conceit and censoriousness as marks of Pharisaism are the more obvious, but they are only secondary symptoms; the primary disease is that God is conceived as law, and not as love, and men put conformity to law for the surrender to love.

2. Conceit.

If God be conceived as law and not as love, a limit can be set to His claim on the soul; and accordingly there can be the conceit of conformity to His law. The elder brother was sure that he had served these many years, and that he had never transgressed, and he believed himself to be entitled to some favour and reward. Such conceit is the barrier, it is evident, to real moral progress. When a man believes the claim of law to be limited to certain commandments, when he persuades himself that he has not transgressed any of these commandments, his moral course will have reached its goal. For him the moral life is a finite satisfaction, and not an infinite aspiration. There can be no moral progress unless man is conscious of an infinite ideal of moral perfection in God which it is his life in God ever to be realising. If he has this infinite aspiration, he will have an inexhaustible inspiration of ever loftier purpose and more heroic endeavour. This satisfaction is possible only when the law is regarded as external commandment; for conformity to law in outward act does not appear a "forlorn hope." But whenever the inwardness of morality is recognised, as it was by Paul, to judge from his confession in Romans vii. 7 that it was the commandment "Thou shalt not lust" which morally slew him, then the impossibility of conforming every thought, feeling, desire to the law's requirements is also realised. It is only a law of limited and external obligation which can encourage the conceit that it has not been transgressed, and such a law would be a condition of moral stagnation, and not of progress.

3. Censoriousness.

(1) The man who is satisfied with himself is very censorious to others. The Pharisees scorned the "sinners," who included not only the morally reprobate, and religiously indifferent, but also plain good people, whose circumstances did not allow them to maintain the Pharisaic strictness. They despised and condemned Jesus, because, professing to be a moral and religious teacher, He did not follow in their ways, but became the companion of the sinners. The elder brother in the parable illustrates this censoriousness. He thinks the worst, and he makes no allowances. Whether the riotous living in the far country included the harlots or not, the elder brother will make the case as black as he can. We know people who literally delight in iniquity; they have an unclean joy in describing the vices that they abstain from themselves; and seem to have a cruel satisfaction in bringing home the worst offences to others; they ever give free rein to their imagination when their information does not go far enough for their malice. If they were truly moral, they would hate sin too much to find a pleasure in talking about it, they would care for their brother's good too much to endanger it by depriving him, even if guilty, of the compassion that might help his repentance. It is because their conformity to their limited external law has cost them so little, that they do not, and cannot, make allowances. They can compute only how much is committed, and not how much is resisted. Their judgment of others is false alike in what it ignores and what it exaggerates.

(2) The true "righteousness" recognises the illimitable claim of God because it trusts in His inexhaustible love; it thinks not of a fixed number of outward commandments to be obeyed; but of a life inspired by grateful love to be fully surrendered to the generous love of God. It is not law that compels, but love that constrains. As the claim of love is absolute, there can never be the conceit of conformity to law; there is the humility that recognises the insufficiency of the return that has been made for love, and there is the aspiration for fuller submission. With humility and aspiration there go charity and compassion. He who is ever conscious of falling short himself will not dare harshly to judge the failure of another. He knows how strong are the temptations, and how feeble the endeavours, of man. Sin in himself and in others he will judge, and with an ever more searching judgment; but as he hopes for God's pity, nay, in Christ is assured of it, he will be very pitiful to others. As it is by grace alone that he himself expects to be saved, he will seek to be a minister of grace to others. As he becomes truly more holy, he will become not less, but more pitiful, for his holiness is an ever closer fellowship with, and an ever greater likeness to the Holy Father, who loves and forgives. The prodigal who accepted the father's forgiveness, and responded to his love, was possessed of the true righteousness, if only in a germ needing further development; while the elder brother had only the false righteousness of the Pharisee.