Due to bad weather and a logistical mix-up, the Doctor Asinorum and I were treated yesterday to a Novus Mass (in all the worst senses of that term) at the church up the street from my apartment. (Said the Doctor, “I always forget how bad it really is.”) We heard a homily on the story of the Prodigal Son. The homily itself need not be related in great detail; the main idea was that forgiveness is very good and important, and that we ought to be understanding and not rebuke others. But the debate that took place in a diner after Mass (between the Doctor and myself) did provoke some lines of thought that I found interesting.

As the Doctor pointed out, the situation between the two sons would have appeared to Aristotle to be straightforwardly unjust. One behaves badly, apologizes and is richly rewarded. The other demonstrates a firm and fixed disposition towards goodness and is given no such favor. Clearly (the Aristotelian would say) the elder son has behaved better and thus is more worthy of being praised and honored.

One response (the line preferred by this Novus priest and by the stereotypical Protestant) would be this: the blessings of God are not distributed to us as rewards for our good works. Thus, it is wrong to decide what would be “fair” to each son on the basis of his behavior towards his father before the day in question. Each was equally undeserving of a fatted calf, but the younger, being humbler and more ready to accept mercy, could be favored with more generosity. We, by analogy, should see ourselves always as beggars at God’s gate: we deserve nothing and are entitled to nothing, but we can hope (and even reasonably expect, if we have enough faith) that God will decide to be generous.

If we take this line, though, there is an oddity. If the elder son was being excessively legalistic, greedy or prideful, we might expect to see him sternly rebuked, or perhaps even cast out himself (as wicked characters in Jesus’ parables sometimes are.) The priest yesterday morning compared the son to the Pharisees, and this would seem a natural comparison given his interpretation. But as it turns out, the elder son is not called a whited sepulcher or thrown into darkness. He is gently told that it is right for them to celebrate his brother’s return, but he is also reassured that, “You are always with me and all that I have is thine.” That is, he is promised that justice will be done to him also, and that his constancy and good behavior have not gone unobserved.

The figure of the elder son strikes me as being similar, not to the Pharisees, but to those laborers in another parable who worked from the early part of the day. They agreed to give a full day’s work for a coin, and, as promised, the Master gives them their wages at the end of the day. Nonetheless, they also complained, not because the Master had cheated them, but because he gave the same to other men who had worked for a much shorter time. The arrangement seemed unfair. As with the elder brother, though, the first group of workers are not chastised and cast out. They are reminded that the promises made to them have been fulfilled, and that, if the Master chooses to be generous to others, this should be no grounds for complaint. It is unfair to them, perhaps, but it is not unjust.

In each case, there seems to be some implicit acknowledgement that the laborers and the elder son are being reasonable in asking for what has been promised to them. They are given mild correction, but their mistake lies, not in the demands that they do make, but only in their complaining that others have been shown more generosity than they. The content of the rebuke seems to imply that they are right to insist on receiving their agreed-upon wage. Had the Master given the laborers only half of what was promised, they would have had grounds for complaint. Had the father halved his elder son’s estate and given it to the younger son, hard feelings would have been understandable. If these stories are, as they obviously seem to be, lessons about men working for salvation, what are we to make of the legitimacy given to these demands? The Church teaches that no one can merit his own salvation, and that we have no right to demand God’s grace. But the elder son and the morning laborers do seem to be making demands, and the Father (or Master) seem to accept these demands as reasonable.

I think this is an intriguing puzzle, and I will offer my best solution, in hope that others who disagree will not hesitate to correct or improve upon it. (I should note that my husband-to-be is not necessarily satisfied with my views as expressed here.) In a nutshell: there may be a curious sense in which some people might seem to “earn” their salvation. But taken in a larger sense, they can only do this with enormous help from God, to which they were never entitled.

To begin, God doesn’t owe anybody any promises in the first place. The elder son was not entitled to inherit half of an estate; this was the agreed-upon arrangement but he had done nothing initially to merit it, and in a sense his contribution (his lifetime of service to his father) was probably no greater than that given by numerous day laborers who would never receive an estate in return. In the other parable, the laborers did not deserve to be hired in the morning; this was in a sense a favor done to them by the Master. So we are from the beginning undeserving, and God shows enormous generosity in coming to us and offering this “contract” in the first place.

But we can go further than this: even once the “contract” has been offered and signed, we will never be able to uphold our end of the bargain without constant gifts of undeserved grace. Go back to the parable of the laborers, and suppose that the Master doesn’t really need workers all that badly, and that the men who are hired are sickly and frail and basically unfit for hard manual labor. So in addition to hiring them, the Master does any number of things to enable them to keep working, none of which were required by the original agreement. He furnishes them with sturdy shoes and good working clothes; he provides nutritious foods and energy drinks throughout the day; he sets up pleasant and shady pavilions for them to rest in during their breaks. Without such help, the laborers would never have made it to the end of the day, and in a sense it’s ludicrous to suppose that the Master benefited from the deal or that they were the sort of men who deserved to earn the coin. But once they do get to sundown, they have in a sense “earned” their pay, in that they have fulfilled their end of the bargain. The good Master can be counted on to keep his promises, even though he has obviously given significantly more than he got.

As the story shows, not everyone gets salvation this way. Some people are like the Prodigal Son or the laborers hired in the late afternoon; their reward is fairly obviously gratuitous from beginning to end. They did nothing whatever to deserve it, aside from needing it badly and humbly being willing to receive it. But isn’t it possible that God can be generous to different people in different ways? Some have the joy of experiencing an utterly unexpected and undeserved gift of grace. Others have the honor of being prompted and prodded through the sort of virtuous life that will allow them to know the joy of fidelity to God.