The Second Son and the Bitter Virtue of Resentment
A secular lesson in a Christian parable
The Parable of the Prodigal Son stands as one of the most beloved portraits of mercy and grace that can be found in Christian scripture, one that resonates with me even as a non-religious person. In parallel with its comforting themes of suffering and forgiveness, it’s also a confronting story of resentment, entitlement, and self-deceptive isolation. The darker, open-ended themes aren’t found in the titular Prodigal Son himself, but in his resentfully-dutiful older brother. That brother is one of the most illuminating and confronting literary figures I’ve ever encountered, and now I’m going to walk through why.
To recap the story (Luke 15:11-32): an impulsive, wasteful son demands his inheritance early and vanishes. He burns through it in spectacular fashion and eventually limps home, humiliated and broke, willing to accept a deeply diminished role as a servant just to be back in his father’s house at all. In a twist that has echoed through the intervening ages, the father greets him not with anger or punishment but with a party—fine robes, a ring, and a lavish feast. We readers greet their reconciliation with delight and relief. Yet the “other” son—the dutiful, ever-responsible second son—simmers in the background, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched. He’s the one who never, ever strayed. He did every single thing his father had ever asked of him. Now, his loser party-boy brother has crawled back home after spitting in his father’s face, and as his father welcomes him home with love the second son finds himself offended. He doesn’t feel joy to see his brother home safe, to have his family be whole again. Instead, he thinks to himself - “I’ve been good all my life—where the hell is my party?”
For many of us, especially those who quietly pride ourselves on our devotion to ideals and rules, the second son’s reaction can really strike a nerve. We may want to scoff at him for being petty—clearly, he’s missing the point. But how often do we find ourselves thinking, “I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do, so where is my reward? How dare the evildoer have a better life than me?”? The second son forces us to confront the murkiness of our motives, the ways in which apparent virtue can mask a deeper self-interest.
Commitments to justice are good and important things to have. The commitment to justice has led to a great amount of progress across world history - for instance, I am very grateful for the deposition of hereditary aristocracy and slavery. This is an ongoing process - it’s both normal and important to seek and identify ways of doing things better than we are currently doing them.
We human beings are also psychologically complex and can often find ourselves using a commitment to justice as a mask to hide a deeper resentment and entitlement. Our motivations are complicated and difficult to discern, especially when the discerning process involves the risk of not looking good (at least to ourselves).
In the parable, the second son’s feelings are cloaked in the language of fairness (“I’ve been good, he’s been bad—this is unjust!”). The father’s point is that the second son hasn’t been cheated in any real sense. He’s had the father’s presence, security, and inheritance all along. His material inheritance remains the same, and he remains every bit as set up for success as ever. Religious language frames this as a tale of God’s grace: infinite, undiminishable love that meets each child’s unique need. A more secular perspective can glean a parallel truth: the second son actually has access to paternal “love” (resources, belonging, stable family ties), but resentment blinds him to this. His sense of desert and reward becomes so hyper-focused on “getting mine” that it corrodes the deeper gift he already enjoys. He doesn’t just seek goodness, but superiority. If he doesn’t have superiority then none of the other good things are even visible to him.
The prodigal son’s transgressions are ultimately resolved. The story ends with the second son’s transgressions inflamed and open-ended. He was obedient for most of his life, but once his father invites him to celebrate the return of the prodigal son then his heart disobeys. His final disobedience reveals that he has viewed his family bond as a transactional relationship: “I do chores; you give me special treatment.” To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting appreciation or a fair share of resources. But if our entire sense of duty is conditional on receiving applause then we’re no longer acting from true integrity. We’re making moral choices under an arrangement of quid-pro-quo, one that might even be invisible to ourselves.
To bring in a contemporary example, I think social media incentives have made it very, very easy to turn the pursuit of justice into a perverse sort of clout chasing. For much of the 2010s and on, left-of-center discourse turned into a giant game of exclusion. Consider the phrases like “if your feminism isn’t anti-racist then it isn’t feminism”. These phrases are dismissive, shrinking the circle of who counts as One Of The Good Ones. This isn’t to say that it’s bad to call for higher moral principles - it’s to say that social media structures can turn those calls into a giant, nasty popularity contest. It turns “we can do better” into “I am one of the good ones, and you are not”. It reduces virtue to visibility. It defines moral identity by what and who we reject.
To re-emphasize: there are good and important reasons to call out injustice and to strive for a better world. I am not claiming that all attempts to do so are secretly corrupt. What I am claiming is that a secret, creeping corruption is possible no matter what your principles are, and that facing that corruption directly is a core part of leading an effective moral life.
It’s easy to identify with the prodigal son, who ruins his life in a big and obvious way. It’s harder, but more important, to see ourselves in the second son, whose virtuous devotion masks a vicious isolation. It’s hardest of all to identify with the father.
This challenge is timeless. We can care about justice while also recognizing that envy or self-pity can skew our moral sense. We can celebrate a “prodigal’s” return—be it a friend emerging from addiction, or someone we disagree with benefiting from a political action—without taking it as a personal slight.
The second son prompts each of us to weigh our attachments to fairness and righteous identity. Are we operating from genuine solidarity or from an unspoken contract that all generosity must revolve around our contributions? If it’s the latter, then ironically, we’ll never find the joy that’s our birthright. The father in the story is ready to bless all his children - so is life itself. But sometimes we block our own path to the party, standing outside with our grievances, sure that others’ gain is our loss.
This is the challenge of grace - justice can be seen as “giving people what they deserve”, while grace can be defined as “giving people a good life even though they don’t deserve it”. Grace, by definition, is not fair.
Our choice, then, is to remain at the threshold—hardened by the unfairness of grace—or to step inside and reclaim the celebration that was open to us all along.