Luke 15:29

δουλεύω σοι. ‘I am thy slave.’ He does not say “Father:” and evidently regards the yoke not as perfect freedom but as distasteful bondage. The slave is ever dissatisfied; and this son worked in the spirit of a “hired servant.”

οὐδέποτε ἐντολήν σου παρῆλθον. This is the very spirit of the Pharisee and the Rabbi, Luke 18:11-12. “All these things have I kept from my youth up.” Such self-satisfaction can only spring from an ignorance of the breadth and spirituality of God’s commandments. The respectable Jews, sunk in the complacency of formalism and letter-worshipping orthodoxy, had lost all conception that they were, at the best, but unprofitable servants. Like this elder son they “went about to establish their own righteousness” (Romans 9:14); and though they kept many formal commandments they ‘transgressed’ the love of God (Luke 11:42). Observe that while the younger son confesses with no excuse, the elder son boasts with no confession. This at once proves his hollowness, for the confessions of the holiest are ever the most bitter. The antitheses in the verse are striking, ‘You never gave me a kid, much less sacrificed a fatted calf;—not even for my friends, much less for harlots.’ He is so satisfied with himself as to be quite dissatisfied with his father on whose “unfairness” towards him, and “unjust lenience” to his other son, he freely comments.

ἐμοὶ οὐδέποτε ἔδωκας ἔριφον. He is bitter and reproachful. To me thou never gavest (so much as) a kid, (B has ἐρίφιον, a kidling); but to him the fatted calf. The reward of a life near his father’s presence and in the safety of the old home was nothing to him. He is like the rescued Israelites still yearning for the flesh-pots of Egypt.

μετὰ τῶν φίλων μου. Here again is a touch of self-satisfied malignity. I should not have eaten the kid μετὰ πορνῶν, as he has done, but with worthy friends.