With the words “this son of yours” he distances himself from his brother as well as from his father. He looks at the two of them as aliens who have lost all sense of reality and engage in a relationship that is completely inappropriate, considering the true facts of the prodigal’s life. The elder son no longer has a brother. Nor, any longer, a father. Both have become strangers to him. His brother, a sinner, he looks down on with disdain; his father, a slave owner, he looks up at with fear. Here I see how lost the elder son is. He has become a foreigner in his own house.
