The Parable of the Prodigal Son

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Luke gives the occasion before he gives the parable, and the occasion governs everything that follows. Publicans and sinners drew near to hear Jesus, "And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them."¹ Three parables answer that complaint. A shepherd leaves ninety and nine to find one sheep. A woman lights a candle and sweeps the house for one coin out of ten. Then a man has two sons, and one of them is lost, and the proportion has narrowed from one in a hundred to one in ten to one in two. The third parable is the answer to the murmuring, and by the end it is aimed at the men who murmured.

The Demand

"And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living."²

The request was not a request for an early gift. Under the law the younger of two sons received a third of the estate and the elder a double portion¹³, and that division came at the father's death. To ask for it while the father was alive and well was to treat him as already dead and to want what his death would bring without waiting for it, or wanting him. A family in that world held its land as an inheritance from the fathers, so turning a portion of it into money to be carried abroad was not a private financial decision. It cut the son out of the household and the household out of its ground.

The father does not argue and does not retaliate. He divides his living. Nothing in the story suggests he approved, and nothing suggests he compelled. He let the son have what the son had asked for, which is one of the more sobering mercies in Scripture.

Here is the essence of the thing the parable calls sin. It is not chiefly the appetite for what is forbidden. It is the appetite for the Father's gifts apart from the Father Himself. The son wanted the estate and not the man who owned it.

The Far Country

"And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living."³

The distance is described in miles and meant in another currency altogether. What follows is told in four short movements, and each one takes something away from him. He spent all. A famine arose. He began to be in want. He joined himself to a citizen of that country, who sent him into the fields to feed swine.

For a son of Israel there was no lower place. The pig was the standing example of the unclean beast¹⁴, and the law forbade the eating of it, so a Jewish man hired to keep a herd of them had abandoned the last visible mark of who he was. Luke carries it one degree further. He would gladly have filled his belly with the husks the swine ate, the carob pods that were fodder and not food, "and no man gave unto him."⁴ The country that had taken his money with pleasure gave him nothing at all when he had none.

Sin promised more than it delivered and then took more than it had promised. The far country that looked like liberty turned out to be a place of famine, and the man who went there to be free from a father ended as the servant of a stranger.

Coming to Himself

"And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father."⁵

The phrase is exact. He came to himself. Scripture treats sin as a kind of madness that takes a person out of his right mind, and repentance here is described as a man waking up in it. It began with a plain comparison. There was bread in his father's house, enough and to spare, and he was dying of hunger in a field.

What he resolved to say has three parts and none of them is an excuse. "Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants."⁶ He named the sin as sin. He named it against God first and against his father second, which is the right order. And he asked for the lowest place in the household, the day labourer, the man hired in the morning and paid at evening with no standing in the family at all. He did not ask to be restored. He asked to be employed.

This is repentance as Scripture describes it rather than as regret describes it. Regret is sorrow that the consequences arrived. Repentance is a change of mind that turns a man around and starts him walking home.

The Father Who Ran

"But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him."⁷

He saw him a great way off, which means he had been looking. The son was recognized at a distance by a man who had been watching that road.

Then the father ran, and the detail would have struck the first hearers harder than it strikes a modern reader. An elderly head of a household in that world did not run. To run he had to gather up his robes and expose his legs, and the whole village would see him do it. He ran anyway. Whatever the son had cost him in shame already, the father added his own shame to it in order to reach the boy before the boy reached the house.

The son began the speech he had rehearsed and did not finish it. He got as far as his unworthiness to be called a son, and the request to be made a hired servant never left his mouth. The father was already giving orders. The best robe, which was honour. A ring for his hand, which in that household was authority, since a signet sealed documents. Shoes for his feet, which servants did not wear. The fatted calf, which was kept for an occasion and made the celebration a public one, so that the village that had watched him leave would see how he had been received.

None of it was earned and none of it was partial. He came home asking for wages and was given sonship. "For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."⁸

The Son Who Would Not Go In

The parable does not end there, and the half that remains is the half Jesus told for the men standing in front of Him.

"Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing."⁹ He asked a servant what it meant, learned that his brother had come home safe, "And he was angry, and would not go in."¹⁰

The refusal was not a private sulk. As the elder son and heir he had a public duty at such a feast, to stand with his father and greet the guests. By staying outside he shamed his father in front of the whole village, which is precisely what his brother had done when he left. The two sons insulted the same man in opposite directions.

And the father came out a second time. Luke says he "intreated him," which is the same grace running in the other direction, out of the house toward the son who never left it.

The complaint, when it comes, is a complete account of the elder son's religion. "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."¹¹ The word he chooses for his service is the word for the work of a slave. Years in his father's house, and he described them as servitude and counted them as a debt owed to him. He had been in the field, near enough to hear the music, and had never once understood where he was standing. Then he refuses his brother's name: "this thy son," he says, not my brother.

The father corrects the pronoun gently and takes nothing back. "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found."¹² Everything the elder son had worked to earn had been his the entire time. He had lived as a hired man in a house where he was an heir, and the tragedy of it is that nobody had required that of him.

The Feast Left Open

The parable stops without telling us whether the elder son went in. That silence is deliberate, and it was aimed at the scribes and Pharisees who had complained that this man receives sinners. The younger son is the publican who drew near to hear. The elder son is the man murmuring at the edge of the room about who has been let in. Jesus leaves the door standing open and declines to say what the elder son did with it, because the men listening had not yet decided what they would do with it.

Two sons were lost in that story. One was lost in a far country and one was lost in his father's field, and open rebellion is not the more dangerous of the two, only the more obvious. The father went out to both of them. He ran to the first and pleaded with the second, and to both he gave what neither had earned.

The parable therefore asks a question of everyone who reads it, and the question is not whether a person has wandered. It is whether he will come in to the celebration when he is called.