If you grew up in church, you probably know the parable of the prodigal son about as well as any story in the Bible. A son asks his dad for his inheritance early, blows every cent of it in a far away country, and ends up so hungry that the pig food starts looking good. So he heads home with a speech ready, and his dad sees him coming from a long way off, runs to him, and throws him a big party. Roll credits. It's the classic felt board story from Sunday school, and honestly, it's a pretty good story. But Jesus didn't end it there.
The party is going, and there's one person who won't come in. The older brother, the one who stayed home and did everything right, is standing out in the yard, and when his dad comes out to get him he won't even call his brother his brother. The father tries to offer perspective, and then the story just stops. Jesus never tells us if he goes in. So what if the prodigal son was never really about the prodigal? What if Jesus told this story to catch the people who were sure they were the good kids?
Here is what I believe. Jesus told a story about a family that couldn't sit at the same table to a family that couldn't sit at the same table. And 2,000 years later, his family still can't.
A Story Thrown Alongside
Because we've heard it so many times, I think a lot of us treat it like it happened, like there was a real guy in a real town with a real dad having a really bad day. But this story never happened. Jesus made it up, and that takes nothing away from it. Once you remember it's a parable, the questions change: why did Jesus tell it, who was he telling it to, and what was he trying to do to the people listening?
The Greek word is παραβολή (parabolē), and it's built from two parts. Para, which means alongside, and ballō, which means to throw. So the picture is a story thrown alongside a real situation. Set next to it, so you can compare the two.
Parables start out with almost no information. "A man had two sons" is basically a once upon a time, with no name and no town, and nobody who heard it thought it was a news report they could fact check. C. H. Dodd, in his 1935 book The Parables of the Kingdom, describes a good parable as one that leaves you unsure enough about how it applies that it teases your mind into active thought. I love that. Craig Blomberg (his Interpreting the Parables is a great place to go for the more technical read) points out that each main character usually carries a point, and here there are three: the father, the younger son, and the older son. Everything else, the servants and the pigs and the robe and the ring, is there to prop them up.
Who's at the Table?
I often say you should never read just one verse, and this is a good example of why. The prodigal son doesn't begin until verse 11, but Luke frames the whole chapter in the first two verses.
"Tax collectors and other notorious sinners often came to listen to Jesus teach. This made the Pharisees and teachers of religious law complain that he was associating with such sinful people, even eating with them!" (Luke 15:1 to 2, NLT)
People have read the prodigal son in lots of ways over the centuries, and I'm not going to say those are wrong, per se. But if we're going to respect the text, verses 1 and 2 are the challenge Jesus is answering for the rest of the chapter.
So let's build this world for a second. There's Jesus, announcing a new kingdom, a new way of existing as God's people. There are the Pharisees and teachers of the law, and let's not make the mistake of turning them into cartoon villains. These were people who knew their Scriptures and cared deeply about honoring God and staying faithful to the Torah. And then there are the tax collectors, Jewish men collecting for Rome and for the Herods who ruled on Rome's behalf, which meant working for the people occupying your homeland and turning your back on your own people. Most of us hear the word sinners through a modern Western lens, but in that world it meant people seen as living outside the covenant, some because they had the wrong job and some because they had the wrong reputation.
Okay, full stop. Every one of them was an Israelite. They were one family, and they were struggling to share a table. N.T. Wright, in Jesus and the Victory of God, reads the whole parable as Israel's story, with the younger son as Israel coming home from exile and the older brother standing for those who opposed the return. You don't have to follow him all the way to see where most modern scholarship lands, which is that this is a family problem inside Israel.
Luke builds to it in steps. A man loses one sheep out of a hundred, finds it, and rejoices. A woman loses one silver coin, looks until she finds it, and celebrates. When one gets lost and comes back, somebody throws a party. Jesus is being accused of letting the wrong people sit at his table, and the first two parables are about the joy that should happen when people on the outside find their way in. That joy was the hiccup, because it didn't look the way the religious leaders thought it should.
The Older Brother in the Yard
Then comes the third story.
"To illustrate the point further, Jesus told them this story: 'A man had two sons. The younger son told his father, "I want my share of your estate now before you die." So his father agreed to divide his wealth between his sons.'" (Luke 15:11 to 12, NLT)
Kenneth Bailey argues (and it isn't a consensus, but it rings true for that culture) that since you only got your inheritance when the patriarch died, asking for it early was a way of saying, I wish you were dead so I could take what's mine. (The NLT's "now before you die" is the translators drawing that idea out. In the Greek he just asks for the share of the estate that's coming to him.) And the father gives it to him anyway.
He goes off to a far country, probably Gentile land, and ends up with a famine and pigs, which for a Jewish audience is about as bad as it gets. Then he comes to his senses and rehearses a speech about not being worthy to be called a son anymore. Have you ever made a bad mistake and caught yourself playing the tape over and over in your head of what you were going to say? That's where he is. But before he can even finish, his father runs out, embraces him, and puts a robe on him, a ring on his finger, and sandals on his feet, and orders the fattened calf butchered for a party. If the story ended right there, it would line up perfectly with the first two.
But Jesus keeps going.
"The older brother was angry and wouldn't go in. His father came out and begged him, but he replied, 'All these years I've slaved for you and never once refused to do a single thing you told me to. And in all that time you never gave me even one young goat for a feast with my friends. Yet when this son of yours comes back after squandering your money on prostitutes, you celebrate by killing the fattened calf!'" (Luke 15:28 to 30, NLT)
Notice what he calls him. This son of yours. The word brother never comes out of his mouth.
"His father said to him, 'Look, dear son, you have always stayed by me, and everything I have is yours. We had to celebrate this happy day. For your brother was dead and has come back to life! He was lost, but now he is found!'" (Luke 15:31 to 32, NLT)
And then it ends, and we actually don't know what the brother did. That's the power of a parable. If you were one of the Pharisees in verse 2, the question left hanging is how you're going to respond to the mercy and love of the Father. The parable gets you to judge the situation before you realize it's about you, the same way Nathan's story about a stolen lamb got King David to condemn a man before Nathan told him, "You are that man!" (2 Samuel 12:7, NLT). And the father pleads with the older son, too. The way Luke frames it, Jesus is inviting the religious leaders to the table as well. You don't have to stand outside bitter. You're welcome here, too.
Side note: Luke is the only Gospel that tells this story. Luke cares about outsiders and about who eats with whom more than the others do, and in Acts, which Luke also wrote, the believers in Jerusalem make basically the same complaint against Peter: "You entered the home of Gentiles and even ate with them!" (Acts 11:3, NLT). Luke is probably writing late in the first century to churches that were still learning how to share a table, and through the sayings of Jesus he shows them how.
What If You're the Father?
The original meaning is about God reconciling a divided people to himself. As Paul puts it in Galatians 3:28, in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female. And boy, does that have real meaning for us today, because we are really good at othering other Christians. We say they're not real Christians, and we go heresy hunting online. How many reels have you seen where all someone does is complain that another Christian isn't the right kind? Is that not the Pharisees all over again?
It falls into this trap of elitism, that we have the right answer, they're wrong, and if you don't believe like I believe, then you're on the outside. And that is absolutely not Jesus. You don't have to agree with all of someone's theology. The trouble starts when we put people outside the table because they don't see the text the way we do, with denominational turf wars and doctrinal litmus tests and every other way we've found to push people out of our tradition.
And this has been going on since the beginning, even among Protestants. On January 5, 1527, Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat River in Zurich. He was part of a new movement that believed you should be baptized once you surrendered to Jesus as an adult, and since most of them had been baptized as babies, their opponents called it rebaptism and called them Anabaptists, which basically means rebaptizers. A Zurich council edict in March 1526 had made rebaptism punishable by drowning, and Manz became the first Swiss Anabaptist martyred by fellow Protestants. I don't know a single Christian today who would kill you for getting rebaptized.
So, back to the yard, and that phrase, this son of yours. When we stop seeing people as our brother and start seeing them as other, we begin to justify all sorts of atrocities, inside Christianity and outside of it. That heart condition is the very thing this parable is trying to confront.
Now, you might be thinking, see, Joe, that's Christianity, and that's why you should give up on the Bible. No. We don't quit Jesus because of the abuse that's been done in his name. He confronted it, and he challenged the people in seats of power to see themselves as the older brother.
And Jesus lived this out. In Luke he's constantly accused of being friends with the people he shouldn't be friends with, but he also sat at the table with the older brother. He eats at the house of Simon the Pharisee in Luke 7, accepts a Pharisee's invitation in Luke 11, and eats at the home of a leading Pharisee on the Sabbath in Luke 14. Jesus keeps accepting both invitations. The challenge for us is whether we have that capacity.
So I wonder if the invitation of this parable is to be the father. We want to figure out whether we're the younger son or the older son, but what if Jesus is saying, be like me, be like the father? The father goes out to both sons. Nobody's locked out and nobody's kicked out, including the people we'd rather leave out, and that cuts both ways, because there are religious people we'd love to leave out too, the ones whose politics and theology frustrate us. The father goes out to them as much as he goes to the younger son.
The holidays are coming, and it's been really hard to sit at the table lately, hasn't it? Whatever side you're on, I think your role this season is to be the father instead of one of the sons. Will you walk out to the yard and build a bridge, or will you stay inside and let them stand on the outside?
I don't assume I've answered every question about this parable. But I hope it gives you a new way to think about a story you've probably heard a hundred times. You can choose to be the father.
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