The Prodigal Father and the Lost Son

Lent 4, Year C 2025; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

This uniquely Lucan parable is presented in the lectionary without the context of two other parables that immediately precede it, the simpler ones of a lost sheep (also at Matthew 18:12-14) and a lost coin. So this is the story of a “lost” son more than of a “prodigal,” and is known as such in some other languages; the vivid story deepens those simpler pictures of finding items of lost property.

These parables are told, as the introductory verses indicate, in response to complaints about Jesus’ relationships with tax collectors and sinners. The themes of food, hunger, and feasting, as well as of proper eating companions, in this third story pick up the previous chapter’s stories of Jesus attending a banquet and discussing the guest list, and telling a parable about those same things (14:1-35), all of which material we will read later this year. All these then contribute to a message of God’s loving welcome for the marginalized, even over the righteous.

If emphasizing the “lost” son is one way we ought to re-think this story, Luke Johnson goes further to suggest the main character is not the son, but the father.¹ This makes sense especially given that in the other two parables the one doing the seeking is the protagonist. Of course in this case the younger son’s experience draws our attention, but if it is just about him then we are left with the last part, the encounter with the older son, as an awkward appendage. In fact the father’s contrasting engagements with the two sons is necessary to complete the parallels with the other parables. Better then to say that the last part, the older son’s complaint and the father’s response to it, illustrates more fully the contrast made in the lost sheep story: “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” The parable then is about people, but it is especially about the joy of God.

The portrait of the young man’s bad choices is among the most evocative writing in scripture. His wrong-headedness and self-absorption are plausible, and the consequences also readily imagined. The young man—apparently from wealth, given the father’s capacity to hand over cash in lieu of inheritance, as well as the lavish response at the end— lurches from excess to poverty, with the relatively common experience of an ancient famine thrown in for good measure. Selling his labor is already shocking, relative to his status as part of a landowning family.

As noted, this story illustrates both loss and the restoration via images already in the reader’s mind from chapter 14, which was all about table fellowship. So the young man’s implied life as a wastrel was one of plenty, but then came poverty and famine. Time in the company of pigs combines a range of humiliations including hunger, but not limited to it. While Luke’s audience will not all have been observant Jews, they knew of the place of pigs in the Jewish imagination, and Jesus’ telling of the story implies that the young man’s joining pigs (or more so, wanting to) at table, was implicitly a symbolic degradation as well as an economic one.²

The joy of the father at the young man’s return is one of the very specific elements that connects this parable with the previous two. Luke’s “sheep” and “coin” parables spent more time on the rejoicing than the finding itself; here the father’s undignified running, ending with (literally) “he fell on his neck,” indicate the father has better things to do than check the fine print of the law, the son’s bank balance, or anything else. That the son has been found is the whole point.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Return of the Lost Son (Hermitage, St Petersburg). Wikimedia Commons

It is ironic that many interpretations of the parable from early Christian times onwards have read the story as one that readjusts exclusion rather than overcoming it. The Pharisees in particular and Judaism in general become the new outcast, an older brother who is imagined—quite without evidence—to be sent away from the table. The tension between Jesus and the Pharisees in particular does provide part of the backdrop for the parables, and for the previous chapter’s reflections of feasting and fellowship. There is no avoiding that the elder son plays a part that corresponds to the complaints of the Pharisees about Jesus’ actions and his table companions (15:1-2).

While the Pharisees are fairly consistently depicted in terms of conflict with Jesus, they must be understood first and foremost as the most politically and religiously serious sub-group in Judaism of Jesus’ time. Their conflict with Jesus, and then with the emergent Christian movement, had something to do with affinity (like that, say, of two siblings…).

The earlier banqueting discourse had been set at the table of a leading Pharisee, so Jesus was not holding them at arm’s length. And if the elder son is a sort of stand-in for them here, his ill-humor does not cause the father to reject him. This disgruntled sibling is not excluded from the party, or from the father’s love, unless he chooses to be—and the parables imply that he remains, along with the one that had been lost.

If avoiding anti-Jewish readings is one important sidebar here, the real significance of the parable now remains to be seen. Many of us know how deeply in need of God’s grace we have been, and remain. We can all be reminded of the God who at some point has “fallen on our neck,” and will do so again against all the odds. Whether or not we can still somewhere in our memories taste the carob pods and smell the pigs, we are at the banquet because God’s love exceeded what we could have imagined or hoped. This love is freely offered and we proclaim it as the Gospel. Yet the common idea of “inclusion” is a weak way of summing this up, if we are tempted to do so. To be found is not just another word for being lost; the younger son does have to “come to himself” and return. The love of God has to change us, and this parable illustrates the idea of divine reversal so central to Luke’s Gospel.

We may also still be tempted to use the older son as the image of some more familiar forms of inflexibility, legalism, or exclusion, which are not in short supply. Anyone taking the time to read this commentary however probably needs to start by assuming that, even if we have been on the other side of the family tree at times, we ourselves are now more like the elder son, firmly ensconced in the house and possibly possessive about its privileges. We should then ponder just whose presence it is in God’s embrace that causes us to wonder why we bothered working so hard and so long.

The focus remains however on the surprising and prodigal love of God, which will always exceed our expectations, and sometimes perhaps our hopes. The call of the Gospel is both that the Father’s love is beyond our imagining, and also that by means we cannot fully understand, we are able to claim it and find our own unlikely place at the table, along with all the others who have miraculously become part of the family of God.

1. Johnson, Luke, 240-41; cf Fitzmyer, Gospel according to Luke 2.1084.

2. Jordan Rosenblum’s discussion of pigs in the NT is illuminating; they could be metaphors for the oppression Roman forces too, at times. See Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig. New York: New York University Press, 2024, 60-62.