In the Name of the + Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be always pleasing in thy sight O Lord, my strength and my redeemer (Ps 19:14).
Brothers and sisters, let us repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand (cf. Mk 1:15).
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a father and his two sons, one elder, one younger. As Amy-Jill Levine notes, talk of a father with two sons would have immediately registered with Jewish audiences about a range of biblical figures: Adam, Cain, and Abel; Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac; Isaac, Esau, and Jacob; Jacob, the sons of Leah, and the sons of Rachel; Joseph, Menasseh, and Ephraim.1 In each of these cases the paternal preference is not for the elder child, the theoretical heir and primary successor, but for the younger child, who in many cases wins out as the graciously elected scion instead. The father’s preference for his young son in the parable would have resonated, then, as appropriate to the biblically literate, and as the obvious choice for the audience’s self-identification. But then Jesus continues to speak about the son requesting that the father divide the inheritance; his own squandering of that inheritance in dissolute living; his moment of truth and return to the father’s great welcome and the brother’s consternation. In a sense, the younger son echoes but undermines the stories of his biblical predecessors: Abraham, the younger brother of Nahor, goes away to Canaan and becomes wealthy; Isaac is not sent away into the wilderness, but Ishmael is, where in both Jewish and Muslim tradition he prospers greatly; when he returns, he has the opportunity to get revenge against Isaac, but instead, the two bury Abraham in Machpelach, the past behind them. Jacob went away to Mesopotamia, but came back rich and, despite the threat of violence with a resentful Esau, reconciled with him; Joseph went away to Egypt and became lord of the whole land, and when he had the possibility of exacting vengeance on his brother forswore it. The interplay of departure, prosperity, and reconciliation characterizes these stories in a way that is not immediately forthcoming in Jesus’ parable, and this should place our attention on the relationship of the brothers, on the peril and possibility that they will be able to reconcile after the younger’s irresponsible living and the elder’s experience of emotional neglect.
This is not how Christian Tradition has been habituated to read the parable. The obsession with finding an allegory here—the father is God, the elder son is “Israel,” “the Jews,” or “the Pharisees,” the younger son is the gentiles; or the father is God, the elder son is the gentile church, and the younger son is a prodigal but eschatologically reconciled Israel; the father is God, the elder brother is a person righteous according to works, the younger brother a sinner (though this one has more merit to it, truth be told)—misunderstands the genre of parables, the historical situation of Jesus as a Jewish preacher and apocalyptic, social prophet of the forthcoming Kingdom of God, and the unique blend of imminent threat and opportunity that Kingdom offers.
So let us leave behind how the text has been read, and read it afresh, with good teachers like Levine as our guides. A man had two sons. The younger—likely to be a child of his elder age, a joy and light to him in an otherwise difficult time of life, the former likely to be a reminder of a life and possibly even a wife he has long since left behind (given the mortality and divorce rates of antiquity)2—requests his portion of the estate for the sake of a journey, to which the father consents. In the ancient world, this would not have read as a desire that the father be dead; it may have read as the beginning of a grand business venture. The younger son is more like the television trope of the perennial grifter, the younger brother who never quite gets his life together, who shows up at holidays strapped for cash and looking for a loan to fund this year’s get-rich-quick scheme that will, certainly, pay off this time, than he is the image of a resentful son who wishes to cut family ties. The father’s acquiescence may code as the special privilege of elite young men, to make use of family wealth to travel before the commitments of marriage, householder life, and community responsibilities set in. The father in that case may, however pained, support the son’s adventurous spirit: he may be blind to his son’s faults, or intentionally deaf to them, wanting to believe in the son’s potential and his desire to see the world and, as our culture might put it, sew his oats before getting serious about life. Some ancient people travelled for work, others for pleasure; those who did the latter, like those who do today, often emerged from a privilege that seems to have been available to this family. And perhaps, given that the son does not announce his intentions ahead of time, the father simply yields his requests the way that men of means often unthinkingly give to their children all that they ask without moderation or hesitancy. The desire to bless is not to be derided, of course, though the imprudence of not blessing by means of healthy experiences of denial and frustration are quick ways to ruin any child, and they seem obvious in this family, not least because they are not evenly shared (more on this in a moment).
The son then goes off into a far country and squanders his wealth on “dissolute living” (; Lk 15:13); it is only when he is reduced to indentured servitude and feeding pigs carob pods that he “comes to himself” (15:17). In the ancient world, the two primary sources of slavery were war and debt, the latter a motivating factor to sell one’s self into bondage as it inhibited one’s ability to buy or maintain food or shelter. We miss key context if we misunderstand the son’s plight as simply a bad job to have; he has given up his legal and social status for the sake of survival. And it continues to be the necessity of survival that motivates the son to go home to his father, and to play on the father’s compassion by offering to come back as his servant—knowing full well that the father will never be so harsh with him and that his manipulation will be successful.
That’s another interpretive mistake we make: the chance to make the son an image of repentance is too good for Christian devotion, so we habitually believe him when we should be suspicious of his intentions. This is a young man who, as the father of a girl I once dated put it, knows how to get what he wants: he knows the right level of public humiliation to save face while also mining the father’s love. He goes in asking to be an indentured servant again, but really he’s after the party. If there’s a parallel here to the attitude that one seeks to cultivate for, say, sacramental confession, it is this: most of us, if we’re honest, go to confession with no genuine belief or intention that we should never fail as we have failed again; our language lacks conviction. We are perhaps fooling ourselves, but we are definitely trying to fool God into thinking we are sorry enough for our mistakes, most of us who find our way to the confessional: and God, good Father that he is, forgives us anyway and throws the party.
This is probably the most scandalous message one can derive from the parable, actually: if the father is a stand-in for the Father, for God, then God’s fabulous goodness as the Father of the universe is being directly analogized to a bad human father whose primary vice is unequal extravagance shown to an undeserving and conniving child while he ignores the heart of his truly faithful son. Anyone who comes out of a toxic home life will know what I mean here: the parent who simply cannot or will not see the devotion of the good child and the wickedness of the wild child, the parent who expends so much concern on the riotous child that they miss and even abuse the heart of the righteous son or daughter. It is easy to figure out who you are in this story, if you think about it for very long. There is no moral calculus which could condemn the elder son for spending the day late into the night out in the field tending to the father’s estate and coming home resentful and angry that his scoundrel brother is the heart of the party; and I do not think that Jesus does so, at least on moral grounds. It should not be the elder son’s responsibility to endure all work and no play, nor his responsibility to share the father’s joy that the lost son has made his way home (this time around, for now); the elder son should be able to look to the father as his father, for justice and compassion for the sacrifices he has made, including the slack he’s had to pick up because of the father’s favoritism towards a son who has been missing all this time not just from the father’s embrace but from the field’s labor. If, on the traditional reading, the elder brother is the Pharisees, or the Jewish people as a whole, Christian readers should understand that they have the unflattering position of the deadbeat in the story, while the true heir and genuine collaborator of God’s is the elder son; it is, after all, Israel that enjoys the sonship (Rom 9:4). And indeed, the father does acknowledge the elder as his son in a way he does not the younger: to others he says that “this my son” has come home about the younger, but he reserves the affection of “child” for the elder.
The elder son, reassured of his universal access to the father’s goods, is invited to the feast. And here may lay Jesus’ true point, in response to the Pharisees and scribes that are critical of the sinners and tax collectors gathering round about him at the start of these parables (15:1-2): the Kingdom offers the repentant, even the partly or insincerely repentant, the mercantilistically repentant, even the minimally repentant, the great joy of welcome celebration. Those who don’t need repentance—and I think the Jesus of the Gospels seems to clearly think that there are such people, and at least in this passage and in the Lukan parables generally may well imply that some of those people are Pharisees—get to enjoy the party, while also knowing that theirs is all that is the Father’s, and enjoying the Father’s affection, boons not listed as those of the younger son. And here is where the analogy between God the Father and the human father of the parable is most illuminating: like the human father, God dotes on the repentant sinner, but respects and trusts the righteous; like the human father, God will give the repentant sinner the title “son,” yet addresses the faithful with the tenderness of “child.” And so like the human father, God sees and hears the frustration of the just in the face of the underserved graces that the lately and perhaps imperfectly penitent receive. And the gentle call—here is where God exceeds the limits of the analogy, for few human fathers compromised by favoritism attain this level of self-awareness—is not to begrudge them their banquet; that the restoration of the sinners to the household of God does not undermine the obvious virtue of the righteous, nor the reward that will attend it; miraculously, the repentance of the sinner redounds to the added benefit of the righteous, who enjoy both the celebration that is occasioned on behalf of the sinner as well as the fullness of inheritance which the sinner has squandered. But this benefit will only accrue to the elder brother if he acquiesces and enters the banquet; if he puts away his genuine, irrefutable gripes and lets himself join the party. That this is not narrated implies that it is Jesus’ invitation to his righteous colleagues among the Jewish legal scholars and teachers of his day towards those Jews who, wealthy off the exploitation of their fellows in collaboration with the Romans, were hearkening to Jesus’ offer of eschatological mercy on the basis of repentance in light of the imminent judgment and Kingdom.
At another layer of interpretation we may also find that this resolves one of the signature complaints of infernalists against universalism, the hope and the confidence that God will save every last creature: if God will simply save all, what point, what benefit in righteousness? Why try in this life at all? These are bigger questions than can be resolved here, but I will close by pointing out that the parable reorients our perspective helpfully. The just, Jew or gentile, are with the Father always, and all that he has is theirs; sinners who repent have gone from death to life, and this is due celebration in God’s Kingdom, for it is nothing less than an act of resurrection and indeed creation, the end in which all have their beginning. And so the eternal call to the just, the gentle voice of the Father speaking with his children, is not to begrudge their brethren the fatted calves they do not enjoy in this life: the celebration may be the Father’s gift to the penitent, but the Kingdom itself belongs to the just, and they can have the celebration, too, but only in and with their restored brethren, where the penitent are promised no such further inheritance than that which they have squandered in their wasting their very essence (ousia) in this life. Over however many countless aeons there may be lost sons and daughters finding their way back to God after the ends of their evil are exhausted, the invitation to the just will always be to join their Father by imitation of his generosity. What in this life is bad fatherhood still, however dimly, witnesses to the perfect love of the divine paternity, ever looking out on the cosmic horizon for lost children to come home.
For all of what follows, consult Levine, Short Stories By Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (SanFrancisco: HarperOne, 2014), 27-76.
See Michael L. Satlow, “Marriage and Divorce,” 608-611 in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2nd ed., ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Gospel reading and homily at church was that much better this morning having read this the day before.
Thanks for this thought-provoking exegesis; I'd never considered the parable in this light.
I only fairly recently discovered Levine's work, and immediately loved it. Thanks for the additional reference/recommendation.