A Very Christian and a Very Jewish Parable - Reflections on Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32, Lent 4, Year C
by John C. Holbert on Saturday, February 8, 2025
It is difficult, if not impossible, to say anything new about Luke 15. How many sermons, commentaries, and simple common references to the “Prodigal Son” have been made is beyond calculation. The moment someone says, “A father had two sons,” the listeners know what to expect. Or do they? I have spent the bulk of my scholarly and preacherly life attempting to demonstrate in as many ways as I can that common readings of the New Testament too often veer toward anti-Judaism, a dreadful condition that has regularly led to anti-Semitism. I write this article on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 in Poland by members of the Russian army. What those soldiers witnessed was the full horror of what happens when a disgusting idea turns into a mass killing machine, when the notion developed that Jews were evil and needed to be exterminated. And we Christians had a huge hand to play in that monstrous deed.
Over the 50+ years of my scholarly life, I have read and witnessed any number of uses of Luke 15 that could only be termed anti-Jewish. For example, when the younger son asks his father for a share in his inheritance, it is often said that the son is treating his father as if dead, demanding from him what he should only receive, presumably by Jewish law and custom, after his father has died. This reading forgets utterly the large number of stories from the Hebrew Bible that focus squarely on younger sons: David, Jacob, and Joseph, to name only the most well-known. Might not the Jewish story-teller, Jesus, be tapping into that familiar trope, where the younger son becomes the significant son?
And what of the role of the father? It might well be that when the younger boy asks for his inheritance, the father, by immediately acquiescing to the demand, reveals his inordinate love for this boy, rather like Jacob’s love for Joseph or Joseph’s love for Benjamin. Is not this tremendous love one of the story’s main points. The Jewish Jesus is not contrasting a new “Christian” love over against an older “Jewish” love; he may, in fact, be saying that Jewish fathers indeed love their sons. In reality, this father will prove to love both of his sons, as any father would.
Instead of offering his new-found wealth to the less fortunate of “the far country,” the son proves wastrel, and “scatters” his money all over the place, employing the same verb found in the parable of the profligate sower (Mark 4). Soon, a famine strikes the land, and the boy is starving. He hires himself out to a local merchant who puts him to the work of caring for his hogs. Of course, Jews at the time wanted nothing to do with pigs, but the boy is starving, and any number of rabbinic texts enjoin Jews to eat what is at hand to avoid starvation. The boy has not thereby become a “sinner;” he merely wants to live. “But when he came to himself,” reads vs.17, a verse that has caused vast comment, much of it overly pious. Given what happens next, namely the boy’s return home, it has been common to say that what has happened is a religious conversion, and his going home is a statement of his repentance and desire for absolution. But why could it not be a more obvious motivation?
The boy is hungry and knows well that his father is wealthy and feeds even his servants far better fare than pig pods. Why not go home and get a good meal, and to make it more appealing to the father, the boy dreams up a nicely religious speech: “O, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands” (Luke 15:18-19). One can imagine the boy practicing his speech as he heads home, getting the emphases right, putting a slight tear in the voice.
But, before he can get the whole speech out (no “treat me as one of your hired hands”), the father rushes out to meet him, and paying no attention to the speech, demands that a robe be brought, and shoes be produced and a party to be planned, “for this son of mine was dead and is alive again…and they began to celebrate” (Luke 15:24). The father acts like any loving father would. Whether or not we or the ancient hearers connected this father with God is not as important as seeing the vast love for his son(s) shown by this particular father.
The eldest son, working as always in the fields, is regularly depicted as a representative of the Jews, committed to their law-following, their refusal to celebrate with their returned brother. Hence, the younger son becomes the Christians in the allegory, while the eldest son is the recalcitrant Jews. This reading is nothing less than blasphemy, a mocking of the power of the parable. The father goes out to his eldest, just as he did with his returning youngest, and urges him to join the celebration. But he refuses, claiming that his brother has “swallowed his living with prostitutes.” Of course, he knows nothing of where the inheritance went, but thinks up the very worst thing he can. In addition, he says his father never even cooked a goat for him, let alone the calf fattened for special occasions. But the loving father makes it plain that “all that I have is yours,” but now it is time to celebrate because “your brother” (the eldest could only call the returnee “this son of yours”) has come back; “he was lost and is found.”
The father loves them both in the only way he knows how, by celebrating the found and by inviting the supposed “not lost” to join in. This story is not at all about Christians and Jews. It is about a family reunited, a community reconstituted, and a rich demonstration of how love works and wins. To claim it has to do with Christian against Jew is exactly to defeat the main claim of the tale; all are welcome to the party without fear or favor. In short, this is without doubt a very Jewish as well as a very Christian story.