The Prodigal Son: What the Village Was Waiting For (19 of 26)

Bailey spent three books on this parable and the payoff is a single ceremony most readers have never heard of.

Once it is in view the father’s run stops being a gesture of affection that costs him his dignity. It becomes an interception with a deadline.

What Does Prodigal Actually Mean?

Recklessly wasteful. Extravagant, especially with money.

It comes from the Latin prodigus, lavish, from prodigere, to drive forth or squander. The word describes spending, and nothing else.

The common misreading is that it means wayward, or runaway, or returning. It does not. It says nothing about leaving home and nothing about coming back. A prodigal who never repents is still a prodigal.

The word can even run positive. Prodigal generosity. A prodigal harvest. Lavishly abundant, with no moral judgment attached at all.

So the label picks out one fact about one son: what he did with the money. That is a narrow thing to hang a chapter on.

Is the Title Even Part of the Bible?

No. It is an editorial section heading added by translators and editors, and it is not in the text.

Jesus opens differently. A certain man had two sons.

That is the parable’s own framing and it is doing something the title undoes. The story announces a father and two sons. The heading announces one son and his spending.

Follow where the story actually spends itself and the imbalance is obvious. The younger son’s collapse and return occupy the middle. The ending, the part a story reserves for what it is about, is given entirely to the older brother standing outside a party he will not enter, and to a father going out a second time to plead.

The parable does not resolve that. It stops with him outside.

So a title that fixes attention on the wasteful son sends readers past the thing the ending is for. It is not wrong, exactly. It is aimed at the wrong half.

Some traditions have noticed and renamed it, usually as the parable of the loving father or the parable of the two sons. Both are closer to what the text does.

What Was Wrong With the Request?

Everything, and the sale that followed was worse.

Asking for an inheritance while the father is in good health is a request for something that arrives only at death, and the implication is not subtle.

Then he sells. In the village, in not many days, with his father alive and present. Land sales in that world took months and often years of negotiation and inspection. Selling that quickly means taking whatever he could get, publicly, in front of neighbours who now know precisely what has happened in that house.

Ben Sirach calls slander by a whole town a terror worse than death, which gives some sense of what the family was now living with.

What Is the Qetsatsah?

The cutting-off ceremony, and it is what the parable has hanging over it.

Jewish sources describe a village ritual for a man who lost family land to Gentiles. The relatives filled a jar with parched corn and nuts and smashed it in front of the assembled people, declaring that so-and-so is cut off from his inheritance. Recovering the land was the only thing that undid it.

Now look at what the younger son has done. He sold the land and lost the money among Gentiles who keep pigs. If the ceremony was not performed when he left, it was certainly waiting for his return.

Why Does the Father Run?

To get to his son before the village does.

The undignified part is real. Running required gathering up the robes and exposing the legs, and it was not what an elder did in public, ever.

But the destination matters as much as the manner. He goes out to meet him on the road, while he is still a long way off, and the embrace and the kiss happen in the open where everyone can see them.

After that, nobody in that town can enact anything. The head of the family has publicly received him, and the ceremony becomes impossible.

The father absorbs the humiliation and spends it buying his son safe passage through his own village.

Is the Son’s Speech Repentance?

Bailey argues it is a proposal, and the wording supports him.

He rehearses it in the far country: make me like one of your hired men. The Greek is not the word for a household slave or a table servant. It is the word for a paid craftsman.

Slaves are not paid. He needs wages, because the plan is to work off what he lost and repay it. That is a scheme for restoring himself by his own effort, and it keeps him in charge of the transaction.

The father never lets him finish. He is interrupted mid-speech by orders for a robe, a ring and shoes, which are the marks of a son rather than a hired man.

What Is the Older Brother’s Failure?

It happened at the beginning, not the end.

In that culture a serious breach in a family produces a mediator, and the elder son was the obvious candidate. When the outrageous request was made, he said nothing.

He had a role to play at the start of the story and declined it. Which makes his complaint at the end considerably less sympathetic than it first sounds, because the party he refuses to enter is celebrating a reconciliation he could have brokered years earlier.

Is the Prodigal Son About Israel’s Return From Exile?

Wright reads it that way, and the case rests on one repeated line.

This son of mine was dead and is alive again. From Ezekiel 37 onward, resurrection language had been doing service in Israel’s Scriptures as a picture of coming home from exile. And most of Jesus’s contemporaries reckoned the exile had never actually ended. The people were back in the land, the temple stood and Herod was in the middle of enlarging it, and pagans still ran the country. What they were waiting for was a second Exodus.

Tell that audience a story about a son who lost everything in a foreign country and came home to a feast, and they are not hearing a family drama.

Which gives the parable a second answer to the muttering that opens the chapter. The first answer is that heaven throws a party when the lost are found. The second is that the promises are being kept in front of the people complaining about it, and a man who objects to the celebration is objecting to the arrival of his own hope.

This is Wright’s reading rather than something the parable states, and it depends on the exile framework being as widely held as he takes it to be. That framework is well attested in the period, though how far it reached is argued over.

Why Does the Older Brother Say He Has Never Disobeyed?

Because that was the boast, and Wright hears a particular voice making it.

I have never disobeyed a single command of yours is the same claim Paul makes about his own past in Philippians 3:6, where he says that as to righteousness under the law he was blameless. The older son is speaking in the register of the men standing in front of Jesus while the story is being told.

There is money underneath it too. The father divided the property at the start, which means the older son has been working his own share ever since, so the complaint about slaving away is not accurate. His real objection may be arithmetic. The younger brother has already spent his portion, and anything killed and served now comes out of what remains, which belongs to the son standing in the field.

The pronouns shift while he talks. The servant tells him his brother has come home. He tells his father that this son of yours has come home. The father answers with this brother of yours, and hands the word back to him.

Wright also notes where Luke is aiming this. By the time the Gospel was written, Gentiles were arriving in the church and Jewish believers were finding the celebration difficult, which is the pastoral problem Paul spends three chapters of Romans managing. The parable stops with the older brother outside, and Luke’s readers had their own version of him.

How Does the Parable of the Prodigal Son End?

Outside, unresolved, with the father in the field again.

The elder son refuses to come in, which is a public insult of the same order as the younger son’s request. And the father does the same thing twice in one day. He goes out to a son who has shamed him, in front of guests, and pleads.

The story stops there. We are never told whether he goes in.

Luke 15 opened with religious men muttering that this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. The parable ends with a religious man standing outside a meal he will not join, being begged by his father to come and eat.

The question is left with the audience, and the audience was the older brothers.

Which is why the title matters more than it looks. Call it the prodigal son and the reader arrives expecting a story about a young man who wasted money, gets one, and leaves satisfied before the parable has made its point. The man Jesus was actually describing to the Pharisees was standing in a field, refusing to go in.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the lost sheep and the lost coin, which open the same chapter, and Lazarus and the rich man, which closes on the same words.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Finding the Lost: Cultural Keys to Luke 15 (Concordia, 1992), The Cross and the Prodigal (IVP Academic, 2005), and Poet and Peasant (Eerdmans, 1983). Support the reading of the request and sale as public offences, the qetsatsah ceremony and its bearing on the father’s run, the rendering of the son’s speech as a proposal rather than repentance, the older brother’s failure to act as mediator, and the unresolved ending. Supplied in full.

N. T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (SPCK and Westminster John Knox, 2004), on Luke 15:11-24 and 15:25-32. Supports the reading of the dead-and-alive language as return-from-exile imagery, the identification of the older son’s claim of perfect obedience with the boast Paul records in Philippians 3:6, the observation that the property had already been divided and the older son is therefore spending his own inheritance on the feast, the shifting pronouns between servant, older son and father, and the forward reference to Gentile inclusion in Luke’s own church. Supplied in full.

Midrash Rabbah on Ruth 7:11 and the Jerusalem Talmud, Ketuboth 2:10 and Kiddushin 1:5. The sources describing the qetsatsah ceremony. Cited via Bailey.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 15:11-32, Ezekiel 37, Philippians 3:6 and Sirach 26:5.

Where the sourcing stops: whether the ceremony would have been performed at departure or held for a return is not specified in the sources, and the parable does not mention it at all. Its relevance is an inference from the son’s specific circumstances, and it is Bailey’s inference rather than a stated element of the story. The return-from-exile reading is Wright’s, and it is an inference about what the first hearers would have heard rather than a claim the parable makes about itself. The link between the older son’s boast and Philippians 3:6 is a parallel of wording, not a citation by either author. The etymology of prodigal is standard and checkable in any dictionary; the argument about what the editorial heading does to a reader’s attention is mine.

Footnotes

1. That the father runs twice in one day, to two sons, for two public humiliations, is the structural symmetry of the parable and it is usually only half told. The second run is the harder one, because by then he has an audience of guests and a son insulting him in front of them.
2. The parable’s refusal to resolve is deliberate and it should be preserved in any retelling. A version that has the older brother come in has answered the question the parable was asking its listeners, and taken it out of their hands.
3. Section headings across the Bible are worth treating as what they are, which is editorial furniture rather than text. They were added to help readers navigate and they carry interpretive decisions made by whoever added them. This is one of the clearest cases, but it is not the only one, and a reader who has never noticed that the headings are not scripture has been quietly guided by them for years.
4. The exile reading and the village reading are not rivals, and they answer different questions. Bailey explains why the father’s run works on the people watching. Wright explains why the story lands on the men who were complaining. Neither requires the other, and a teacher can run the parable on either one.