The Real Meaning of the Prodigal Son

Ask any 5 Christians what the real meaning behind Jesus' story about the prodigal son was, and you are likely to get 5 completely different answers, followed by a lament that Jesus didn't just come out and say what He was talking about when He spoke the story. However, many would be interested to find that the passage in Luke 15 actually does tell who is who, and allow for a very easy, and true, understanding of what Jesus was talking about.

The Story of the Prodigal Son
First, however, let's recap the story for those who may not remember. In Luke 15, Jesus is having a meal with sinners and tax collectors, while the Pharisees stand back in disgust. These self-righteous religious leaders cannot believe that Jesus, who is growing in popularity and teaching many things that fly in the face of the judgmental and pompous teachings of the corrupt clergy, is associating with what they would consider the scum of society, and so they question Him.

Jesus' response takes the form of three stories: the parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep, the parable of the woman and the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal son. This article will not deal with the first two, though there is much relating to those two to shed even more light on the parable of the prodigal son.

In His story about the prodigal son, Jesus tells of a young man who becomes restless at home, and decides to demand that his father give him his inheritance early. The father does so, sadly, and the youth leaves to go on a wild adventure out of the country. Once out from under his father's roof, the young man quickly spends his entire inheritance partying, soliciting prostitutes, and just plain poor money management. He suddenly finds himself hungry, penniless, and alone.

While working with the pigs under his new employer, and still so hungry that he longs to eat the pigs' scraps, the prodigal son realizes that even all of his father's hired hands eat better than he is in this foreign country, and that his only logical course of action is to go crawling back to his father and beg to be hired on as a servant. This, needless to say, is not his ideal return.

The son decides to go back to his father, who has been waiting for his lost son all this time. As the young son is walking back on his father's property, the father sees him and goes running out to hug him and welcome back joyfully. The father is so happy in fact that he throws a grand party in his son's honor.

But the young man's older brother is angry at the prodigal son's return and the joyous way that his father has welcomed him back and refuses to go into the party. When the father desperately tries to get his older son to celebrate with them, all he can think of is the fact that he has remained there by his father's side all this time, and the father never threw a party like this for him.

So Where's the Symbolism?
The question now is to find out who is who in the story. First off, since the majority of the story is about the prodigal son, we ask who the prodigal son is.

Looking back at the first two verses of the passage, we discover the tension in the entire chapter is basically why is Jesus accepting these horrible sinners and tax collectors into his presence. In this case, this tension parallels to the tension in the story where the elder son asks why the father would accept his horrible son back. So, we easily come to the conclusion that Jesus is using the prodigal son as a metaphor representing these very sinners and tax collectors that he is eating with.

Next, we come to the father in the story. If you ask many people, they will tell you that of course Jesus is the father in the story, and He was welcoming the lost people back to him.

This can't be, however. The entire purpose of these stories, as we see in the first two verses of the passage, is to prove that what Jesus is doing is right. Jesus couldn't prove that what he was doing was right by being in his own story; that would be like saying "I'm right because this is what I do." It makes no logical sense to validate your own actions by showing your own actions. Instead, in order to prove that what you are doing is right, you have to compare it to something else.

So who then is he comparing himself to? For that answer, we must consider who would accept these people back like the prodigal son is accepted back, even after they have left and squandered everything given them on a life of pleasure and self-serving.

The answer is God the Father. Throughout the Old Testament (which would be the only thing for Jesus to refer back to in the eyes of these religious leaders) it is written that God is this kind of God:

1. In Deuteronomy 30:1-9, Moses tells the Israelites that once they have been scattered and placed under oppression by the other nations because of their disobedience to God, He will accept them back and give them even more prosperity and blessing than their ancestors.
2. In Deuteronomy 4:31 and Hosea 2:23, God is shown to be a merciful God who will quickly and willingly accept Israel back into blessing, and they will fear and follow the LORD again even after they have left and treated God with disrespect.
3. Isaiah 62:5 says that He will rejoice greatly at the return of His people from their disobedience and lives of sin when they come back to Him.
4. In Hosea 2, God is presented as the faithful husband of His adulterous wife Israel, waits for the return of His wife from her worship of idols so that He may show mercy and grace to her.

So, we see that Jesus is comparing God to the father in the story of the prodigal son, and by telling the story to make his point, he is comparing himself to God to show that his actions in accepting the sinners and tax collectors is just the same as God saying that he will accept Israel back. Jesus is right in accepting these outcasts because God is right in accepting Israel (which the religious leaders were waiting expectantly for).

So, finally, who does the elder son represent in the story? I should think it would be obvious by now: the elder son is just like the religious leaders! Just like the elder son becomes angry that the father would accept his sinful brother back with celebration, the religious leaders became angry that Jesus would sit and eat and celebrate the return of sinners and tax collectors.

Get to the point
The point here is that Jesus was right to love and accept those sinful people, and the Pharisees were wrong to think so highly of themselves that they would not accept Jesus' joy at their return.

You see, the Pharisees and Jesus had two completely different value systems. The Pharisees, with all their pomp and self-righteousness, thought more highly of their laws and regulations (not to mention their position) than they did of people. The people, sinful and dirty as they were in the eyes of the Pharisees, were put far down on the religious leaders' priority lists.

God, on the other hand, placed a high value on people, and on salvation. He loved them completely enough to make a way for them to come back to him even after they had left him, done everything he had ever told them not to do, and rejected him. God's priority is on people and on their salvation.

What does it mean to me?
The more we learn about the attitude of God, the more we are able to emulate it and, hopefully, bring our lives more in line with who he is and what he desires of us. The story of the prodigal son amounts to one enormous example of how much God values the return of the lost, and how different that is from humanity's selfishness and conceit. Every one of us has a bit of the Pharisees in us. Every one of us fears at some points losing control over our happy little lives for the sake of valuing others the way God values them.

But that is what being a child of God is: risk. The real question that should come out of this passage, and the hardest one to answer, is, "how much am I willing to risk in order to love people the way Jesus does?" To that question, there is no easy answer.