Of course you have. Everybody has. Even people who haven't been in church since Jesus originally told the story know it. In fact, people who frequent the church may be tempted to tune out the minute the pastor reads the words, "there was a father who had two sons." "Oh yes," we might say to ourselves, "that old saw. I've heard it so many times I almost have it memorized. Hearing it again only makes me wonder, 'What's for lunch. How about a nice roast? Probably not pork but beef or lamb would do quite nicely."
“This magnificent story is known ... as ‘the parable of the prodigal son,’ even by people who never use the word ‘prodigal’ in other contexts.”
This is a human story. Its power and appeal arise from the reality of the characters. None of them is a plaster saint. The younger son is headstrong, demanding, wasteful, and perhaps even manipulative in his return. The elder son is petty and angry, but his protests have the logic of simple justice and good order. And the father has not been very sensible.1
It is also, as Dr. Fred B. Craddock points out, “extraordinary in its composition, developing the plot in an economy of words, using only the necessary characters, with no more than two onstage at one time, and arriving at a resolution that requires the readers consent to be satisfactory.”2
There was a father who had two sons.
To put it mildly, the first son was a bean head. He had the emotional I.Q. of a three year old. His attitude was “I want what I want, and I want it now.” He didn’t seem to care what it would do to the family. He didn’t seem to care if his actions would break his father’s heart. If his brother had to work twice, maybe three times, as hard to keep the place running, so be it. He wanted what he wanted, and nothing was going to stop him from getting it.
He looks at his father’s 401-k, and landholdings, and livestock and said to himself “there is no way I am going to wait around for my old man to ‘go to glory’ before I get all this. I want it now.”
Every original listener to Jesus' story would have known what we know. This “bean head” is saying in effect, to his father, “I wish you were dead because, if you were I could have my share of your property not tomorrow, or someday, but today.”
This bean head doesn’t seem to realize his only claim to fame is what “Warren Buffett calls “‘the ovarian lottery’ — the random chance of being born into a particular time, place and identity.”3
Compared to the rest of the people in his world, our world, this bean head doesn’t seem to realize how good he has it.
Still, he asks, ‘I want my share of your estate now, instead of waiting until you die!’4
And amazingly his father gives it to him! The young man packs his things and saunters off down the garden path to who knows where leaving his father to just stand at the end of the walk and wonder.
Jesus’ first listeners had to have been perplexed by such a father. People would have raised eyebrows: “His son did… what? Just up and left? And with half his father’s accumulated wealth?” To the father’s face, his neighbors probably doled out pity – that dreaded parody of compassion. But away from him? Not pity, but blame: “Wonder what he did wrong?” He’d clearly not lived up to Proverbs 22:6, “Raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
But then, more shame on him: they’d all noticed him gazing down the road day by day, longing for the boy’s return. Had he no pride. Move on.”5
The father can only stand and wait while his son is somewhere becoming the toast of the town.
You know how it is when you have money, or people think you have money, everybody is your friend. It can get very heady. Everybody in the saloon is your best buddy. When the cheque comes around at a fine restaurant everybody but you seem to have a severe case of short arms and can’t seem to reach for their wallets or pick up the tab. Meanwhile, your funds are running low, your credit cards are maxed out, and the ATM machine almost laughs in your face when you even approach it.
By the way, please note that, after running away from home this bean head has developed no marketable skills. He didn’t take his inheritance and become an investment banker. He didn’t take all the “dough-ray-me” in his pocket and build a business. With no money, and no skill set the only job he could get is feeding pigs, slopping hogs.
I love the way The Jerusalem Bible translates this moment.
“‘When he had spent it all, that country experienced a severe famine, and now he began to feel the pinch, so he hired himself out to one of the local inhabitants who put him on his farm to feed the pigs."6
It was a pinch that came like a punch when he wakes up dirty, hungry, and also suffering from the stunning realization that he stinks to high heaven.
At this point this bean head comes up with a plan. Some may call it repentance, but it sounds more like a scheme to me and a bean headed scheme at that.
“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ So, he got up and went to his father.”7
His father doesn’t scold him. His father does lecture him. His father doesn’t ask him the two obvious questions that everybody in this room would have asked in stronger language than I can share with you today: “Where in the heck have you been? And why do you reek of pig koprion?”
Instead, this father is so glad to see him he throws the party of all parties for his bean headed son and dresses him up to the nines. Washed up and spruced up the kid is ready again for primetime.
As Father Robert Farrar Capon points out in an essay on this text.
The fascinating thing ... is that in the whole parable the father never says one single word to the Prodigal Son. Jesus makes the embrace, the kiss, do the whole story of saying, “I have found my son.” The fascinating thing also is that when the father embraces the boy who has come home from wasting his life, the boy never gets his confession out of his mouth until after the kiss, until after the embrace.8
Resolution! Happy ending! Oh no, stay with me here because this is a parable of Jesus so there has to be more. Remember this is a story about a father who had two sons.
Out in the field there is another son, feeling slighted and for good reason. He never ever even received an invitation to the party. He heard the music and laughter while he was still at work in the field. It is only when a servant, a servant of all people, comes out to tell him that he finds out what’s going on. Makes you wonder whether he was so taken for granted that nobody noticed he was missing. Like “Mister Cellophane” in the musical Chicago.
As the always wonderful Amy Joy Levine observed. “The father indulges the one who slights him and slights the one who indulges him.” 9
Somebody notices that someone is missing. My former pastor Shannon Kershner thinks it might have been his mother.
Perhaps she was the one thrilled to watch the father and the younger lost son embrace. And perhaps she was also the one who remembered their other son as well. I wonder if the mother sought out the father and said something like, “Remember we have another child, too.” She needed to help him remember all their children. And when she reminded him, the father’s face drained of color, as he realized what he had done. He had forgotten about his faithful child. The one who never caused him any problems. The one he counted on. But because of her reminding, he went searching.
He went to find his other lost son, the one who would not come to the party because he felt forgotten. Due to the mother’s encouragement, the father found the older son and told him everything was already his. Told him how he was full of regret for not having let him know sooner how much he meant to the family, how deeply he was loved, how he, the father, realized that it was the older son who had kept it all going, while he, the father, had been lost in grief and shame and the younger brother had been lost in selfishness and greed.10
The other son is still rightfully angry, and his point is well made. “‘Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!”11
The father pleas and begs for him to come in and join the party but there is one thing this young man just can’t get over and Father Capon thinks he knows what it is. He has the father going out to the son steaming literally and figuratively in the field and says:
“Look, Arthur (let’s call the older brother Arthur), what do you mean I never gave you a goat for a party? If you wanted to have a great veal dinner for all your friends every week in the year, you had the money and the resources. You owned this place, Arthur. You have the money and the resources to have built 52 stalls and kept the oxen fattening as you wanted them to come along, but you didn’t. Why didn’t you do that, Arthur? Because you’re a bean counter, because you’re always keeping track of everybody else. That’s your problem, Arthur, and I have one recipe for you.” (The father is pleading with this fellow to come out of the death of bookkeeping.) He says, “I have one recipe for you, Arthur. That is, go in, kiss your brother, and have a drink.”12
Does he do it? Jesus never tells us but the one thing we do know is that the father, and the mother too, never gave up on either of their two boys. They never gave up on either whether we be a bean head or a bean counter.
Long ago at another church in another place and time after I had finished preaching on or leading a bible study on this parable the young man who was the president of the Church Council (Ministry Board to you) came up to me with a question.
He was the kind of person pastor’s dream about. If I needed something done all I needed to do was ask John. If there was a flood in the basement, literally, I called John, and he was right there. He ran excellent, snappy, church council meetings that started on time and ended at a more than reasonable hour. In addition to all this he was a great father and husband.
John was also a party animal who came early and stayed late. He could party-hearty with the best of them. If you tried to keep up with John you would be staying far longer than you intended and consuming so much “liquid libations” that people would be asking about you, “Did he have a hat?”
Anyway, after the sermon, or presentation, or whatever, he came up to me and asked. “So, pastor, what am I? A bean head or a bean counter?”
And the only thing I could think of to say in response was. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
1. David L. Tiede, Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament - Luke (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988), 276.
2. Fred B. Craddock, Luke: Interpretation Bible Commentary (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990), 186.
3. Jeannine Mancini, “Warren Buffett Says Winning This ‘lottery’ Is Most Important Thing in Life, and You Have No Control over It - ‘I Am in the Luckiest 1% of the World Right Now,’” Yahoo! Finance, August 8, 2023, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-says-winning-lottery-171412689.html.
4. St. Luke 15:12b. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971)]
5. James C. Howell, “Lost and Found Parties,” Reading Luke Together, March 24, 2025, https://mail.aol.com/d/list/referrer=newMail&folders=1&accountIds=1&listFilter=NEWMAIL/messages/APnsfaISyAh1Z-F_8QzosPIpE_k.
6. St. Luke 15:14-15. (JB) [JB= The Jerusalem Bible (London, ENG: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1970).
7. St. John 15:17-20. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]
8. Robert Farrar Capon, “The Father Who Lost Two Sons,” Eclectic Orthodoxy, August 28, 2023, https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2023/08/26/the-father-who-lost-two-sons/.
9. Amy-Jill Levine and Maria Mayo, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2018), 67.
10. Shannon J. Kershner, “The ‘Missing’ Mother.” Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. February 28, 2016.
11. St. Luke 15:28-30. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).
12. Capon, loc.cit.
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