The Prodigal Son

The inevitable Rembrandt: "The Return of the Prodigal Son."

In three of the four gospels, Jesus speaks in parables. He does not make his points, give his teachings, straightforwardly, but tells little stories. Why does he do that?

He tells us why. In the Gospel of Mark, for example, he explains to the apostles:

The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven.

Speaking in parables, then, is a way to separate the sheep from the goats. There is something about good people that corresponds with being able to understand the basic point of a little story, and something about bad people that prevents them from doing so. Good people, it seems, have imagination and discernment; bad people are literal-minded.

It is indeed striking that people very commonly get the vital points of the parables wrong. The common understanding of just about any of them is demonstrably incorrect. For example, the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the common idiom, calling someone a “Good Samaritan” simply means they help out another in difficulty. But that is only being a good neighbour. Everyone already knows that, without being told. The non-self-evident, new point Jesus was making is that this neighbour was a Samaritan. Most people don't even know what that means.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is the first parable cited if you look up “parable” on Wikipedia, so perhaps it is best-known of all. Many people seem to think it has to do primarily with a son leaving home. But this is absurd; in the ordinary course of life, unless we are talking of a family farm, all sons, all children, leave home. There is likely something very wrong if they do not. The point is that the son is prodigal.

But as with “Samaritan,” most non-religious people seem to have no idea what “prodigal” even means.

Jesus's parables always include some odd detail which is there to signal to us that we cannot read them literally. This is an important generic requirement. One is not free to randomly declare Biblical passages to be “metaphorical” or “symbolic” instead of meaning what they literally say. That is a sinner's trick to force the Bible to mean whatever you want it to mean. And it demonstrates a literalist's blindness to metaphor and symbol: a metaphor or symbol is not itself simply arbitrary or open to random interpretation.

If a metaphor is meant, a parable, there must be a textual clue. Something in the story must make a literal reading implausible.

Here, in the parable of the prodigal son, the initial premise is that the younger of two sons requests, and gets, his inheritance in advance.

Right out of the box, this is not a realistic situation. How is the father himself supposed to survive, if the estate is given away while he still lives? And how do you separate and render liquid half the assets in a working farm? At least in days before mortgages. It is jumping down the rabbit hole. “Dad, let's just pretend you are dead, and do it now.”

So, no, you cannot possibly read this literally as a real family situation, nor as advice on family relationships. Any more than the parable of the sower is giving farming advice, and suggesting you should sow indiscriminately on tilled fields, on the path, and on barren ground. No human father could do what this father does.

The point of the parable, rather, is given plainly in the Gospel. Jesus is responding to the Pharisees when they condemn him for spending time with sinners.

The father represents Jesus, by extension, God. We are the sons. The prodigal son represents the sinner, and the son who stays on the farm the Pharisees, those who are conventionally righteous in their conduct. And there is an implied third group as well: those who are not sons at all, and do not understand the meaning of the parable.

The prodigal son gets his inheritance in advance, and wastes it. That is what “prodigal” means: spendthrift.

All that we have, in this world and the next, is from God; it is our inheritance. He created it all. He is our real father; indeed, we are to call no man father, only him. We are all brothers. If we pursue the pleasures of this world, heedless of the next, we are spending our inheritance in advance. We will have no share in the next world—after our death, not our father's.

God, as father, like Jesus, is delighted to welcome sinners back home. This is repentance.

Yet notice—people always seem to miss this, too—that the prodigal also gets no new inheritance. That is genuinely gone. Divine mercy is not a magical “all is forgiven; back as we all were.” Forgiveness cannot work that way; for the obvious reason that it would violate divine justice. It would be unjust to those who do not sin, like the older brother in the parable. The father assures his other son, who has never made such demands on him, that everything the father has is his when he dies.

So what happens now to the prodigal son, based on the story, when his father dies? That is the meditation we are left with. If his father right now falls dead of a heart attack—if, in other words, the sinner dies soon after repenting—he is back in his previous destitute position.

This, it seems to me, kills the Protestant argument that salvation is by faith, and mere repentance is enough. The wayward son must now do something to build himself a new inheritance; presumably good deeds.

And then, if there is not time left in his life to do so, this means there must be some place of expiation after death—Purgatory. Otherwise there would be no point in repentance late in life. Repentance, in itself, would have no reward.

Here's the scariest bit: if most people don't get this, as really seems to be the case, this means, according to Jesus, that most people are going to hell. They are not even in on the reason for being alive.