Preaching Paths 30 March 2025 Lent 4 Yr C

Sally A. Brown, Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary

In today’s reading (Luke 15:1-3,11b-32), Jesus responds to Pharisees who condemn his habit of sharing his table with notorious sinners and tax collectors. We focus today on what many know as the parable of the “Prodigal Son,” the third in a triad of parables about God’s concern for that which is lost. Each ends with a great celebration. Recent interpretation makes clear that this parable might better be called the parable of “the Two Lost Sons.” As for prodigality, the father, too, could be described as “prodigal;” prodigality can mean either extravagant, wasteful spending or extravagant generosity.

Preaching from so familiar a text can be challenging. Listeners have heard it since childhood as a heart-warming tale of fatherly forgiveness toward a wastrel son. Lost on many is that this story would have been shocking, not heart-warming, for Jesus’ first-century listeners, as well as Luke’s readers. Over and over, actions taken—not only by the younger son, but his father and brother as well—transgress social norms in ways that would bring lasting shame on any first century ANE family. We need to retell this story, highlighting the shame the father bears for the sake of both his sons, to release its counter-cultural portrayal of the astonishing grace of God.

Most preachers do make clear that the younger son insults his father when he demands his share of the family’s land (his “inheritance”) while his father is still alive. He may as well have wished his father dead. Yet his father grants this request. We generally underestimate the ramifications. First, that the younger son leaves the country with his “share” means he has sold his portion of the land. This would have a triply negative impact: it would reduce the family’s land holdings and, thus, the property’s productivity. It would shame the family, and increase the burden carried by the older sibling. Further, the older brother would almost certainly despise not only his reckless brother, but also their father. The expected response to the younger son’s insolent demand would be to refuse the demand and disavow that son. That the father grants the request makes him seem a fool.

Far from disowning the boy, this father searches the horizon, until one day he spots a wasted figure in rags trudging toward the house. Hiking up his robes in a manner deemed unseemly for a man of dignity in ANE culture, the father runs out to embrace his lost son. The older son, nauseated by the idea of the family signet and best robe adorning his despicable sibling, makes himself conspicuously absent from the homecoming festivities. This would constitute a slight toward his father. Ignoring this humiliating insult from his oldest, the father debases himself yet further in front of his guests, abandoning the feast to engage his elder son. This is so much more than a story of forgiveness! It is a stunning, even confounding portrait of divine love: utterly selfless love that submits to the most extreme humiliation—even death naked on a Roman cross—to bring every last, lost one of us home.