Parable of the Prodigal Son: Meaning and Application

If you typed this into a search bar tonight, you are probably one of two people. You are the one who took what God gave you and spent it, and you are not sure the door is still open. Or you are the one who never left, and you have started to notice that you are angry about who else seems to be getting in. Jesus told this parable for both of you, in the same breath, sitting in the same room.

The story runs only twenty-two verses in Luke 15:11–32. A younger son demands his inheritance early, wastes it, ends up starving in a pig field, and walks home expecting to be a hired servant. He is met by a sprinting father, a kiss, the best robe, and a feast. Watching from the field, an older brother seethes. Two thousand years later, this is still the picture people reach for when they try to say what God is like. Most of the time they are reaching for it because something in their own life has just gone sideways.

What the parable teaches

Jesus told this story because the religious leaders around him could not stand the people he was eating with. "Tax collectors and sinners" were gathering, and the Pharisees were muttering about it (Luke 15:1–2). The whole of Luke 15 is one sustained answer to that muttering. A shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one. A woman tears apart her house to find one coin. A father runs down a road to meet a son who is still "a long way off" (Luke 15:20).

What Jesus is saying, three different ways, is that God loses nothing he intends to keep.

But the parable is not only good news for wanderers. It is also for the brother in the field who never left. Tim Keller's observation in The Prodigal God is hard to forget. There are two ways to run from a father. One is to take his money and flee. The other is to stay home and try to earn his love. Both sons are lost. Only one of them knows it yet.

The story, scene by scene

Jesus opens with a request that would have made every listener wince. The younger son asks for his share of the estate now. In first-century Jewish culture, that was the functional equivalent of telling his father, "I wish you were dead." The father, astonishingly, divides his property and lets him go. The son sells what he has been given, travels to a distant country, and squanders the whole sum in "wild living" (Luke 15:13).

A famine hits. He hires himself out to a Gentile pig farmer and becomes so hungry he envies the pigs their feed. This is rock bottom twice over. A Jewish boy is literally feeding unclean animals, and not even allowed to eat their food. It is in this place that Luke writes one of the most quietly hopeful lines in the gospels. "He came to his senses" (Luke 15:17). He rehearses a speech. He will confess. He will not ask to be received back as a son, only as a hired hand.

He never finishes the speech. While he is "still a long way off," his father sees him. The father runs, which a dignified Middle Eastern patriarch would never have done, embraces him, kisses him, and cuts off the part of the rehearsed speech where the son asks to be a servant. The robe, the ring, the sandals, and the fattened calf are not rewards for grovelling well. They are the father restoring him completely, in front of every servant and neighbor, before he has done anything to deserve it.

Outside, in the field, there is the other son. He hears the music, asks a servant what is going on, and refuses to come in. So the father, for the second time in this parable, leaves the house and goes out to a son. He pleads. And the older brother delivers the speech the younger one never got to finish. Only his is built out of years of resentment, not repentance. "All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat" (Luke 15:29).

The father's answer is the last word we hear. Jesus does not tell us what the older brother does next. He hands that part to the listener, because some of the people listening that day were the older brother, and Jesus knew it. The invitation is still standing in your direction.

Timeline of key events

• The demand (Luke 15:11–12). The younger son asks for his share of the estate while his father is still alive.
• The journey (Luke 15:13). He liquidates his inheritance and travels to a distant country.
• The collapse (Luke 15:14–16). A severe famine hits. He hires himself out to feed pigs and starves on the job.
• The turn (Luke 15:17–19). He "comes to his senses," rehearses a confession, and starts walking home.
• The reunion (Luke 15:20). The father sees him from a long way off, runs, embraces him, and kisses him.
• The restoration (Luke 15:21–24). Robe, ring, sandals, and the fattened calf. The party starts before the son finishes his speech.
• The complaint (Luke 15:25–30). The older brother refuses to come in and lists the years he has served without reward.
• The plea (Luke 15:31–32). The father goes out a second time. He calls the older brother teknon, "my child," and pleads with him to come in. Jesus stops there. The older brother's answer is the one every listener has to give.

Five lessons from the prodigal son

1. God runs. The image that does the most work in this parable is not the pig field. It is the father sprinting down a road. Your repentance does not have to be polished. The father meets the son before the rehearsed speech is even finished.
2. You can come to your senses. Hitting bottom is not the end of the story. Most of the time it is where the story actually begins. The son did not earn his way home. He turned around.
3. Religious respectability can be its own far country. The older brother never left the property, but his heart was somewhere else the whole time. You can keep all the rules and still not know your Father.
4. Grace will offend somebody. The party in this parable is exactly what makes the older brother angry. If your version of God's grace never makes anybody uncomfortable, it might not be the grace Jesus was talking about.
5. The Father pursues both kinds of lost. He leaves the house twice. Once to welcome the younger son, once to plead with the older. The God of Luke 15 is not waiting on a porch with his arms crossed. He is going out, in both directions, looking for you.

Key verses from Luke 15

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.

— Luke 15:18–19

So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

— Luke 15:20

But the father said to his servants, "Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found." So they began to celebrate.

— Luke 15:22–24

"My son," the father said, "you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found."

— Luke 15:31–32

How the parable points to Jesus

The parable does not have a Christ figure in the obvious sense. No character explicitly stands in for the Son of God. But Jesus himself is telling it, and he is telling it to explain why he is eating with sinners. He is the welcome embodied. The fattened calf is being killed because Jesus has come. The feast is starting because Jesus is the host.

Centuries earlier, the prophet Isaiah had promised that God would prepare "a feast of rich food for all peoples" (Isaiah 25:6). The cross is the cost of that feast. The resurrection is its guarantee. The Father can throw the door open and run because the Son went into the far country, took on the famine, and came home carrying us with him. The robe the prodigal receives is, in Christian terms, the righteousness of Christ. Undeserved, freely given, immediately covering.

Further study

Read the parable straight through in Luke 15 on Bible Gateway before reaching for any commentary. The chapter is short enough to take in one sitting, and the three stories it contains (the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son) build on each other in a way single-passage reading often misses.

For a longer treatment, Tim Keller's short book The Prodigal God walks through Luke 15 in about a hundred pages and is widely regarded as the modern classic on this parable. Henri Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Son, written as a meditation on Rembrandt's painting of the scene, takes a more contemplative route.

On this site you can keep reading with the story of David, another man embraced after a catastrophic fall, or Is God Real?, which asks what kind of evidence we should expect for a God who looks, in this parable, like a sprinting father.

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