“The Lost Son(s)” based on Joshua 5:9-12 and Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 March 30, 2025

If you have been part of the church for a while, you probably think you know the parable of “The Prodigal” pretty well. In short, many of us were trained to hear this as being about God who is generously forgiving, like the father in the parable. It is probably better for those of you who are a little new to this game, because today you are going to have to unlearn less stuff.

I’m working today with the wisdom of Amy-Jill Levine, in her book “Short Stories by Jesus.” Dr. Levine is a professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. Yes. New Testament and Jewish Studies. Dr. Levine is unusual in that she is a Jewish New Testament Professor, and that means she does incredible work bringing the history of Judaism as context for the New Testament.

She is also, let me be clear, awesome. And, a number of years ago she was in Schenectady to lecture at Union College. I’d had the privilege of meeting her even more years ago when I co-lead worship for a retreat where she was the key-note speaker. So I invited her to coffee, and somehow we ended up sitting in my office for hours talking. One of the things I remember saying is that this church gives her hope.

OK, so you are caught up? There is a brilliant scholar who brings incredibly useful Jewish context to the New Testament, and also she’s been here and she was impressed with you. (I am too, I love this church.)

Dr. Levine’s work on the parables in Luke 15 are the first chapter of her book “Short Stories by Jesus” and she brings some critiques even to the names we call it. She says, “there is nothing complimentary about being prodigal, that is, in wasting resources for personal gratification.”1 She ends up calling it the “Lost Son” parable, although she toys around with “The Father Who Lost His Son(s).”2

As good scholars do, Dr. Levine rejects attempts to make a parable into an allegory. She maintains the right of the father and both sons to be simply characters in the story. She does NOT think that the father represents God. Which is good, because he’s not a great father. She even takes the story as a stand alone, outside of the interpretation that the Gospel of Luke applies to it. She lets the parable stand as it is. So, let’s hear what happens when you do it that way.

Luke 15 opens with, “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”3 (Luke 15:1-2) Dr. Levine thinks we may mess a bunch of the memos in even those opening lines. She writes:

The problem with “tax collectors” is not that they have have denied the covenant; it is that they work for Rome and so would be seen by many in the Jewish community as traitors to their own people.

Sinners are not “outcasts”; they are not cast out of synagogues or out of the Jerusalem Temple. To the contrary they are welcome in such places, since such places encourage repentance. The Gospels generally present sinners as wealthy people who have not attended to the poor. That is a dandy definition of the term. Thus, in a first-century context, sinners, like tax collectors, are individuals who have removed themselves from the common welfare, who look to themselves rather than to the community.4

Such a good definition of sin, and such an idea worthy of reflection. I suspect many of us can FEEL the truth of sinners being people who care only about themselves and not about the common well-being of the community. Yes?

Luke 15 then has three parables – the lost sheep, the lost coin and then the lost son. The three seem presented to build on each other and reflect on each other. In each case the person who loses something has more than average. Most people didn’t have 100 sheep, most people didn’t have 10 silver coins, most people didn’t have a wealthy estate to liquidate to give to a son as an inheritance. Also, 100 sheep can be hard to count. Most people can’t immediately see in a pile of coins if there are 9 or 10. But two sons are supposed to be pretty easy to notice. But we’ll come back to that.

Dr. Levine points out that “some man had two sons” is a fabulous opening line that would lead its initial hearers to think about Cain and Abel; Ishmael and Issac; Esau and Jacob; etc. She says:

All Biblically literate listers know to identify with the younger son. But those first-century biblically literate listeners were in for a surprise, when the younger son turns out not to be the righteous Abel, faithful Issac, clever Jacob, strategic David, or wise Solomon. He turns out to be an irresponsible, self-indulgent, and probably indulged child, whom I would not, despite his being Jewish, be please to have my daughter date.5

Some of you are also quite biblically literate and you know that it was normal for a first born son to get a “double share” of the inheritance, so that an elder son would get 2/3 and a younger son 1/3. But, that was actually up the discretion of the father, who decided not to do it that way. Dr. Levine says that asking for an inheritance while the father was alive was probably similar to doing so today – not super common but not super problematic either. It is clear that the father is very fond of this younger son, probably problematically so.

In any case, the younger son gets his inheritance, leaves, spends it, and ends up in trouble. Dr. Levine reflects on the question, “What went wrong for him?”:

Readers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa tend to attribute his desperate status to a combination of bad parenting, lack of community values, separating himself from his network, and personal responsibility. …

Readers in Russia tend to note neither personal failure nor fiduciary ineptitude but the famine – there was no food to distribute. In a Vanderbilt University seminar on Luke’s Gospel, a graduate student from Kenya proposed that the real problem was lack of generosity, for no one gave him anything. This reading is particularly commended by the narrative context of the parable. Junior’s yearning to be fulfilled is the same term used to describe the sick and destitute Lazarus in Luke 16:21.6

Lack of generosity. That’s a good take.

Many of us know that good Jewish boys didn’t raise pigs, but we’ve been taught it would have been problematic for a Jewish boy to even feed pigs, but Dr. Levine disagrees, “the son did what he did in order to live; Jewish Law is law by which one lives, not by which one dies. The prodigal is in an impossible situation, but the issue is not Jewish xenophobia or purity. The problem is starvation.”7

Then the younger son decides to return home. He claims he is going home to be a hired hand, but keeps calling his father father and assuming he’ll be received with open arms. Its manipulative. Basically, his plan is “I’ll go to Daddy and sound religious.”8

As he returns, his father is thrilled to see him, is filled with compassion, runs to greet him, kisses him, and throws a party. I’ve been taught that the father acted too enthusiastically for a proper patriarch, but Dr. Levine is having none of that. She leans hard into proving that fathers who thought they’d lost their children and meet them alive again were welcome to respond with joy – and that no shame came on anyone for his delight.

The issue is entirely different. The issue is that he throws a party and FORGETS TO INVITE THE ELDER SON. Which is where we go back to 100 sheep are hard to count, 10 coins aren’t necessarily visibly different from 9, but heavens one should be able to count to 2 when it comes to children. But this father forgot to count to TWO. It really does seem like his preference for his younger son impaired his capacity to express love to his elder son.

So the older son comes out of the fields, notices the party, and asks one of the slaves what is going on. He gets told “your brother has come, and your father has sacrificed the grain-fed calf, because he received him healthy. And he became angry and didn’t want to go in.”9 Would you? It is, at least, very uncomfortable to be the last one told and to have been uninvited to the party, isn’t it?

So the father comes out to the elder son, the one who it turns out is lost to him in a way he hadn’t realized, and tries to comfort him and urge him to come in. But the elder brother is angry, and – finally- says so. The elder son rejects his familial connection to his brother, referring to him as “your son” but the father tries again and calls him “your brother.” (Truly, the use of family references in this parable is brilliant.) The father affirms “all that I have is yours” which is a truth the son needed to hear.

But the parable ends without a true conclusion. The father has made an appeal, but the two of them are left standing together outside of the party, with the son’s answer unmade. Does he go in? Does he refuse? Dr. Levine keeps asking:

What would we do, were we the older son? Do we attend the party? What will happen to this family when the father dies and the elder son obtains his inheritance? Will he keep Junior in the restored position to which the father elevated him or will he send him to the stables, to be treated as one of the ‘hired laborers’? …

What do we do if we identify with the father and find our own children are lost? Is repeated pleading sufficient? What would be? What does a parent do to show a love that the child never felt?”10

She concludes, “In this household, no one has expressed sorrow at hurting each other and no one has expressed forgiveness. … Recognize that the one you have lost may be right in your own household. Do whatever it takes to find the lost and then celebrate with others, both so that you can share the joy and so that others will help prevent the recovered from ever being lost again.”11

She speaks truths I’ve heard from so many people, including many of you. This ancient short story seems like it resonates today as well as any day, when we let it speak for itself. The parable leaves me yearning for healing in that family’s relationships, similar to a way I often yearn for healing in people’s family’s today.

That yearning for wholeness and goodness, that’s a whole big piece of what we’re trying to do as people of faith. Build a world where more and more people get to be whole, where more and more families get to be whole, where wholeness is easier and easier to access. And in this time when it is hard to impact the big stuff, maybe it is a good reminder to look around and work on the relationships with those closest to us. And to let our yearning for wholeness lead us to act in ways that lead to healing and wholeness here and now. May it be so! Amen

1Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, (USA: HarperOne, 2014) p. 29.

2p. 27.

3p. 31.

4p. 33.

5p. 47.

6p. 51.

7p. 52.

8p. 52 – quoting David Buttrick.

9p. 61.

10p. 68-69.

11p. 69.

Rev. Sara E. Baron 
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 
Pronouns: she/her/hers 
http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

March 30, 20215