Luke 15.11-20A .
Our English word
But no, it’s not precisely what he did.
I’m gonna analyze half the story now, and the other half later. Lots of Christians have unpacked this story, and mostly (and rightly) just focused on the moral of the story: The father is overjoyed that his son came home, and welcomes him unconditionally, as will our heavenly Father
Well anyway. Off to the story. Which is usually called “the Prodigal Son,” or by people who wanna avoid the ambiguity of what prodigal means, either “the Wasteful Son” or “the Lost Son.” Or if they wanna focus on the happy ending, “the Loving Father” or “the Forgiving Father”—or if the focus is on the disgruntled brother, “the Two Brothers” or “the Prodigal Son and the Unforgiving Brother.” Clearly I don’t have a problem with the original popular title.
Luke 15.11-20 KWL - 11 Jesus says, “A certain person has two sons,
- 12 and the younger of them tells his father,
- ‘Father, give me the part of the property coming to me.’
- So the father divides his living between them.
- 13 After not many days, gathering everything,
- the younger son journeys to a distant land,
- and there he squanders his property in excessive living.
- 14 Once he’s spent everything, a severe recession hits that land,
- and he begins to be in need.
- 15 Going to stay with a citizen of that land,
- the citizen sends him into his fields to feed swine.
- 16 He longs to gorge himself on the husks the swine eat,
- and no one gives him anything.
- 17 “Coming to his senses, he says,
- ‘How many of my father’s employees abound in bread
- while I’m being destroyed by this recession?
- 18 I will get up and go to my father.
- I will tell him, ‘Father, I sinned against heaven and before you.
- 19 I’m no longer worthy to be called your son.
- Make me like one of your employees.’
- 20
A And getting up, he goes to his father.”
Dividing the property.
The story starts with a father and two boys, and since Jesus didn’t give them names, I’m gonna swipe the names from the lousy 1955 movie based on the parable,
Micah came to Eli and asked for “the part of the property coming [to me].” We don’t know how often sons in ancient Israel would come to their fathers with such a request, but it did happen regularly enough so that neither Jesus nor Luke felt they had to explain the idea.
Preachers wanna make the prodigal son sound like as bad a human being as possible. So they’ve invented this popular idea that Micah asking Eli for his inheritance was culturally wrong. That “demanding one’s share of the inheritance before the father died was tantamount to saying, ‘I wish you were dead’”
But clearly the authors of the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible have either never read, or chosen to ignore, Joachim Jeremias’s
The legal position was as follows: there were two ways in which property might pass from father to son, by a will, or by a gift during the life of the father. In the latter case the rule was that the beneficiary obtained possession of the capital immediately, but the interest on it only became available upon the death of the father. That means: in the case of a gift during the father’s lifetime, (a) the son obtains the right of possession (the land in question, for example, cannot be sold by the father), (b) but he does not acquire the right of disposal (if the son sells the property the purchaser can take possession only upon the death of the father), and (c) he does not acquire the usufruct which remains in the father’s unrestricted possession until his death. This legal position is correctly depicted in the parable when the elder brother is indicated as the sole future owner,
Lk 15.31 but nevertheless the father continues to enjoy the usufruct.Lk 15.22, 29 In verse 12 the younger son demands not only the right of possession, but also the right of disposal; he wants a settlement because he proposes to lead an independent life. Verse 13:Συναγαγὼν πάντα : after turning the property into cash.Ἀπεδήμησεν εἰς χώραν μακρὰν =he emigrates. Jeremias 128-129
Because sometimes that was why family property would be divided: Emigration. Jews would leave the land of Israel and move to other parts of the Roman Empire, to make their successes elsewhere. They were likely never coming home. It was considered a legitimate reason for people to divide property.
Legitimate, in part, because there’s actually precedent for it in the bible. Before Abraham died, he gave his kids “gifts,” and it seems receiving these gifts meant they had a quit-claim on any further inheritance they might get from
Genesis 25.1-6 NRSVue - 1 Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah. 2 She bore him Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. 3 Jokshan was the father of Sheba and Dedan. The sons of Dedan were Asshurim, Letushim, and Leummim. 4 The sons of Midian were Ephah, Epher, Hanoch, Abida, and Eldaah. All these were the children of Keturah. 5 Abraham gave all he had to Isaac. 6 But to the sons of his concubines Abraham gave gifts, while he was still living, and he sent them away from his son Isaac, eastward to the east country.
No family squabble between Isaac and his seven brothers (’cause let’s not forget his older brother Ishmael): They’d received their “gifts,” so all was good. They’d later became various Arab tribes. You probably remember the Midianites, with whom Moses lived for 40 years; yep, they’re fellow descendants of Abraham. Moses’s distant cousins.
Pharisee literature, like the Mishna, also shows precedent for this idea. In a culture where extended families tended to live together, sometimes a son had to become independent of his father, so he’d take a portion of his family’s wealth—a “gift,” they usually called it, borrowing the language of Genesis 25.6—which was either a substitute for his eventual inheritance, or was funded by it. The son and his family would then go to another province or land. Sometimes for a profitable business venture. Sometimes a daughter had inherited a portion of her father’s property,
And it looks like this was why Micah asked for the money: He was gonna emigrate! He was moving to a faraway land (the
That’s pure speculation on my part, ’cause of course Jesus doesn’t say. And it doesn’t really matter! The whole point was Micah was going to lose all that money.
But this whole idea of asking the money would be an utter rejection of his father and his family: Pure melodramatic horsecrap. Maybe that’s more how our culture might interpret such a thing: “Hey Dad, let’s pretend you’re dead; give me all the money I would’ve inherited from you.” But not theirs. Property and inheritances back then did not solely belong to the father; they belonged to the family. The father might run it, and rule over it and his family like a tinhorn dictator, but the culture didn’t consider it his property; really it was God’s.
So in no way do the scriptures call it wrong to give your children inheritance-sized grants, and the Pharisees considered such things wholly acceptable. It was okay for Micah to ask his dad for his inheritance! It was okay for Eli to grant it!
What was not okay was squandering it.
Losing the property.
Jesus doesn’t say how long it took Micah to blow through all that money. Or even how much it was. It might not even have been all that much. Rich families back then had
Micah was likely granted the entirety of his inheritance, not just a cash equivalent of the projected income from it. Eli later told his elder son, “All that I have is yours,”
But Micah frittered it away prodigally “with riotous living,” as the
Being asotías in Greek culture meant you were too messed up to be saved. Usually from the sorts of immoral behaviors that outraged even the gods (and if you know the mythology, the Greek gods were rather immoral themselves): You were that far gone. The gods were gonna destroy you.
So yeah, you can imagine Micah was merely foolish with his money: He rented an expensive house, picked up too many checks for his friends, lost track of just how much he was spending on liquor, and spent way more time on recreation than work. But asotías means he wasn’t just foolish; he was sinful. When his elder brother Joram later complains how Micah “devoured your assets with prostitutes,”
Maybe more, but Jesus never says more. Yet I have heard some downright nasty speculations about what more Micah did with all the money. And as I said before, it reveals an awful lot about the preacher! Some of our preachers come from rough backgrounds. Some of them don’t, but they’ve obviously fantasized about dabbling in some rough stuff, and it all comes out whenever they denounce other people’s sins. I once heard a preacher go on and on in lurid detail about all the orgies the prodigal son probably attended, and of course Jesus never said anything about orgies. Why would one’s brain immediately go towards orgies?… unless of course one’s brain has already spent quite a lot of time there already.
Well, so much for the money. Micah was dead broke… and then comes the recession. Bibles tend to translate
Ordinarily if a Jew was poor and hungry, he could glean from the edges of the neighboring fields.
Bibles tend to say Micah “hired himself out to one of the citizens of that region, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs.”
Swine, I should remind you, were
I’m not sure Micah was paid for this job; or if so, he certainly wasn’t paid much. He was still starving. So much so, he dreamt of eating the swine’s food. The “husks” they ate, called
Going home.
Swineherding gives you lots of time to think, and Micah finally realized the best thing to do would be to cut his losses and just go home. Working for his father as an employee was better than the starvation wages he currently had, and (assuming Israel wasn’t also suffering from recession) his dad’s employees weren’t starving!
So he devised a plan: He’d go home and repent to his father. He even drafted a little speech. “Father, I sinned against heaven and before you. I’m no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your employees.”
Nevertheless I’ve heard many a preacher denounce Micah’s plan as pathetic, as insufficiently repentant, as scheming, as all sorts of evil things. How dare he presume his father’s gonna accept his apology and give him a job?—and why would you hire somebody who’s demonstrated so little ability with money?
I remember this one sermon I heard as a child, in which the preacher gave a five-point sermon about how self-serving the prodigal son’s plan really was. How he wasn’t really repentant; this was all a scheme, and if you parse the sentence in careful detail, you can see how this was really about benefiting himself, with no real repentance in it whatsoever. Though I have a better-than-average memory, I don’t remember all the details of that sermon, and I’m gonna credit the Holy Spirit for that, because it was so graceless. Even at the time, with me being a kid who didn’t know any better about a whole lot of things, I knew it was so graceless. The dude repented! The whole point of Jesus’s parable is our heavenly Father’s radical forgiveness of his repentant children—even if we’re not as repentant as certain legalistic Christians would prefer.
Because humanity’s pretty much in the same boat as Micah here. We’ve been granted some generous resources, thanks to
But like the prodigal son’s father, our Father is more than willing to embrace us—just like the father in the next part of Jesus’s story.
