In Jesus’ stories in Luke’s Gospel, the Parable of the Prodigal Son is his longest and perhaps, equally famous as the Good Samaritan Parable. There are three main characters in the parable–the youngest son, the eldest son, and the father. I ask you to take a moment and figure out with which one or ones you identify. Prodigal means lavish, extravagantly wastefully, profligate, giving something on an overly lavish scale. I suggest that each character in the story, and I would include the narrator, are all prodigal.
Let’s start with the youngest son, who asks for his inheritance from his father. A father usually does not bestow his inheritance until his dying. Then the oldest son gets two-thirds, and the remainder one third is divided up among the other brothers.
One writer, Kenneth Bailey, writes

For over fifteen years I have been asking people of all walks of life from Morocco to India and form Turkey to the Sudan about the implications of a son’s request for his inheritance while the father is still living. The answer has always been emphatically the same… the conversation turns as follows:
Has anyone ever made such a request in your village?
Never!
Could anyone ever make such a request?
Impossible.
If anyone ever did, what would happen?
His father would beat him, of course.
Why?
The request means—he wants his father to die. (Bailey/Nouwen)

The son is requesting in the parable not only for his inheritance but the right to do whatever he wishes. What the youngest son is saying: “Father, I can’t wait for you die…give me my due, right now!” His request is insulting in its request and not offering his father the cultural reverence due to him.

Another point is that the younger leaves his father’s household. It is a blatant rejection of his father. It is an insult, offensive, rejection of the social tradition. His leaving for a distant land is commonly understood of youth today wanting to see the world. But in the ancient world, this is heard as a drastic rejection of social conventions of his people and his father’s household. For Jewish listeners it indicates a rejection of his people for the impure Gentile world.

Of course, the younger son squanders his inheritance with prodigal living. How many friends did he make as long as he had some inheritance to spend? When he no longer had any monies left, he stopped existing for his newly found friends. We all know some of these fair weather friends. Such friends left him when he was in need, hungry, and certainly lonely. They were no longer there for him. It was so bad when no one gave him any food or shelter, he gave himself to a citizen of that country who sent him to feed the swine. He was so hungry that he would gladly have eaten the pods feed to them.

The younger son reached rock bottom—lonely, doing the most menial job in society and with swine—an animal considered unclean by his own people. He was lost, totally isolated, and abandoned. He has reached rock bottom. At that moment, he probably felt regrets at what he did to his father and though how secure his life was earlier in his father’s household. And his father called him, “my beloved son,” while he hugged him. Think of those moments in your life when he felt that there is nothing lower and emotionally distraught than this. I can’t sink down any further. We all been there. He thought, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough, and I perish with hunger!”
The younger son rehearses what he will say to his father: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”

I am going to suggest that Jesus who told this parable and criticized for associating with sinners and unclean outcasts, lived the pain of being stigmatized as a fellow outcast. When I imagine Jesus speaking this parable to me, I also hear his in voice: “I have been there as well! I know what it is like to be there. It is a lonely place.”\

But I hear in his voice, a tinge of surprise and hope in the journey of the younger son. Jesus continues the story of everyone’s experience as well as his own.
When the young son was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion. He ran to his son, hugged him with his arms around him and kissed.

Jesus’ description of the father is his own experience of Abba God. He remembered the words of the prophet Isaiah:

Can a mother forget her baby, at the breast, feel no pity for the child she has borne? Even if those were to forget, I shall not forget you. Look, I have engraved you on the palms on my hands. (Isaiah 49:15)

Abba God for Jesus was a maternal father, he had compassion. To have compassion means to have a womb-like love. The Hebrew word for compassion is derived from the word for “womb.” Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen writes, “What I see here is God as mother, receiving back in her own womb the one whom she made in her own image.” Remember Jesus’ own words in the sermon on the plain in Luke’s Gospel: “Be compassionate as your Abba God is compassionate!”

Now the elder son hears a commotion and discovers that his father has welcomed his own brother back into the household. He was angry and refused to go into the house. His father comes out and tenderly tries to soothe the anger of his son. The eldest son angrily says, “Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I have never transgressed your commandment at any time, and yet you never gave me a young goat; that I make merry with my friends.” Hear the resentment in the voice and tone of the eldest son. I have often found such resentment in religiously righteous people.

His father replies, “My son, you are always with me, and all I have is yours. But it was only right we should celebrate and rejoice because your brother here was dead and has come to life; he was lost and is found.”
The key to this parable of Jesus is his own words and the message that Jesus lived out, despite the harsh criticism and his death for the compassion that he extended to sinners and outsiders: “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate!”

Jesus is speaking two groups of people represented by both sons:

Those represented by the younger son, who rudely felt entitled to his father’s inheritance and rejected his father, and who left his country to buy friends and have a good time, spending everything.
And those represented by the eldest brother, who resented the father’s welcoming back his lost son, who is angry for doing the necessary things that will secure his father’s inheritance, who hates his brothers, and now is angry with his father for compassionate welcome back of his younger brother.

Henri Nouwen writes,

To associate and eat with people of ill repute, therefore, does not contradict his teaching about God., but does, in fact, live out this teaching in everyday life. If God forgives the sinners, then certainly those who have faith in God should do the same. If God welcomes sinners home, then certainly those who trust in God should do likewise. If is compassionate, then certainly those who love God should be compassionately as well. The God whom Jesus announces and in whose name he acts is the God of compassion, the God who offers Godself as an example and model for all human behavior. (Nouwen)

Jesus knows something of the eldest brother. Diarmuid O’Murchu in the poem for Centering prayer echoes the eldest son’s complaint.
The rules are all broken, strange words are being spoken,
That young guy called Jesus has life upside down,
We must all be inclusive –it scares me illusive,
It robs the uniqueness I too long have known.

Many of Jesus’ religious opponents criticized him: “Look he is a drunkard, he associations with sinners and tax collectors.” Jesus pokes fun of this position of his critics. His critics place himself in the position of the youngest son in the parable. Jesus is prodigal as well the youngest son. Both are sinners: But Jesus turns the world upside for the eldest brother as well and critics:
“Can you deal with God imagined as the father in this Parable? In fact, God is more prodigal in God’s love for us. God’s hospitality is so extravagant and so indulgent of us.”

One of my favorite theologians, a Jesuit Karl Rahner” “God is the prodigal that squanders himself (Godself).” Let’s apply this to Jesus’ parable. The father exceeds his younger son as a prodigal, he is true prodigal by his extravagantly lavish display of compassionate love and hospitality. The real prodigal in the story is God.

In other words, Jesus invites his hearers whether they identify with the younger brother as a sinner and outsider or the eldest son with righteous resentment at God’s mercy and forgiveness to become like the compassionate father of his parable. We are invited to model the compassionate love of the father in the parable.

As young man, I realized that no matter what I did or thought I did that was sinful, God was always there to love me. I was convinced numerous times that at the core of this universe is love, so prodigal in its unconditional love and outreach. God is the true prodigal who squanders so much love on each and every one of you. We are invited to imitate the prodigal love of God as community.

“No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”