HOPE! - No Prodigals

So how much does our own culture and upbringing influence the way we understand and interpret the bible?

Here’s a fun little experiment you can try.

Gather a bunch of middle-class American Christians together and then divide them into groups and have them read Luke 15:11-32… Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.

Then, have each group give a brief summary of the parable.

Pretty easy, right?

However, in most American groups, those retelling the story (to their own shock) will leave out a very important fact…

…the fact that there was a famine!

However, when this experiment was done in Russia, almost everyone mentioned the famine in their brief summary.

So why did the Americans leave out such an important fact?

Because famine is foreign to the experience of most Americans; whereas most Russians have experienced famine at some point in recent history.

Americans, who tend to think a lot about saving and spending money… blame the son’s starvation on his waste of his father’s inheritance… hence the title “prodigal” we’ve attached to him.

However, Russians point out that he was starving because there was a famine… and the people who first heard this parable would have thought the same way.

So why do we call the prodigal son… “The prodigal son”? What makes him a prodigal?

Well… he wasted all his dad’s money on prostitutes and wild parties, right? That would make him a prodigal, no doubt.

But Jesus never calls him a prodigal. The word prodigal is never used in the story. It’s just a label that people gave the son later.

So why the label? Do we think we’re better than the son because we don’t spend all our money on prostitutes and wild parties?

The only reason we attach the prodigal label to him is because we value good finance and frugality in our culture. We value good use of good money. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does get in the way of our view of the son. We see him as someone who threw away privilege – who wasted his life… and we’re just a little bit ashamed of him for that.

But that’s not how Jesus sees the son. Jesus sees him as one who isolated himself from his community of support and lost his way because he thought he could handle life on his own terms and with his own wisdom… and he failed. When life got hard, he hit rock bottom.

But Jesus also shows us that God is the loving father who takes the son back despite his imperfections.

The father doesn’t say, “That prodigal son of mine who wasted all my money on prostitutes has returned to get more money from me.”

The father says, “My son who was lost has come home! Let’s celebrate!”