Once upon a time Jesus told a story about a father and his two sons. Jesus told a lot of stories, which people wrote down and included in the Bible. Probably the most famous of all of his stories is the one we now call The Good Samaritan. But a very close second would be this story, which we now call The Prodigal Son. That’s probably not the best title for it, as we shall see in a few moments.

Here is the story that Jesus told, as found in Luke 15:

“There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the wealth that will belong to me.’ So he divided his assets between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant region, and there he squandered his wealth in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that region, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that region, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, and no one gave him anything. But when he came to his senses he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” ’ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.

“Now his elder son was in the field, and as he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command, yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your assets with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’ ” (Luke 15:11-32).

So the first thing to notice here is this: at the very beginning of his story, the people listening to Jesus would have gasped at the younger son’s horrible rudeness, the total lack of respect expressed when he asked to receive his inheritance early: within first century culture it would be the equivalent of saying to his father, “I wish you would die!” The listeners would have expected this disrespectful son would get seriously smacked down for speaking like this, and they would be astonished when that did not happen, and even more astonished when the father pulled out his cell phone to use the calculator function to figure out how many cows he would have to sell to gather up the right number of gold coins to pay out his son’s inheritance.

While the father is working on the math there, let’s pause just a moment over the word ‘prodigal.’ It’s not a word that gets used in ordinary conversation. It has the same root meaning as the word prodigious, which is also pretty uncommon, but it means extravagant or excessive or astonishing. We sometimes speak of someone making a prodigious effort, which means they are working very hard at a very difficult task, sweating and grunting as they do it, and you say to yourself, “Wow, I could never do that: I can’t believe anyone could do that.” That combination of something excessive and astonishing is what ‘prodigal’ means. As we go along, we’ll see some further indications that The Prodigal Son might not be the best title for this parable.

As the father finishes up his calculations, let’s ask: How old is this younger son? Jesus never said a specific age. The feel of the story suggests that he is not just younger than his brother, but actually young: but how young is young? I usually think of him as about 17, partly because there is no mention of his wife as the story progresses, and first century culture would normally have arranged a marriage for him by his late teens. But we can’t be certain. Perhaps he was 20. I don’t think he was as old as 25. But the fact remains, as Jesus told this story, he did not mention the ages of either of the sons, or the father either.

A few days later the proper number of cows have been sold, there is a bag of gold coins in receipts, the younger son puts the bag of gold into his knapsack and then heads out on his grand adventure, not aiming for some town twenty miles away but going to “a far country.” If you are somewhere in Galilee, Jerusalem is about 60 miles away, a distance you can walk in about four days, at 15 mile a day. That will not be far enough to count as “a far country.” Again, Jesus did not specify what “far country” the young fellow decided to travel to: it might be Egypt if he goes south, Syriah if he goes north, or Babylon if he goes east. Perhaps a couple of hundred miles, two weeks’ worth of hiking. 

Then, when he got there, he wasted his money on “dissolute living.” What kind of living is “dissolute living”? In the Greek text it’s actually an unusual word that gets used there, asótos; it’s a compound adjective that means something like “unsavable” or “irredeemable,” and this is the only time it shows up in the New Testament. The noun form of this word, asotía, gets used three other times in the New Testament. In Ephesians 5:18 we read: “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is asotía.” In Titus 1:5-7 we read that Paul had instructed Titus to appoint leaders for each community, listing qualifications including that such leaders not be accused of asotía,and then further specifying that they not be “addicted to wine.” In I Peter 4:4 we read Peter’s assessment of how the heathen live in drunkenness, and that “they are surprised that you no longer join them in the same excesses of asotía.” We don’t see a strict definition that insists that asotía is always about too much liquor, but its usage in those passages strongly suggests that connection. So the nuance of asotía probably gives the term a meaning something like “too drunk to be rescued” or “irredeemably wasted.”

So when the people listen to Jesus give this brief description of the young man wasting his money on asótos living, they get a picture in their heads of the fellow going to the tavern every day, buying a bowl of lamb stew and some fresh pita bread, and drinking his life away.  He’s not worried, because he’s got a bag of gold coins, which feels like so much money it will never run out.  He wakes up in his room at the inn around noon, with a terrible hangover, and he heads back to the tavern, feeling mushy in the head, and orders lamb stew and pita bread, and has a few drinks, and another day goes by.  One day he notices that his bag of gold isn’t as heavy as it used to be.  He stops buying single malt scotch and switches to blended, which he can get for silver.  But after a while the silver starts to run out, too, and one day he’s down to just a few coppers, enough to buy one last bowl of lamb stew, a single pita, and some cheap beer.  He’s no longer sleeping in that nice room in the inn; he’s sleeping on the ground, on some scraggly grass outside of town.  He wakes up the next day, raging headache, not a penny in his pocket, and says, “I need a job.”

He grew up on a farm, so he knows how to do farm work.  He says, “I’ll hire on with a local farmer.” He walks up the driveway to a farm and asks for a job.  He looks terrible, dusty and sweaty, but the farmer asks about his experience.  The young man says, “I’ve worked with cows and sheep and goats all my life.” The farmer says, “Well, I’ve got pigs.  If you can take care of pigs, then you’re hired.” Not long ago the younger son felt like he was the richest man in town, with a bag full of gold coins; now he’s just another migrant worker, sent out into the field to feed the pigs.

He’s got a basket of pods to feed to the pigs.  Again, it’s a specific word that gets used:  kerátion, used only once in the New Testament, right here. It’s the word for the seed pod of the carob plant.  Nowadays people have learned how to refine carob and use it as a substitute for chocolate.  You can make carob chip cookies instead of chocolate chip cookies.  Most people don’t think carob is as hearty and flavorful as chocolate, but if you’re allergic to chocolate, maybe you’d think a bland chocolate substitute is better than no chocolate at all?  Some people think so.

In its raw unrefined form, picked straight from the tree, carob pods were used in ancient times only as cattle feed.  Well, except when there was a severe famine:  people would eat it then, because bland raw seed pods are better than no food at all.  It’s like if you had no food in your pantry, not even a crust of bread and some moldy cheese, if you had no money to buy a little something, if it was now four days since the last bite you had to eat: then you might look at that bag of dry dog food in the bin in your garage and think, “Maybe I’ll eat some of that.”  That’s something you’d never even think about, in normal circumstances. 

So the young man has wasted all his money getting wasted, now he’s hot and dirty out in the field, he’s feeding these carob pods to the pigs, and the people listening to Jesus know that they’d never be tempted to eat pig food like carob pods, just like we today would never be tempted to eat dog food. Unless we were hungry enough. The rich folks might have a barn full of grain they haven’t sold yet, they might think they need to tear down their barns to build bigger ones, but the common people had all had weeks when the food had all been eaten up and there won’t be money to buy more till payday. They had all had times when they’d been hungry enough to eat carob pods, even though it’s gross to think of eating pig food. So they get it that the young man is thinking maybe he could just chow down on some of these carob pods.  Everyone listening would nod and think, yeah, if you were hungry enough you’d be thinking about eating those things.  The way Jesus tells the story, the young man doesn’t go ahead and eat the pods.  But he’s thinking about it.  And maybe it’s Tuesday, and payday isn’t till Friday.  He can drink water from the well, and he just has to make it to Friday and he’ll have money to buy groceries.  He can go three days without eating, right?  Or – there’s the carob pods.  Maybe by Thursday he’ll be eating pig food.  Maybe chowing down on some raw carob pods wouldn’t be so bad.

When he got his basket of carob pods on Wednesday, he heard the radio playing a Carrie Underwood song, and as he headed out to feed the pigs the line from the song’s chorus kept running through his head: “I ain’t spending no more time, wasted.” And he said to himself, “You know, my father’s hired hands get a denarius in pay plus three meals a day.  I could go back home, and say to my father, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.  I am no longer worthy to be called your son.  Just let me be one of your hired men.”

Now here’s the thing.  Before Luke wrote this story down, Jesus said it out loud.  And when Jesus said it, the listeners got to listen to his voice tones.  And sometimes the way you say it makes a lot of difference in what the words mean.

Like when a husband senses that his wife is upset about something, and he asks, “Honey, is something wrong?”  And she snaps back at him, “Oh, it’s just fine!  Everything is fine!” And maybe you’re that husband, and you tell yourself, “I guess it must be okay.  She said everything is fine.” But you’d be wrong, because you only thought about the meaning of the words, and didn’t pay attention to the sarcastic tone of voice, which would have told you that the meaning of the sentence is different from the meaning of the words. The words she said were “Everything is fine,” but the sentence she said means that everything is not fine.

So when Jesus said that the prodigal son said, “I will say to my father, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you,’ ” what did that sound like?  Did Jesus speak with a tone of voice that told the listeners that the young man was sincerely repentant?  Or did Jesus’s tone of voice suggest that the young man had figured out how to outwit the old man again?  The father was so gracious before, but maybe the son sees that not as gracious but as gullible:  “I scammed him before, and maybe I can scam him again.  If I say ‘treat me as one of your hired hands,’ he’ll fall for that, he won’t make me a hired hand, he’ll welcome me home as a beloved son.” Because the record we have is words on paper, we don’t know what those words sounded like when spoken.

So as he heads for home, is the prodigal son deeply repentant, knowing his actions have been bad and he will have to live with the consequences of his prodigality, his excessive wastefulness and his excessively bad behavior, and he humbly accepts that reality?  Or is he sly, because he has figured out a new angle of how his father’s emotions can get played, so that the boy can manipulate his father and get himself all restored?  If you were there, listening to Jesus tell the story, you could probably hear in his voice tones which one it was.  But when we read the story, it’s not so easy to know. 

So the lad starts to walk back from the far country.  Maybe he put some of those carob pods in his knapsack, and he’s been eating half a dozen of them every day.  Maybe he’s managed to beg for a few coins to buy some stale bread.  He looks terrible, but he’s almost home.  And his father sees him, walking on the road, too far away to make out who it is.  But – the way that distant person walks is familiar.  It’s – could it be? – it is! – it’s his son.  And the old man jumps off his porch and begins to run toward his boy.

And as Jesus tells this story, the audience gasps again, because in ancient Middle Eastern culture the boss never runs.  He walks, with slow measured pace:  he walks into the situation, looks around, and gives orders:  you people, get to work on this project.  You there, stop what you’re doing, I need you to work on this other assignment.  The servants may have to run, but the boss doesn’t run.

Yet now the father is running, and the servants all gasp and they begin to run, too, because if the boss is running something must be seriously on fire.  And the father sweeps his son up into a hug, and kisses him.  The son begins his rehearsed lines: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you …”   But the father isn’t listening:  he’s giving orders.  He points to one servant:  “Go get a clean robe for him.” To another, “Go get him a gold ring.”  He assigns three others to get the prize calf and slaughter it, and tells the next one to get a big fire going in the barbecue pit. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the older son has been out in the field working.  Perhaps he has been hoeing the vegetables in the back 40, or moving the sheep from one pasture to another.  As the sun is setting he makes his way back home.  He hears the sound of music and dancing.  He catches a passing servant by the elbow and asks what’s up.  The servant replies that the younger brother has come home, and the father has called everyone in the neighborhood to come for a party to celebrate his safe return.

And the older brother runs into the house, finds his brother, and embraces him, and says, “Ah, brother mine!  I am so glad you are back!  The world is right again!” Oops.  That’s not what happens.  The older brother shouts angrily that he refuses to go in.  He stomps his feet on the back porch.  His father comes out to see what’s the matter.  And once again the listeners gasp as Jesus tells this part of the story:  this is now unbearably rude behavior on the older son’s part, making his father come out to deal with him. 

But the father comes and stands in the twilight with his older son.  The older brother complains, “I have worked like a slave for you all these years, and I have never disobeyed your commands, but you have never given me even a young goat so that I could have a barbecue with my friends.  But now this son of yours, who has squandered your money on prostitutes, he comes home and you slaughter the prize calf for him!”

We might pause for a moment and consider a couple of things about this accusation.  The first is the audience reaction to the older son’s rudeness. As they listen to Jesus tell this story, they are thinking that the father will surely punish him severely.

The second is this. The older brother has just found out that his younger brother is home.  He has no information on what his brother has been doing. Jesus has told his listeners that the younger brother used up all his money getting drunk, but the older brother doesn’t know that.  He doesn’t know what happened to the money at all.  Maybe the younger brother bought trade goods that were shipped across the Mediterranean and there was a shipwreck and he lost everything.  Maybe he shipped goods across the Mediterranean and there were several successful voyages and he has doubled and then redoubled his money, and now is far wealthier than when he left.  The older brother has no information regarding what may have happened while his brother was away.  But in his heart and mind he has been assuming that his brother has been doing the worst thing he can imagine, and he blurts out his accusation: “This son of yours has squandered all your money on prostitutes!”

And it might be true, for all the father knows. Jesus told us how the money was wasted, but the prodigal son has not told his father. The father can see that his son is obviously broke and hungry, but the father doesn’t know how he got that way. Maybe the boy is guilty of being stupid while he has been gone. Maybe he’s only guilty of being clumsy. Or maybe he is indeed guilty of being as wicked as his brother thinks he must be. But the father’s goal is apparently not to assess how bad this prodigal son has been, so that he can respond with the appropriate level of judgmental harshness. The father does not engage on the question of how bad the older brother is, either, with his harsh rebuke of his father and his wild accusations about his brother; instead, he focuses on this son, the elder son, the one standing in front of him in the dusk on the back porch. And the father says to him, “My son:  you are with me always, and all I have is yours.” It is to say, you are my son, you are beloved, and all of the farm, all the money in the bank, all of the life we have here, it is all about my love for you.

The elder son knows that he has been working hard, and he sees it as a burden: he blurts out his accusation that he has been considered as a slave. He has not understood that he is a beloved child of his father.

And then the father does say something about his younger son as well. By now it’s full dark, as he says to his older son, “All I have is yours. But we had to celebrate, because your brother was dead and now is alive once more:  he was lost, and now is found.”

And Jesus stops telling the story right there.  It’s not the end of the story, but it’s the point where Jesus stopped speaking, not telling us what happened next. It’s an excellent rhetorical move: it presses us to think, “Wait, what? How does it go from here? What happens next?”

So what did happen next?  The older brother slapped his forehead, and said, “Of course, that’s right!  We have to celebrate!” And he walked into the house, found his brother, embraced him, and said, “Welcome home!” And they all lived happily ever after.

Or maybe not.  Maybe the older brother said, “It’s all just fine!  Everything is fine!” And he marched into the party and swung his arm around his brother’s shoulders, and then shifted his hand to grab him by the back of the neck, and plunged his face down into the punchbowl.  And when he let him up, he smiled and said, “Just kidding, brother mine!  I’m so very glad you’re back.” And the listeners noted the sarcasm in the older brother’s voice, and said to one another, “I don’t think he’s actually glad his brother is back.”

Or maybe not that, either.  Maybe the older brother swore loudly in his anger, and stalked off into the dark in rage.  And the father was left standing there on the porch, shaking his head and saying to himself, “Just when you start to get one of them back on track, the other one goes off the rails.”

This is a sermon about a parable Jesus told, a story about these two lost boys.  One of the boys has become obviously lost, unsalvageably lost, lost in his drunkenness, lost beyond the possibility of redemption.  It turns out that the other boy is also lost, though not so obviously:  he is lost in his anger, lost in his jealousy, lost in his judgmentalism.  Yet even though the first son has wasted his life on unsavable wastedness, we are surprised to find out he still gets saved after all. 

So a better title for this parable might be “The Parable of the Two Sons who Reversed Their Behaviors.” One son ran away, and then came back home. One son stayed home and worked hard, and then blew up in judgmentalism and stomped off into the dark.

Or perhaps we could say “The Prodigal Sons.” The astonishing excessive drunkenness of the younger son is easy to see. And really, the astonishing excessive resentment and bitterness of the elder son is pretty easy to see, too. So maybe we should call it the parable of “The Prodigal Sons.”

Except: the one who is really prodigal in this story is the father. Again and again we see astonishing excessive response of the father to the outlandish behavior of his sons. He gives the younger son a bag of gold instead of the back of his hand. He runs to greet the lad when he sees him all bedraggled on the road. He fires off orders to his servants to arrange the astonishing excessive welcome home party. With astonishing excessive patience he explains to his older son that we must celebrate whenever lost ones somehow find their way home. The father is prodigal in his love for his children, with an astonishing excessive love that grips his soul, whether his sons are somewhere far away or at home working hard. So perhaps the title should be, “The Prodigal Father and his Two Prodigal Sons.”

Now whenever we read one of the parables of Jesus, the point is for me to have a chance to see myself in the story:  to recognize “I’ve been that prodigal child, so lost, so far from home:  and still somehow beloved of the father.”  And to recognize that “I’ve been that self-righteous child, looking like I was faithful and happy even though I was so full of judgment and anger, so lost even while being at home:  and still somehow beloved of the father.” And either way, to recognize – badly, incompletely, clumsily – that we are held and treasured by the irrepressible, prodigal love of the Father.

That’s who we are:  the children of God, in the midst of all our lostness, always and forever beloved of God. Prodigal child: come home. Prodigal child: give up your judgmentalism. And know that you are the beloved children of the Father.