The Prodigal Son is about family abandonment

Transgression is putting one's self above the community

Credit: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

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A couple of years ago, I wrote one of my favorite blog posts, arguing that The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is about a community that forgives a transgressor. So I thought I’d continue the holiday tradition of offering slightly alternative readings to well-known stories this week by looking at another text that’s also about forgiveness: the New Testament’s Prodigal Son. And my argument this time is that the story is a warning against betraying one’s community. The story features two sons, both of whom transgress by letting their selfishness and egos cloud the truth that their resources — their money, their energy, their lives — are meant for the betterment of their families and villages¹².

The Prodigal Son is one of Jesus’ parables and is documented in the fifteenth chapter of the book of Luke. I’m not going to include the entire text here because I think most people, regardless of religion or lack thereof, probably know the gist. But to briefly refresh, the parable is about a man with two sons. The younger of the two sons asks for his inheritance early, then goes out and blows it all on a life of hedonism.

Eventually the son ends up dirt poor and taking care of pigs — animals he envies because they have enough to eat. He realizes his father’s servants are better off, so he goes home with plans to beg his father for a job as a servant. But when the son returns, his dad embraces him, clothes him, and throws a feast in his honor.

Meanwhile, the older son is pissed. He stuck around and did everything right, but for some reason his dad is celebrating the black sheep. The father responds by telling the older son he’ll ultimately inherit everything that’s left, but that they’re celebrating because the younger son “was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”

There’s an obvious lesson here about forgiveness; the younger son abandons his life of sin and is forgiven by his father. The older son wants everything to be fair, but is reminded that fairness is less important than the return of the lost family member. It’s a powerful message.

But I also think the nature of the transgressions is worth dwelling on. When I was growing up, we heard this story in church constantly. Often, our lessons focused on the types of sins the younger brother committed. The text specifically tells us he engaged in “riotous living,” for example, which my religious leaders typically interpreted as things like sex, drugs, and the like³.

These things were big sins in my religious community, so the implication was that the transgression stemmed from what the younger son was doing with his inheritance. Had he used the money to, say, grind away at a law degree from Harvard, or work a low-wage-but-altruistic job in the nonprofit sector, there wouldn’t have been a problem because those activities are not sins.

But I would like to offer that the specific activities on which the younger son spent his inheritance are largely irrelevant. Why? In verse 15 we learn that after getting his inheritance the younger son “took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.”

The “far country” is a curious detail, and it strikes me as significant that it’s mentioned before the riotous living. It was, I think, the younger son’s first and most critical misstep.

In other words, the transgression was less about what the son did with his money. Instead, the problem was ditching his family in the first place so he could focus entirely on himself. It was using his family’s resources selfishly rather than in a way that would benefit the family-village⁴. And even if he had been doing something objectively worthwhile, he still abandoned his people.

Meanwhile, the father tells the older son, “thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” The line is written in the present tense and implies that by remaining with the family, and laboring for the edification of the group, the older son benefits from a kind of mutual ownership of the family resources⁵. All that the father has already belongs the older son because he’s there, paying in.

So, the younger son’s error is placing self above family, and the older son’s actions up to this point in the story demonstrate the opposite.

Of course, the older son also makes mistakes when he complains about the younger son being welcomed back into the family. In fact, I was often taught that the older son was the real prodigal due to his vindictiveness and lack of compassion.

But I think another part of what’s going on here is that the older son is basically making the same mistake his brother committed: He’s putting his own interests, in this case an abstract concept of fairness, above the family gaining another contributing, able-bodied member. In an economic sense, labor is a resource and another person bolsters the family’s human capital. And more generally, a bigger village community lightens all the loads for everyone. If the younger son is truly repentant, and it appears he is, there’s no rational argument for excluding him. So, the older son’s response is another instance of selfishness.

What I like about this reading of the story is that it’s actionable. The lesson is that the family is more important than the individual, the needs of the group trump selfishness, and family resources are meant for the family.

I can use those ideas as a lens through which to look at major life decisions. So, what should I choose for a career? Something that benefits the group. Where should I live? In a place that benefits the group. How should I handle inheritance (the literal topic of the parable)? In a way that bolsters connections and, again, benefits the group. Self interest — the “follow your passions” worldview so many of us millennials inherited — and even concepts such as fairness are secondary in this framework.

The mistakes of both brothers in the Prodigal Son suggest that making village-oriented choices isn’t easy. But it is at least an ideal to shoot for and the conclusion of the story shows why: Everyone benefits if the village survives. Despite their mistakes, the younger son still has a family-village to come back to while the older son has a village to inherit.

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Headlines to check out this week:

What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life

Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participants—boys from disadvantaged and troubled families in Boston, and Harvard undergraduates—the study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. Researchers periodically interview participants, ask them to fill out questionnaires, and collect information about their physical health. As the study’s director (Bob) and associate director (Marc), we’ve been able to watch participants fall in and out of relationships, find success and failure at their jobs, become mothers and fathers. It’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and it’s brought us to a simple and profound conclusion: Good relationships lead to health and happiness. The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.

Cain: A Story of Squandered "Alpha"

When we use our gifts and opportunities well we are mostly generating “beta.” An intelligent person who uses her intelligence to become a cutting edge researcher executes well, but gets no credit for being intelligent. But a person who is faced with a hard choice and does the right thing has genuinely moved the cosmos. Anything else and you’re just benefiting from being in the right seat. Not screwing up beta is fine, and keeps the lights on, and if everyone stopped executing on it, the world would be worse off. But if you are a person striving to be great, to outperform the average, ask yourself what is in your freewill, and what you can do to choose the good but difficult thing.

1. I’m not arguing that this is the historically “correct” interpretation. I’m not a scholar of ancient Palestine. Rather, this is a useful (for me) interpretation of a common story.

2. I’m sure others have made this argument before, but I’m not part of an academic theological community and haven’t seen it before. If you’re familiar with writers who have discussed these ideas, let me know.

3. When I was growing up, we had a memorable modernized video version of the story that showed the younger son working as a photographer. It was a church video that couldn’t actually show anything racy, but I think we were meant to understand that he was possibly getting involved in pornography, drugs and the mafia. After I wrote this post I wondered if this video was online anywhere, and lo and behold it is! You can watch it on YouTube here.

4. The text states that after the son asked for his inheritance, the father “divided unto them his living.” I’m not totally sure what that would have entailed in Jesus’ time, but today if a child asked for an early inheritance the parents would likely have to sell off some of the their business or assets to provide the cash. A farmer might have $10 million in land, but probably won’t have $5 million in cash lying around that he can give away — meaning he’d have to sell half the farm to provide an early inheritance. This idea deepens the scope of the younger son’s betrayal; he might have forced the family to reduce its holdings and livelihood in order to fund his life of debauchery .

5. When I read this part of the story, what comes to mind is the concept of the “corporate family,” which was a common way of setting up ownership in the premodern world. Basically, a tribe rather than an individual might own an asset like a farm. You can read more about this in, among many other places, The WEIRDest People in the World.