Three Sons and a Father Who Keeps Running

A Complaint About Who Jesus Eats With

Luke 15 begins with a murmur. Tax collectors and sinners have pushed in close to hear Jesus, and the Pharisees and scribes, standing at the edge with their arms folded, have found something to say about it.

“And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.”

— Luke 15:2 (KJV)

Anyone who has sat through enough church services knows that murmur. It isn’t shouted. It’s the voice behind the hand at the back of the hall, asking who that woman is sitting with and whether the pastor knows what she has done. It needs no microphone and it has survived every revival in history.

Everything else in the chapter is Jesus answering it. He tells three stories, one after another, and they are not addressed to the sinners at his table. They are addressed to the people at the edge of the room. That changes how the third story should be heard, because we’ve preached it for so long as a story about the boy who left that we have mostly forgotten who it was told against.

We know the younger son by heart. The inheritance, the far country, the pigs, the walk home with a rehearsed speech. Preachers can feel an altar call coming from the first verse. The elder brother gets a few uncomfortable minutes at the end, and then we sing. And the father, the one who actually runs the story, tends to be treated as a prop that makes the sons look interesting.

I think the story has three sons in it, although only two of them are named by the text. Getting to the third takes the whole chapter.

Two Searches and Then a Silence

Jesus opens with a shepherd.

“What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?”

— Luke 15:4 (KJV)

Any sensible farmer would count that as an acceptable loss, and Jesus knows it. The sums are wrong on purpose. This shepherd leaves the ninety nine to the wilderness and goes after one, and when he finds it, he doesn’t drive it home with a stick. He “layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing” (Luke 15:5, KJV), and calls his friends and neighbours to come and celebrate.

The second story is a woman who has ten coins and loses one. She lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and keeps looking until the coin turns up, and then she too calls her friends and neighbours. A coin can’t repent. It didn’t choose the crack in the floor. It can’t find itself, and nobody expects it to. The only action in the story belongs to the woman with the broom.

Put the two side by side and a pattern is plain. In both stories something is lost, somebody goes out to look, and the finding ends in a party. The lost thing does almost nothing. We have a habit of preaching repentance as though the sinner takes the first step and God, impressed by the effort, takes the second. Luke 15 begins by telling us otherwise. Before anything else happens, someone has already gone out.

Hold that pattern in mind, because the third story quietly breaks it. There are two lost sons in it, and there’s a father who goes out for each of them. But there is no brother who goes out, and I’ll come back to that.

What the Younger Son Asked For

The story is short on explanation. A man has two sons, and the younger one says to him, “Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me” (Luke 15:12, KJV). The same verse reports the father’s response.

“And he divided unto them his living.”

— Luke 15:12 (KJV)

Two details in that sentence deserve more attention than they usually get. The first is that the father agrees. He doesn’t argue, or lock the safe, or tell the boy to wait until the funeral. Whatever the younger son meant by his request (and many readers hear in it a wish that the old man were already dead, which the text doesn’t say), he is asking a living father to treat the family property as something to cash out. Anyone who has watched relatives turn up with calculators before the burial rites were over knows how raw that request is when the man who built the estate is still sitting in the next room.

The second detail is easy to miss. He divided his living unto them. Both sons received a share. The elder brother’s inheritance was settled that day, in the same sentence as the younger’s. Hold on to that as well. It’s going to matter at the end of the story.

The father’s consent has a cost, and I think the story wants us to feel it. He lets the boy go. He doesn’t send servants after him with a letter, and he doesn’t cut off the money in the second month. There are fathers who are strong because they hold on and fathers who are strong because they let go, and the second kind is much more frightening to the child. It means the choice is real. God doesn’t keep us home by force, and when we insist on what we think we want, he has been known to let us have it, because a good many people only learn the price of a thing by paying it.

The Far Country and the Walk Home

Luke does not linger on the spending. “Not many days after the younger son gathered all together” (Luke 15:13, KJV) and he’s gone, and in a few lines the money is gone too and a famine has arrived, and the boy who asked for a share of the estate is hiring himself out to feed pigs. Nothing in the text says his collapse was sudden. It reads like a series of decisions that each made sense when he took them.

The distance deserves a word. He didn’t move to the next village. He travelled far enough that nobody who knew his father could stand across a road and ask him what he thought he was doing. Plenty of Nigerians have left for Britain, Canada or the United States, and most of them have gone for ordinary reasons and worked harder abroad than they ever could at home. But we also all know the other story, because it gets told at family gatherings in low voices. Someone leaves, and within a year the restraint that looked like character turns out to have been held up by who was watching. Take away the aunties and the church elders and the neighbours who knew your mother, and a person finds out how much of what he called conviction was really proximity.

That’s a reason people choose far countries. The place itself isn’t the point. The point is to be somewhere that nobody has the standing to say, wait, is this who you want to be?

It works in the other direction too. Think how many people have stayed away from home, from church, from a phone call, for no better reason than shame. They aren’t in love with the pigs. They simply can’t picture the walk back, and the longer they stay, the more the picture fills with faces: the cousin who’ll say he always knew, the pastor who’ll want a testimony, the mother who will cry. The far country is partly a place and partly a way of avoiding a conversation.

Then comes the sentence on which the whole story turns.

“And when he came to himself,”

— Luke 15:17 (KJV)

The Greek is eis heauton elthon. He came into himself. Hunger did what a father’s pleading couldn’t have done, and it took the noise away long enough for him to see his own situation. I’d resist reading too much devotion into what follows. His speech, as the next verses give it, is a business proposal. He has worked out that his father’s hired hands eat better than he does, and he plans to apply for a job. It is a thin kind of repentance, mixed with appetite, and the story doesn’t pretend otherwise.

It turns out not to matter, which is the next surprise.

The Father Runs, Whatever the Village Thinks

“And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”

— Luke 15:20 (KJV)

Read it slowly and the first thing to notice is that the father saw him while he was still a great way off. You can only see a figure on the horizon if you are already looking at the horizon. Nobody had sent word that the boy was coming. Whatever the father had been doing for months, he’d also been watching the road.

Many sermons at this point tell the story of the kezazah, a ceremony in which the village would break a pot at the feet of any Jewish boy who had lost his inheritance among Gentiles and declare that he was cut off from his people. In the sermons, the father runs to reach his son before the village does. The story is vivid, and it has been told so often that it now travels as plain fact. It needs checking before it is repeated.

The ceremony was brought into popular use by Kenneth Bailey, a New Testament scholar who spent decades living and teaching in the Middle East and who read the parables through the eyes of the villagers he knew. His book on Luke 15, The Cross and the Prodigal (revised edition 2005), is thoughtful and well worth reading. Matthew Williams of Biola University, in a piece drawing on Bailey, reports the claim as follows: the community would break a large pot before the returning son and tell him he was cut off. But when others went looking for the ceremony in ancient texts, the evidence was thinner than the sermons suggest. The rabbinic passages that mention something like it are from the Jerusalem Talmud, which dates to somewhere between about 200 and 450 CE, long after Jesus. They describe relatives breaking jars of grain and nuts before children, who declare that a man has been cut off from his estate, and the trigger in those texts is selling ancestral land or marrying someone unsuitable. Nothing in them involves a boy who has squandered his money among Gentiles. The New Testament scholar Levine, who writes on the parables from within Jewish scholarship, concludes, as one account of her argument puts it, that the parable itself gives no hint of any such rite.

So I won’t build on the broken pot. I don’t need to. The father doesn’t have to be racing a mob to be astonishing. A man who is wealthy enough to divide his estate and who has been wronged as badly as this father has been wronged is perfectly entitled to wait on the veranda and let the boy come to him. Williams adds, again drawing on Bailey, that a man of standing in that culture would have to hitch up his tunic to run, and that showing his bare legs was, in his words, “humiliating and shameful.” That comes from life in Middle Eastern villages rather than from an ancient text I could check, so I’d hold it loosely, though it sounds right to me. What the text itself says is enough. The father ran, and he fell on his neck, and he kissed him.

And notice the order. Luke gives the son’s speech in the next verse the son begins his speech, and he begins it after the embrace. He hasn’t earned the hug by rehearsing well. By the time he opens his mouth, he is already being held. The father gives orders to the servants.

“But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:”

— Luke 15:22 (KJV)

Hired hands do not get the best robe. The father is dressing a son, and he is doing it in front of the servants and the neighbours, so that nobody has to wonder where the boy now stands.

Paul puts the same logic into a single sentence, and he wrote it about the cross rather than a father’s gate.

“but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

— Romans 5:8 (ESV)

Grace gets there first. That isn’t because repentance doesn’t matter, since the boy did get up and walk. Repentance is what makes the welcome receivable, but it doesn’t make it possible. The love was already out on the road before the speech was ready.

What the Elder Brother Has to Say

This is where the story gets difficult, because Jesus doesn’t end it at the party. He turns the camera to the field.

“Now his elder son was in the field:”

— Luke 15:25 (KJV)

He’s working, as he has been all these years, and when he comes near the house he hears music. A servant explains that his brother has come home and that the fatted calf has been killed. And the elder brother is “angry” and will not go in. So the father does something he did not have to do. “Therefore came his father out, and intreated him” (Luke 15:28, KJV). That is the second time in one story the father leaves a party and goes out onto a road for a son. He runs to the first and pleads with the second.

Now listen to the elder brother properly, because his complaint is a reasonable one and I’d like to give it in words he would accept. I’ve stayed. I’ve been here every day. When there was no money, I was the one who found it; when the roof leaked, I climbed up. I never once embarrassed you in front of the neighbours. And in all these years you never threw me a party, not even a goat for me and my friends. Then this boy, who has eaten your money with prostitutes, walks in smelling of pigs, and you kill the best animal you own.

Anyone who has watched a family reunion in Nigeria knows the face behind those words. One sibling has been paying the electricity bill and driving the old woman to hospital for a decade. Another arrives from abroad, to a house full of food and relatives falling over themselves, and the first one sits in the kitchen doing the washing up. Most of us have been one or the other, and a few of us, on different days, have been both. If your first instinct is to dismiss the elder brother as a villain, I think you haven’t yet listened to him. He isn’t entirely wrong. His arithmetic is fine.

What’s wrong is something underneath the arithmetic, and the father puts his finger on it.

“And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.”

— Luke 15:31 (KJV)

Remember that the estate was divided in verse twelve, unto them. When the younger son left, everything that remained was already the elder son’s. The calf in the pen was his calf. The robe in the cupboard was his robe. If anything, the father is throwing the feast out of his elder son’s property, and the elder son has never complained about that because he has never once thought of it as his own. He complains that his father “never gavest me a kid.” He never asked. Every day of those years he could have walked into the pen and taken a goat, and the father would have said, of course, it’s all yours.

The word he uses of himself is “serve.” “Lo, these many years do I serve thee” (Luke 15:29, KJV), and the Greek verb is the one for a slave’s labour. He has lived in the house all his life and organised his entire relationship with the man who owns it around wages. His father is a boss whose approval he is saving up for.

I want to be careful at this point, because it can be taken the wrong way. Some of the things the elder brother does are good things. Fasting and long prayer, giving, early mornings, vigils, showing up when nobody is watching. None of that is the problem. A son can do all of it, and the best sons do. It becomes the elder brother’s ledger when it turns into overtime, when you fast twenty one days and privately expect God to settle the account. The same habit is a delight when you do it as a child in your father’s house, and it’s a grievance when you do it as a labourer in somebody else’s. The difference lies in what you think you’re doing it for.

And look at what he calls his brother. The younger one is not my brother. He is “this thy son,” in the elder’s mouth, and the father quietly takes the word back at the end of the story: “for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:32, KJV). The elder brother had disowned the relationship in a single phrase. The father hands it back to him.

The Brother Nobody Sends Out

Here the story stops, and it stops in the strangest place. Jesus doesn’t tell us whether the elder brother went in. There’s no last line about the music or the dancing. The father has just said “thy brother,” and then the camera simply goes off, with the elder son still standing in the yard.

That silence is deliberate. The people to whom the story is told are the Pharisees at the edge of the crowd, and they are the elder brother, and what Jesus leaves unfinished is the very thing he is asking them to finish. They are the ones outside the house. The party is for people they have been muttering about.

But I think the silence also has a shape, and the shape is a missing person.

In the first two stories, someone goes out. The shepherd goes into the wilderness, and the woman takes up her broom. In the third story the father goes out, twice, once for each son. But a household like the one Jesus describes needs more than a father. It has an eldest son whose job, as every Nigerian family understands without being told, is to be the one who goes. When the cousin has disappeared into a bad crowd in Lagos, the eldest is the one who takes the bus, finds the address, and brings him home. When there’s a quarrel between two uncles, the eldest sits down between them. It is one of the heavy duties of being first. In Luke 15 the eldest son is the one who has to be fetched.

So there is an empty chair in the story, and everyone can see it. Where is the brother who goes out to find the lost one, who walks the road beside him, who stands at the door of the feast and says to the sulking one in the yard, come in, he’s your brother and I’m not ashamed of him?

That’s where Christian readers have always heard a third son. Let me be careful about what I’m claiming. Levine has warned that parables are not allegories, and she is right to say it. Luke 15 doesn’t contain a character with Jesus’s name on him, and a reading that finds one must be argued for, not assumed. But look at the occasion. The one who tells this story is, at that very moment, sitting at a table with the sinners the Pharisees are complaining about. He is doing exactly what the elder brother refuses to do. The empty chair in the story is occupied in the room where the story is told.

The New Testament says this about him in so many words.

“For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers,”

— Hebrews 2:11 (ESV)

The writer adds that “he had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17, ESV). And on the morning of the resurrection, when the men who had scattered when he was arrested are hiding behind a locked door, the first message he sends them uses the word the elder brother couldn’t say: “go to my brothers” (John 20:17, ESV).

The writer Shiao Chong, reading Luke 15 with Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God (2008), makes the same point in his own way. Keller argues that both brothers are trying to be their own saviour, one by rebellion and one by moral performance. Chong adds that the elder brother should have gone looking for his lost brother, and that Jesus is the true elder brother who does, at the cost of the cross. That is Chong’s reading rather than Keller’s, and I find it hard to resist.

An African version of the same instinct has a long history. Timothy Palmer’s survey of African Christology describes how Charles Nyamiti, in Christ as Our Ancestor (1984), proposed that Christ is the brother ancestor in the fullest sense, and how Kwame Bediako argued in 1995 that Christ can rightly be called, in African terms, the supreme ancestor. Palmer is careful to add that not everyone agrees. Some respected African theologians did not use the language, and the students he asked mostly rejected it, on the sensible ground that Christ is alive and ancestors are dead. I’m not asking anyone to adopt a vocabulary. But anyone who grew up in a Nigerian family understands the instinct underneath it. Families need an elder brother who goes out, and in the story Jesus tells, the person who ought to have been that brother is standing in the yard with a grievance.

Learning to Stand Where the Father Stands

Henri Nouwen’s meditation on Rembrandt’s painting of the return of the prodigal (1992) ends somewhere many of us wouldn’t expect. The painting shows both sons and the father, and Nouwen’s point is that whichever son you see yourself in, you are being asked to become the father. “The return to the Father is ultimately the challenge to become the Father” is how he puts it in the passage quoted by Kevin Spinale in America (Nouwen, 1992, p. 123). I would add only what Luke 15 itself suggests, that the father in this story spends most of it on the road. To stand where he stands is to be someone who goes out.

That means the way we talk about people, for a start. “This son of yours” has a long life in Christian conversation. It comes out as that girl, that boy, that family, those people who left the church. Language shows who is carrying whom. Listen to how a family talks about a daughter who came home pregnant, or a son who came out of prison, and you can tell within a minute which of them the speaker thinks belongs to the household and which has been put on the other side of the gate. The moment a lost person becomes their problem, their sin, their consequence, we have moved out of the father’s posture and into the yard. To say my brother is to take on the responsibility of the one who goes out. It’s more costly than the other word, and it’s the only one the father uses.

It may be that a church is the place where this is hardest. We can arrange a thanksgiving service for a new car at very short notice. A man who has been away for eight years and wants to come back into the fellowship gets a long silence and a seat at the back. That isn’t the fault of one or two unkind people. It’s what a system does when it has grown very good at working for God and has lost the habit of knowing him, and it can be fixed by anyone willing to cross the room and sit down beside him.

If you are the younger son, hear what the story says about the road. You don’t have to arrive with a better speech. The man who is watching for you has been watching for a good while. The robe is already in the house.

If you are the elder son, which is to say if you have been faithful for years and are tired and feel unseen, the story has something harder and gentler to say to you. Your father is not unaware of what you’ve done, and he doesn’t dispute your arithmetic. He tells you the whole estate is yours and has been all along. You can go and take the goat. You can also go in and sit down by a brother whom the father has already named as yours.

The Door Is Still Open

The story ends with a verse that ends in the middle of a conversation. “This thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.” The music is still going. The calf is on the fire, the younger son is washed and dressed and probably still half in shock, and somewhere out in the yard a man with his arms folded is deciding whether to go in.

Jesus doesn’t say what he decided, and I think the reason is that the Pharisees were still deciding, and so are we.

So here is a suggestion, and it’s a small one. Think of the person you have been calling this son of yours. Perhaps it’s a cousin who went abroad and stopped answering the phone, or a woman in your church whose story everyone knows, or a father you haven’t spoken to in six years. Somebody in your life has been lost for long enough that you’ve stopped saying their name. The third son in this story is the one who goes out. It is what Jesus did for us, and he’s not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters while he does it, and it is also what he asks of us.

The music is still playing. There’s a chair for you, and next to it is the one belonging to the brother you’ve been refusing to name. Go in and sit beside him.

References

Biblical References

• Luke 15:2 (KJV). The murmur of the Pharisees; the occasion for all three parables, and the reason the story is heard as told against them.
• Luke 15:4 to 5 (KJV). The shepherd who leaves the ninety and nine and carries the sheep home rejoicing; the first search, and the pattern the third parable breaks.
• Luke 15:8 to 10 (paraphrased). The woman who loses a coin and sweeps the house; the second search, in which the lost thing does nothing.
• Luke 15:12 to 13 (KJV). The request for a share of the estate; the division “unto them”, which gives the elder brother his portion; the departure.
• Luke 15:17 (KJV). “When he came to himself”: the turning point, with the Greek phrase noted.
• Luke 15:20 to 22 (KJV). The father’s running, embrace and the best robe; the argument that grace precedes the speech.
• Luke 15:25 to 32 (KJV). The elder brother in the field, the father who goes out a second time, the complaint, the answer, and “this thy brother”.
• Romans 5:8 (ESV). Grace arriving while we were still sinners; the parallel to the father on the road.
• Hebrews 2:11 and 2:17 (ESV). Christ not ashamed to call us brothers, and made like his brothers in every respect; the reading of the third son.
• John 20:17 (ESV). The risen Christ’s word “my brothers” for the disciples who had scattered; the brother who says the word the elder son would not say.

Other Sources

• Bailey, K. E. (2005). The cross and the prodigal: Luke 15 through the eyes of Middle Eastern peasants (Rev. ed.). InterVarsity Press. https://ivpress.com/the-cross-and-the-prodigal
• Biola Magazine. (2010). The prodigal son’s father shouldn’t have run! Biola University. https://www.biola.edu/blogs/biola-magazine/2010/the-prodigal-sons-father-shouldnt-have-run
• Chong, S. (2024, November). The elder brother. The Banner. https://www.thebanner.org/columns/2024/11/the-elder-brother
• Keller, T. (2008). The prodigal God: Recovering the heart of the Christian faith. Dutton. (Cited as quoted in Chong, 2024.)
• Levine, A.-J. (2014). Short stories by Jesus: The enigmatic parables of a controversial rabbi. HarperOne. (Cited through Spinale, 2015, and Sleepless Theology, n.d.)
• Nouwen, H. J. M. (1992). The return of the prodigal son: A story of homecoming. Doubleday. (Cited as quoted in Spinale, 2015b.)
• Palmer, T. (2008). Jesus Christ: Our ancestor? Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology, 27(1), 65-76. https://www.gospelstudies.org.uk/biblicalstudies/pdf/ajet/27-1_065.pdf
• Sleepless Theology. (n.d.). Kezazah and the prodigal: Debunking a popular sermon illustration [Newsletter post]. Substack. https://sleeplesstheology.substack.com/p/kezazah-and-the-prodigal-debunking
• Spinale, K. (2015a, February 12). Short stories by Jesus: February selection. America. https://www.americamagazine.org/catholic-book-club/2015/02/12/short-stories-jesus/
• Spinale, K. (2015b, August 6). Henri Nouwen’s The return of the prodigal son: August Catholic Book Club selection. America. https://www.americamagazine.org/catholic-book-club/2015/08/06/return-prodigal-son-story-homecoming/

Translation Notices

• Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.