The Prodigal Son

Week 49 of 52 · Book 2, Follow Me About 22 minutes to read The practice runs for seven days

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The gist

The son rehearses a sentence in verse 19 and does not say it in verse 21. Of the printed Greek editions, Westcott and Hort alone restore the missing line, and the text this book prints is not theirs. Meyer, Vincent and Trench all noticed the omission; Bengel noticed it too and denies it means what the other three think.

Going deeper

The range is the MSB’s own unit exactly. Its heading, The Parable of the Prodigal Son, stands at verse 11, and the next heading is in the following chapter. The MSB prints Luke 15 as three separate parables under three headings, not as one; Luke supplies a single occasion for all three at verses 1 to 3.

And the parenthetical printed with the heading is worth stopping on. It reads Deuteronomy 21:18–21 — the law of the stubborn and rebellious son, whose penalty is death by stoning.

That is the MSB’s own editorial cross-reference and not a quotation of Christ, but it is on the page, and what it does is point the reader at the law the father does not invoke. (It should not be confused with Deuteronomy 21:17, the double portion of the firstborn, which is the verse the commentators cite for the arithmetic of the estate. Different passage, different point.)

Now the text, where there is a great deal to report and one thing that will surprise anyone who has heard this parable preached.

Verse 16 — the belly, and the split is not where you would expect. The Byzantine, the Greek text of the Orthodox Church and both Receptus editions read gemisai tēn koilian autou — he longed to fill his own belly with the pods. Westcott and Hort read chortasthēnai, “to be fed.”

But Nestle 1904 keeps the belly. So does Tischendorf’s text on the point of the phrase. Six of the seven editions on the page have the grosser, more physical reading, and Westcott and Hort stand alone. The MSB’s footnote is scrupulous about this: it names NA, TH and WH rather than using its usual blanket “CT.”

So this is not a Byzantine-against-the-world reading. It is very nearly everyone against Westcott and Hort — and the entry says so, because the opposite claim would have been easy and wrong.

Verse 17 — and here the Orthodox text parts from the Byzantine. The Greek text of the Orthodox Church includes the word hōde, “here”: I am perishing here with hunger. The Byzantine and both Receptus editions omit it, and the critical editions have it.

So the Orthodox text is a hybrid at exactly this verse — with the critical editions on here, and with the Byzantine on the verb. And it is a hybrid at the one place a preacher would most want the word: here, in this field, over against the father’s house.

This is the only substantive place in the passage where the Orthodox text and the Byzantine differ; at verses 16, 21, 22, 24 and 32, checked individually, they agree in wording.

Verse 21 — the swallowed sentence, and this is the entry’s centre.

At verse 19 the son rehearses his speech: I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.

At verse 21 he delivers it — and he stops one sentence short.

Westcott and Hort alone print the missing clause. Nestle omits it, the Byzantine omits it, the Orthodox text omits it, and both editions of the Receptus omit it. The MSB footnotes it precisely: “WH includes Make me like one of your hired servants; see verse 19.” (The chapter page carrying that footnote could not be re-fetched on verification; the wording is recorded here as first obtained.)

So in the text this book prints, the hired-servant line is rehearsed and never spoken. And three commentators noticed, two of whom explain it the same way and one of whom denies the explanation.

Meyer: the clause “is repressed by the demeanour of his father’s love; the deeply moved son cannot bring these words to his lips in the presence of such paternal affection. A psychologically delicate and significant representation.”

Vincent notices the same thing and states it in one line: “To be called thy son — He omits make me a servant. The slavish spirit vanishes in the clasp of the father’s arms.”

And Trench, quoted by Jamieson-Fausset-Brown with the credit printed, gives the mechanism: “The son has not said all he purposed, not so much, because the father’s demonstrations had rekindled the filial, and swallowed up all servile feeling.”

Bengel reads it the other way, and the disagreement is worth printing rather than hiding: “The son did not abuse his Father’s graciousness, so as to prevent his proceeding to say what he had intended. Serious and earnest repentance does not satisfy itself with merely one thought unattended with cost or trouble.” On Bengel’s reading the son was not cut off at all.

But the omission is on the page whichever way it is explained, and it is destroyed by restoring the clause. This is a place where the Majority Text the book prints is not merely defensible but dramatically better, and the entry says so without special pleading.

Verse 22 — and a second variant riding along. The Byzantine, the Orthodox text and both Receptus editions lack the word “Quick!” — and so does Tischendorf, so it is Nestle and Westcott-Hort alone that carry it. The MSB footnotes it. They also read “the robe, the first one,” with the article, where the critical editions read it without.

That article is small and not nothing. On the text this book prints it is not a best robe. It is the robe — a known garment in that house.

Verses 24 and 32 — the refrain, and the Byzantine keeps it whole.

At verse 24 the father says to the servants: he was dead, and anezēsen — lived again. Every edition agrees there.

At verse 32 he says it again, to the elder son. And the critical editions read a different verb: ezēsen, lived. The refrain breaks.

The Byzantine, the Orthodox text and both Receptus editions read anezēsen both times, and keep the participle order identical as well. So on the text this book prints, the father says exactly the same thing twice — once to the servants and once to the angry son, without varying a word.

That is the point of the ending, and the MSB can render it identically at both verses because its Greek is identical at both verses.

Then the words, of which five are worth the space.

Ousia, verses 12 and 13, “estate” and “wealth.” It occurs twice in the entire New Testament, and both occurrences are in this parable. It is not the ordinary word for possessions; the Gospels have four other words for that, and Luke uses one of them in the same verse — the father divides his bios, his living, which the elder brother throws back at him in verse 30.

Ousia is substance. Being. It is the word from which the Fathers built the vocabulary of the Creed.

Whether Luke intends any resonance is not something the lexicon says, and this entry does not claim it does. But the bare fact is a fact: the New Testament’s word for substance appears exactly twice, on the lips of a son demanding his share of it and in the narrator’s report of him scattering it.

Asōtōs, verse 13, “in wild living.” A hapax legomenon — once in Scripture, here.

Thayer glosses it morally: “dissolutely, profligately.” Strong’s the same. But the etymology pulls the other way: alpha-privative plus the root of sōzō, to save — literally un-save-ably, past saving, unsalvageable. Both senses are live in the word’s history.

And nothing in the lexicon connects it to prostitutes. The only mention of them in the parable is at verse 30, in the elder brother’s mouth, and the narrator never confirms it. The elder brother supplies a lurid detail the story itself withholds — which is worth noticing, because it is the kind of thing that only ever gets supplied by someone who has been thinking about it.

Keratia, verse 16, the pods. Another hapax, and Thayer’s entry corrects the standard preaching.

The word is a diminutive of the word for “horn” — little horns, which is what carob pods look like. And Thayer says the fruit “has a sweet taste; it was (and is) used not only in fattening swine, but as an article of food by the lower classes.”

So the pods were not inedible, and they were not bitter. The text does not say he could not eat them. It says no one would give him a thing. The cruelty in that verse is the withholding, not the food — and that is a better and more accurate reading than the usual one.

Splanchnizomai, verse 20, “filled with compassion.” Twelve occurrences, all in the Synoptic Gospels. Nine have Jesus as the subject. The three that do not are the king in the parable of the unforgiving servant, the Samaritan of Week 48, and this verse. The verb the evangelists reserve almost entirely for Christ’s own visceral pity is given here to the father of the prodigal.

Katephilēsen, verse 20, “kissed him.” Thayer gives the compound as “to kiss much, kiss again and again, kiss tenderly,” and records that the simple verb and the compound were felt as distinct in classical Greek, distinguished by Xenophon and Plutarch.

The lemma occurs six times. But this exact form occurs three times, and the other two are Matthew 26:49 and Mark 14:45.

Which is Judas in Gethsemane.

The same word, the same tense, the same person and number: the traitor’s kiss and the father’s. Vincent’s note on this verse says only “Kissed — See on Matthew 26:49,” pointing the reader there himself. Cambridge glosses it “kissed him warmly or closely” and compares Genesis 33:4, Esau falling on Jacob’s neck — the other great reconciliation-embrace in Scripture, and the Septuagint uses this same verb there.

Now the first of two disputes, and it is the one honest readers actually have with this parable.

Is “he came to himself” repentance, or is it hunger?

Bengel is blunt: “The supply of foods that ministered to the scattering of his senses had now failed. The commencement of his return to himself is immediately linked to the height of his misery.”

And the Pulpit Commentary does something better than any other commentary consulted for this book: it states the objection at full strength, concedes it entirely, and then answers it anyway.

Against them stand the commentators who read the phrase as the lifting of a madness. Barnes: the expression “is commonly applied to one who has been deranged… it denotes that the folly of the young man was a kind of derangement — that he was insane.” Matthew Poole: “Every sinner is beside himself… Conversion is but the return of a soul to itself.” Cambridge: his previous state was “a brief delusion and madness.”

Vincent puts it best of these, and adds a striking classical parallel: it is “a wonderful stroke of art, to represent the beginning of repentance as the return of a sound consciousness” — and he then cites Plato, through Ackermann, on redemption as a coming to one’s self, with the image of the sea-god Glaucus so encrusted with shells that “he is liker to some sea-monster than to his natural form.”

And Plumptre, who wrote the Luke volume of Ellicott’s commentary, dissolves the dispute in one sentence: “The man’s guilt was, that he had been self-indulgent; but he had been living to a self which was not his true self.”

The Expositor’s Greek Testament declines to decide and says why: the phrase means “either, realising the situation; or, coming to his true self, his sane mind… Perhaps both ideas are intended.”

Then the second dispute, which the parable itself leaves open.

Is the elder brother condemned?

Gill reads him as flatly reprobate. Matthew Henry identifies him with the Pharisees — but with his own qualifier, which should always be kept: “though not of them alone.” Barnes goes further than anyone on the legal point: the property was already divided, so what remained was in reality the older son’s, and “He had, therefore, no right to complain.”

And the Expositor’s Greek Testament contradicts Barnes on the same verse, flatly:

Two named commentators, one page, directly opposed. Both are printed here.

The Cambridge Bible then says the honest thing about the ending, which is that there is not one:

And Cambridge notices two more things worth having. First, the father’s address at verse 31 is teknon — not “son” but ”Child,” the tenderest word available, which the MSB’s “Son” loses; Bengel independently notes that the father “addresses him by a loving title” and does not cast off the envious brother. Second, Cambridge quotes Ambrose to exactly the point, and the sense of the Latin — which is corrupt as printed and is therefore given here in English only — is that Israel stands outside, but standing outside he is not shut out.

Outside, but not excluded. For an Orthodox book that is the sentence to keep.

And there is one more thing in the text itself, which no commentator is needed for. At verse 30 the elder brother says “this son of yours.” At verse 32 the father answers: “this brother of yours.” The correction is in the Greek and it is the last thing the father says.

In the modern world

Two things everyone has heard about this parable are not in the sources, and clearing them away makes the parable harder rather than easier.

First: that asking for the inheritance early amounted to wishing the father dead. No commentator consulted for this entry says it. What they actually say is the opposite. Vincent notes that a man “might, during his lifetime, dispose of all his property by gift as he chose.” The Pulpit Commentary says such division “was not uncommon in the East.” The Expositor’s Greek Testament says the father “complies, not as bound, but he must do it in the parable that the story may go on.” And the Jewish legal scholar Bernard Jackson, quoted by Amy-Jill Levine, states in print that “Jewish sources give no support to” the idea that the prodigal in seeking the advance wishes his father dead.

So it was legal, it was not unheard of, and the father was under no obligation. The claim is a preaching commonplace of recent vintage and this entry does not print it.

Second: that a father in that culture would never run, and that running required lifting his robe and was therefore shaming.

The first half is real; the second is not. Nothing about robes, exposed legs or shame appears in any commentary consulted, and Levine, who examines the claim directly, treats it as an overstated observation advanced without ancient sources, tracing the whole “oriental patriarch” model not to ancient sources but to modern informants in the Middle East.

But the running is genuinely remarked on, and by the oldest witnesses available. Bengel, in the eighteenth century: “Parents, under ordinary circumstances, are not readily disposed to run to meet their children.” And the Expositor’s Greek Testament supplies the detail nobody quotes and which is better than the invented one:

The father is old. Running is not safe for him. He runs.

That does not need a dress code to be devastating, and Barnes completes it with the contrast: “The son came slowly — the father ran.”

Which brings the parable to where it actually bites, and it is not where most readings put it.

The son’s return is not admirable and the parable does not pretend it is. He is starving. He rehearses a speech. There is a calculation in verse 17 — my father’s hired servants have plenty of food — that is frankly about food. The Pulpit Commentary conceded all of this, and then asked the question that matters: is a mean repentance still a repentance?

And the parable’s answer is that the father does not wait to find out. He runs before the speech. He interrupts the speech. The one line the son had prepared to secure a lesser standing — make me a hired man — is the line he never gets to say.

That is the practical content, and it cuts against the way most people actually approach God, which is by trying to arrive with terms. I will go back, but as something less. I will go back once I have something to offer. I will go back when I can explain myself. The son had a position worked out and never got to state it, because the embrace came first and made it unnecessary.

Chrysostom’s use of this parable is exactly here, and it is the best patristic material on it. Writing to a specific man who had fallen and despaired, he insists on the one thing the parable establishes about the son:

The sonship was never lost. It was dishonoured, and the dishonour was total, and it was not the same thing as losing it.

And his conclusion is a single imperative:

Elsewhere he presses on the difference between saying it and doing it, and the distinction is the whole practical weight of the passage:

A Greek Father of the fourth century, and two German Protestants of the eighteenth and nineteenth, converge on the same observation. Bengel on verse 20: “No sooner said than done.” Meyer: “the resolution is no sooner taken than its execution begins.”

Then the elder brother, who is the harder half and the half that concerns most readers of a devotional book.

The identification with the Pharisees is not an invention: Luke supplies the occasion at verses 1 to 3, where the grumble is that He welcomes sinners and eats with them, and the parable ends with one brother eating with a returned sinner and the other refusing to go in. The accusation of verse 2 is the plot of verses 22 to 32.

But the tradition’s own correctives should be kept with the identification, because they come from inside it. Matthew Henry’s “though not of them alone.” Cambridge’s insistence that the earlier part of the parable is “of more universal application,” and that “envy and lovelessness are too marked characteristics of modern religionism to render the warning needless.”

Which is to say: the elder brother is not a historical group you can safely disapprove of. He is the position occupied by whoever has been doing it right.

And his complaint is not stupid. It is arithmetically correct — he has served for years and never had a goat — and the Expositor’s thinks the father half concedes it. What is wrong with it is not the accounting. It is the two words at the end: this son of yours. He has stopped having a brother, and he did it while standing in the right.

The diagnostic, then, is not which brother am I — everybody knows the answer they are supposed to give. It is narrower. Is there anyone whose restoration would annoy you? Someone whose return, whose success, whose forgiveness, whose late arrival at the thing you have been doing faithfully for years, you would find hard to celebrate?

If the answer is no, ask again more slowly. If the answer is yes, that is the parable, and the ending is left open on purpose.

One guard. Nothing here is an argument that the elder brother’s years were wasted, and the father does not say so. He says you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours — and Plumptre notes that the words are literally true and warns against reading them as irony. The faithful years were real and they were not the problem. The problem was one evening, at one door, about one person.

The tidbit

The verb for the father’s kiss in verse 20 is a compound, and Thayer glosses it “to kiss much, kiss again and again, kiss tenderly.” The lemma occurs six times in the New Testament.

But the exact form used here occurs three times, and the other two are Matthew 26:49 and Mark 14:45 — Judas in the garden.

The same word, the same tense, the same person and number. The most treacherous kiss in Scripture and the most generous one are, grammatically, the identical act.

This week

The son never gets to finish his prepared speech, and the sonship he offered to surrender was never his to surrender. Everyone approaching God has terms of some kind — a reduced standing they are willing to accept in advance. So the week identifies the terms and then declines to offer them, which is the one thing the father made impossible.

Note first where the Church puts this parable. It is read on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, the second of the four pre-Lenten Sundays — after the Publican and the Pharisee, and before the Last Judgment. The Church has placed the prodigal between the man who thanked God he was not like other men and the day the sheep are divided from the goats, which is exactly the sequence the parable itself makes.

On the first day, find the sentence you have prepared. Everyone approaching God has terms — the explanation, the qualification, the reduced standing they are willing to accept. Write yours down. It will be some version of make me a hired servant: let me back, but not all the way.

Then, for the week, practise not saying it. Pray without the preamble. Whatever else you say, do not offer the terms.

Once, do the second half, which is harder. Name the person whose restoration would annoy you. Not a category — a person. Then do one small thing that would please them, and do not tell them, and notice how much of you objects.

And keep two sentences where you can find them, one for each brother.

For the younger: he did not say, “Let me go back,” and then stay there; but said, Let me go back, and went back, and returned the whole of that way.

For the elder: outside, but not shut out.

Fifty-one more like it

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