Parable of the Prodigal Son

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The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a story told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, the longest of three parables there about things lost and found. A younger son asks his father for his share of the inheritance, leaves for a distant country, and spends everything; reduced to feeding pigs and to hunger, he resolves to go home and beg to be taken on as a hired hand. The father, seeing him still far off, runs to meet him and orders a feast. An elder son, who never left, refuses to join the celebration and resents it.

In Luke the parable closes a sequence answering critics who object that Jesus welcomes outcasts: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son set the same point three times, that what was gone and is recovered is cause for joy rather than reproach. The father’s running, in a culture where an elder did not run, and the killing of the fatted calf make the welcome deliberately excessive; the elder son’s complaint — that his own steady obedience went unrewarded — is left standing at the story’s end, the father’s reply to him the last word but not plainly a settled one. The story survives only in Luke and is one of the most widely recognized passages in the Gospels.

Around this Christian text a second reading grew. Several later traditions took the journey to a far country, the squandering, the forgetting, and the return as a figure for something larger than one family: the soul that leaves its origin, loses itself in a foreign world, and is finally called home. The closest near-contemporary parallel is the so-called Hymn of the Pearl, embedded in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, in which a prince sent from the East to fetch a pearl forgets his royal birth amid the food and sleep of Egypt, is roused by a letter from home, recovers the pearl, and returns to his father’s house. Many readers have heard the two stories rhyme, and the Hymn is often described as a Gnostic allegory of the soul’s exile and waking.

The resemblance is real and has been traced for a long time; it is not identity. Luke’s parable turns on a father’s mercy and a son’s repentance within one household, with no cosmic descent and no secret knowledge to recover. The Hymn turns on forgetting and remembering one’s true nature — the characteristic Gnostic shape. Whether the later allegorical reading recovers something already latent in the parable or reads a different scheme into it remains a matter of interpretation rather than of settled fact. What the two share is plain enough on their own: a leaving, a losing, and a way back.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Gnosis · Gospel Of Judas