Everyone knows this parable by the wrong character’s name. The heading “prodigal son” is a later shorthand rather than a phrase from the text, and it quietly decides the question of who the story is about before anyone reads it.
Luke 15:11-32 concerns the father and two sons, and the reading below follows the argument made by New Testament scholar Luuk van de Weghe in conversation with Wes Huff. The video that makes the case is titled “The Real Prodigal was the FATHER,” and its claim is literary before it is theological. In modern English, prodigal means extravagantly wasteful, and the character who spends most freely in this story is the one who never leaves home.
The parable runs nineteen verses, short enough to quote in full. Below, the text appears in passages from the English Standard Version, each followed by a close reading.
Where the parable sits in Luke
The chapter opens with a complaint. Luke 15:1-2 reports that “the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him,” and that the Pharisees and the scribes “grumbled, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’”
Table fellowship in that world was not a neutral act. Ritual-purity concerns governed who could eat with whom, and a teacher who welcomed the obviously compromised at his own table was making a statement his critics could read without help.
Jesus answers the grumbling with three stories told in sequence: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a man with two sons. Each story moves the same way, from loss to recovery to celebration, and each ends with joy over what was found. The first two are brief. The third takes nineteen verses, gives every character dialogue, and leaves one character standing outside.
The request
And he said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them.”
The younger son’s request is colder than it sounds. He asks for his inheritance while his father is still alive, which treats the father as though he were already dead. The Greek calls his share epiballon meros, the portion that falls to him, and says the father divides his bios, his living, between the two sons.
The elder would normally receive a double share, so this is not a fifty-fifty split of a healthy estate. It is a family dismantled at the younger son’s request.
The far country
”Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.”
He converts the estate, travels to a distant country, and spends it, and the narrative files the spending under a specific Greek word, asotos: dissolute or squandered living. When the money runs out, so does the society around him, and he ends up feeding pigs, an occupation that touches a Jewish audience at the level of cleanliness as well as hunger. He attaches himself to a local citizen, a detail that suggests a man from the covenant surviving on the charity of a foreign patron. Then the story does something small and terrible: “no one gave him anything.”
The rehearsal
”But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise 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 as one of your hired servants.”’”
Hunger produces a plan rather than a confession, and the plan has a script. Luke’s parables often let a character’s private speech expose what he is really doing, and van de Weghe reads this rehearsal in that light. The speech may be sincere; it is certainly strategic, and it positions the son to negotiate his way back into the household on the best terms starvation allows.
The return
”And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’”
The father sees him while he is still a long way off. The verb translated “felt compassion” is esplanchnistho, built on splagchnon, the word for the inner organs, the guts. Compassion in this text is not a sentiment; it is a physical response that immediately produces motion.
The father runs. In a culture ordered by honor and shame, an elderly landowner gathering his robes and running through the village humiliates himself in front of the same neighbors who know exactly what the boy did. He runs, the text implies, so that the son’s return does not become a public spectacle of shame, and he reaches the boy before the village can.
And the speech dies in the boy’s mouth. The rehearsed third clause, “Treat me as one of your hired servants,” never gets spoken; verse 21 records the confession and stops. The father will not allow the negotiation to begin.
The welcome
”But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.”
Then he spends. The best robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fattened calf arrive before any probationary period as a servant. Each gift is a public credential: the robe announces restored standing, the ring authorizes, the shoes mark a free man rather than a servant, and the calf turns the courtyard into a feast.
None of it is earned. The father restores a son before the son has finished confessing, and he does it with the same extravagance the boy showed in spending the estate, pointed in the opposite direction.
The elder son
”Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in.”
He comes in from the field to music he did not ask for, and he refuses the doorway. His argument with his father completes the story’s architecture:
“His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’”
He has been near the father the whole time, and he has been keeping accounts the whole time. He will not call the returnee his brother; he calls him “this son of yours,” and accuses him of devouring the property with prostitutes, an accusation that goes beyond anything the narrative has reported.
The plea outside
”And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’”
The answer is tender and unanswered at once, and the parable ends there: the older son never enters the feast on the page, and Luke gives no closing verse that resolves him.
The open ending is aimed at the audience. The chapter began with Pharisees and scribes grumbling about who Jesus eats with, and the story leaves them, in effect, standing where the elder son stands: inside the household, near the father, outside the celebration. Whether they go in is the question Jesus hands back to them, and the text declines to answer it for them.
Why the father is the prodigal
Luke does describe wasteful spending, but the Greek word asotos sits in verse 13 and belongs to the younger son. The reversal van de Weghe argues for rests on what the father does with his resources.
He divides his living at the younger son’s request and spends his dignity in a public run. He spends his own robe, ring, and table on a restored sinner, and then comes out of his feast to entreat the son who is insulting him by staying in the field. He is extravagant with property, affection, and invitation in every direction. The prodigal father is the character who matches the dictionary definition of the title everyone else in the story has been assigned by habit.
Both sons fail in different directions. The younger son treats the father’s property as his own and takes it far from home; the older son treats the father’s love as wages he has earned and resents anyone who receives it for free. The father answers neither failure with the punishment either son has coming. He seeks both: he runs to the one who left, and he walks out to the one who stayed.
The reading and its counterpoint
Van de Weghe places this parable inside Luke’s larger portrait of Jesus, where echoes of Isaiah 6 run through the Gospel from Peter’s calling onward. There Jesus forgives sin, commands creation, and eats with the unclean as the Holy One of God. On that reading the shepherd, the woman, and the father picture what happens when God’s holiness approaches what is lost: it cleanses rather than contaminating.
There is an honest counterpoint, and the video takes it seriously. Jesus introduces the first two stories with “Suppose one of you,” which sounds like a moral example aimed at the hearers rather than a self-portrait.
The response is that the framing narrative carries the theological weight. The three parables together answer a specific grumble about Jesus’ own table fellowship, and the third story ends with a father who behaves in ways no listener is being asked to imitate. The text permits both readings; it does not mechanically allegorize every detail.
The parable’s lasting claim is structural rather than sentimental. It has two sons, not one, and nearness to the father guarantees nothing about sharing his joy.
The father’s compassion is public, physical, and expensive, and it goes looking for sons who are lost in opposite ways. The celebration is ready. The story ends with the door open and the reader standing where the elder son stands.
Sources
- Wes Huff with Luuk van de Weghe, “The Real Prodigal was the FATHER | looking at Jesus’s parable,” YouTube, September 24, 2026. Video
- Luke 15:1-32, English Standard Version, quoted from Bible Gateway; Greek text consulted via the SBL Greek New Testament
- Luuk van de Weghe, For People Like Us: God’s Search for the Lost of Luke 15 (Wipf & Stock, 2023). Author’s page
- Kenneth E. Bailey, The Cross and the Prodigal: Luke 15 through the Eyes of Middle Eastern Peasants (InterVarsity, 2005)
- Klyne Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2018)
- Daniel K. Eng, “The Widening Circle: Honour, Shame, and Collectivism in the Parable of the Prodigal Son,” First Century 1.4 (2019). DOI