Scripture Notes: The Prodigal, Part 3 (Luke 15)

Now that he has squandered all he had, the younger son in Jesus’ parable finds himself in a very sticky situation. Famine has spread across the far country in which he has chosen to live, and he finds himself lacking the basic necessities of life. He gets a “job” with one of the locals, who sends him out into the field to tend the swine. 

This is about as low as a Jewish person can go. Swine are unclean animals, never kept by the Jews, but here is this young man in closest contact with them. He has to feed them and care for them and keep them together. He lives among them. He undoubtedly smells like them. What is more, even though this is supposed to be a “job,” the young man apparently is not getting paid nor fed. He has nothing to eat and longs to fill himself up with the pigs’ food. No one gives him anything. No one pays any attention to him. No one sees him. No one cares. He has left his father to be his own person with his own life, but now he is nothing at all.

Notice what the young man does do and does not do in this situation. First, he does not eat the pigs’ food. Even in his dire need, he refuses to take something that does not belong to him. Something in his father’s training must have stuck because, even in his current depravity, the son knows right from wrong. What he does do is come to himself. He wakes up. He experiences an insight into reality. 

The young man looks back and catches a glimpse of just how good he had it at home. Even the hired servants had more than enough to eat! And here he is dying of hunger. Yes, at this point, the young man is motivated by his horrible situation. He has reached rock bottom, and he probably does not care all that much about the intricacies of family relations or the connection between mercy and justice. He is starving, and his father’s house is filled with food. He wants to go back. He will arise and go home to his father. No, his motives are not pure and perfect, but they are enough to get him started along the road.

The son does, however, recognize and admit his own sinfulness. Even, perhaps especially, in his hunger, he see what he has done. He makes a plan to confess to his father, saying that he has sinned “against heaven and before you” (Luke 15:18). He has offended God, acting against God’s moral order, and he has done so in the presence of his father, the person to whom he owes the deepest respect and love. His sin is serious and deep, and he knows it. So he humbles himself. Here he is among the swine, the lowest of the low, so he will tell his father that he no longer deserves to be called (or to be) his son. He will gratefully settle for being treated as a hired servant. The one so intent on striking out on his own and being his own man will now return, content to be a dependent, a servant, no longer a member of the family he spurned.