Is the famous ‘Prodigal Son’ parable more about the ‘Prodigal Father’?

Fr David Howell• March 30, 2025

Why did the prodigal son, in Sunday’s Gospel, decide to come home? He had become restless in his father’s house but now he had found a new and worse monotony, feeding the pigs abroad. He was hungry physically, but he also had a hunger for something deeper, as revealed by the little phrase “entering into himself” which introduces his monologue about going home (Luke 15:17 – our lectionary is more metaphorical: “he came to himself”).

By implication, he had been living “outside himself” beforehand, and only by “entering into” himself did he realise that he needed to “enter into” his home again: he realised he was a son, even though his sins had turned him into a slave, given nothing by his master.

Yet his awareness of being a son was still confused: he wanted to say “treat me as one of your hired servants” to his father, and rehearsed these words as he walked home. But his father’s loving embrace took these words from his lips: he rehearsed them but couldn’t actually say them in that moment, since he knew unmistakably that his father was treating him with love as a son not a slave.

God the Father embraces us like this, through the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross, described in our second reading: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). We never need to fear our sins, since Jesus always forgives, as our psalm (34:5) states: “from all my terrors he set me free.”

Christ wants to free us from shame and feed us with himself, foreshadowed by the fattened calf in the Gospel, and also by our first reading: God takes away the “reproach” of his people’s slavery and gives them new food to eat in their new home (Joshua 9:5f).

The elder son was in a strangely parallel situation. The younger brother was a slave, given nothing, who remembered he was a son; the elder brother was a son who saw himself as a slave, since he was given nothing. He never calls their father ”Father” and describes a contractual relationship, not a filial one with him: “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15:29).

An added “insult” was that since the younger son had already taken half the father’s goods, the fattened calf, ring, robe and sandals would have been inherited by the elder son if they had not been lavished on his brother. Yet the father loves this disgruntled elder son too, so much so that he goes out to find him, as he had run out to his brother, and he restates the inheritance agreement (“all that is mine is yours”). As Fr Giulio Maspero states, it would be better to call this parable that of the “prodigal father”, so generous is he in love.

Let’s ask for the grace to “enter into” ourselves through prayer this Lent, and rediscover who we really are: children of God, not his slaves. Let’s feel the embrace of Jesus crucified overpowering our sin and shame so we are never tempted to act or identify as slaves of God. And Sunday being Mother’s Day we can think that the mother of these two sons, although absent from the parable, was undoubtedly praying for them, as our mother, Mary, prays for us.

Photo: ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’ by unknown artist, at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City.

Fr David Howell is an assistant priest at St Bede’s in Clapham Park. His previous studies include canon law in Rome, Classics at Oxford and a licence in Patristics at the Augustinianum Institute in Rome. He is a regular contributor to the Catholic Herald; his other articles can be accessed here.