Luke 15:11

And he said, A certain man had two sons:

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(11) And he said, A certain man had two sons.—We enter here on one of the parables which are not only peculiar to St. Luke’s Gospel, but have something of a different character, as giving more than those we find in the other Gospels, the incidents of a story of common daily life. As with the Good Samaritan, it seems open to us to believe that it rested on a substratum of facts that had actually occurred. It is obvious that in the then social state of Palestine, brought into contact as the Jews were with the great cities of the Roman empire, such a history as that here recorded must have been but too painfully familiar.

In the immediate application of the parable, the father is the great Father of the souls of men; the elder son represents the respectably religious Pharisees; the younger stands for the class of publicans and sinners. In its subsequent developments it applies to the two types of character which answers to these in any age or country. On a wider scale, but with a less close parallelism, the elder son may stand for Israel according to the flesh; the younger for the whole heathen world. Looking back to the genealogies of Genesis 5:10; Genesis 9:18, and even (according to the true construction of the words) Genesis 10:21, they correspond respectively to the descendants of Shem and those of Japheth. It is obvious from the whole structure of the parable that the elder son cannot represent the unfallen part of God’s creation; and, so far as it goes, this tells against that interpretation of the ninety and nine sheep, or the nine pieces of silver.

MacLaren's Expositions

Luke

‘THAT WHICH WAS LOST’

THE PRODIGAL AND HIS FATHER

Luke 15:11 - Luke 15:24.

The purpose of the three parables in this chapter has to be kept in mind. Christ is vindicating His action in receiving sinners, which had evoked the murmurings of the Pharisees. The first two parables, those of the lost sheep and the lost drachma, appeal to the common feeling which attaches more importance to lost property just because it is lost than to that which is possessed safely. This parable rises to a higher level. It appeals to the universal emotion of fatherhood, which yearns over a wandering child just because he has wandered.

We note a further advance, in the proportion of one stray sheep to the ninety-nine, and of one lost coin to the nine, contrasted with the sad equality of obedience and disobedience in the two sons. One per cent., ten per cent., are bearable losses, but fifty per cent. is tragic.

I. The first part {Luke 15:11 - Luke 15:16} tells of the son’s wish to be his own master, and what came of it.

The desire to be independent is good, but when it can only be attained by being dependent on him whose authority is irksome, it takes another colour. This foolish boy wished to be able to use his father’s property as his own, but he had to get the father’s consent first. It is a poor beginning of independence when it has to be set up in business by a gift.

That is the essential absurdity in our attempts to do without God and to shake off His control. We can only get power to seem to do it by misusing His gifts. When we say, ‘Who is Lord over us?’ the tongues which say it were given us by Him. The next step soon followed. ‘Not many days after,’ of course, for the sense of ownership could not be kept up while near the father. A man who wishes to enjoy worldly good without reference to God is obliged, in self-defence, to hustle God out of his thoughts as soon and as completely as possible.

The ‘far country’ is easily reached; and it is far, though a step can land us in it. A narrow bay may compel a long journey round its head before those on its opposite shores can meet. Sin takes us far away from God, and the root of all sin is that desire of living to one’s self which began the prodigal’s evil course.

The third step in his downward career, wasting his substance in riotous living, comes naturally after the two others; for all self-centred life is in deepest truth waste, and the special forms of gross dissipation to which youth is tempted are only too apt to follow the first sense of being their own masters, and removed from the safeguards of their earthly father’s home. Many a lad in our great cities goes through the very stages of the parable, and, when a mother’s eye is no longer on him, plunges into filthy debauchery. But living which does not outrage the proprieties may be riotous all the same; for all conduct which ignores God and asserts self as supreme is flagrantly against the very nature of man, and is reckless waste.

Such a ‘merry’ life is sure to be ‘short.’ There is always famine in the land of forgetfulness of God, and when the first gloss is off its enjoyments, and one’s substance is spent, its pinch is felt. The unsatisfied hunger of heart, which dogs godless living, too often leads but to deeper degradation and closer entanglement with low satisfactions. Men madly plunge deeper into the mud in hope of finding the pearl which has thus far eluded their search.

A miserable thing this young fool had made of his venture, having spent his capital, and now being forced to become a slave, and being set to nothing better than to feed swine. The godless world is a hard master, and has very odious tasks for its bondsmen. The unclean animals are fit companions for one who made himself lower than they, since filth is natural to them and shameful for him. They are better off than he is, for husks do nourish them, and they get their fill, but he who has sunk to longing for swine’s food cannot get even that. The dark picture is only too often verified in the experience of godless men.

II. The wastrel’s returning sanity is described in Luke 15:17 - Luke 15:20.

‘He came to himself.’ Then he had been beside himself before. It is insanity to try to shake off God, to aim at independence, to wander from Him, to fling away our ‘substance,’ that is, our true selves, and to starve among the swine-troughs. He remembers the bountiful housekeeping at home, as starving men dream of feasts, and he thinks of himself with a kind of pity and amazement.

There is no sign that his conscience smote him, or that his heart woke in love to his father. His stomach, and it only, urged him to go home. He did, indeed, feel that he had been wrong, and had forfeited the right to be called a son, but he did not care much for losing that name, or even for losing the love to which it had the right, if only he could get as much to eat as one of the hired servants, whose relation to the master was less close, and, in patriarchal times, less happy, than that of slaves born in the house.

One good thing about the lad was that he did not let the grass grow under his feet, but, as soon as he had made the resolution, began to carry it into effect. The bane of many a resolve to go back to God is that it is ‘sicklied o’er’ by procrastination. The ragged prodigal has not much to leave which need hold him, but many such a one says, ‘I will arise and go to my father to-morrow,’ and lets all the to-morrows become yesterdays, and is sitting among the swine still.

Low as the prodigal’s motive for return was, the fact of his return was enough. So is it in regard to our attitude to the gospel. Men may be drawn to give heed to its invitations from the instinct of self-preservation, or from their sense of hungry need, and the belief that in it they will find the food they crave for, while there may be little consciousness of longing for more from the Father than the satisfaction of felt wants. The longing for a place in the Father’s heart will spring up later, but the beginning of most men’s taking refuge in God as revealed in Christ is the gnawing of a hungry heart. The call to all is, ‘Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat.’

III. The climax of the parable, for which all the rest is but as scaffolding, is the father’s welcome {vs. 20b-24}.

Filial love may die in the son’s heart, but paternal yearning lives in the father’s. The wanderer’s heart would be likely to sink as he came nearer the father’s tent. It had seemed easy to go back when he acted the scene in imagination, but every step homewards made the reality more difficult.

No doubt he hesitated when the old home came in sight, and perhaps his resolution would have oozed out at his finger ends if he had had to march up alone in his rags, and run the gauntlet of servants before he came to speech with his father. So his father’s seeing him far off and running to meet him is exquisitely in keeping, as well as movingly setting forth how God’s love goes out to meet His returning prodigals. That divine insight which discerns the first motions towards return, that divine pity which we dare venture to associate with His infinite love, that eager meeting the shamefaced and slow-stepping boy half-way, and that kiss of welcome before one word of penitence or request had been spoken, are all revelations of the heart of God, and its outgoings to every wanderer who sets his face to return.

Beautifully does the father’s welcome make the son’s completion of his rehearsed speech impossible. It does not prevent his expression of penitence, for the more God’s love is poured over us, the more we feel our sin. But he had already been treated as a son, and could not ask to be taken as a servant. Beautifully, too, the father gives no verbal answer to the lad’s confession, for his kiss had answered it already; but he issues instructions to the servants which show that the pair have now reached the home and entered it together.

The gifts to the prodigal are probably significant. They not only express in general the cordiality of the welcome, but seem to be capable of specific interpretations, as representing various aspects of the blessed results of return to God. The robe is the familiar emblem of character. The prodigal son is treated like the high-priest in Zechariah’s vision; his rags are stripped off, and he is clothed anew in a dress of honour. ‘Them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also sanctified.’ The ring is a token of wealth, position, and honour. It is also a sign of delegated authority, and is an ornament to the hand. So God gives His prodigals, when they come back, an elevation which unforgiven beings do not reach, and sets them to represent Him, and arrays them in strange beauty. No doubt the lad had come back footsore and bleeding, and the shoes may simply serve to keep up the naturalness of the story. But probably they suggest equipment for the journey of life. That is one of the gifts that accompany forgiveness. Our feet are shod with the preparedness of the gospel of peace.

Last of all comes the feast. Heaven keeps holiday when some poor waif comes shrinking back to the Father. The prodigal had been content to sink his sonship for the sake of a loaf, but he could not get bread on such terms. He had to be forgiven and bathed in the outflow of his father’s love before he could be fed; and, being thus received, he could not but be fed. The feast is for those who come back penitently, and are received forgivingly, and endowed richly by the Father in heaven.

Benson Commentary

Luke 15:11-12. And he said, &c. — Christ delivered next the parable of the lost or prodigal son: “which of all his parables,” says Dr. Macknight, “is the most delightful, not only as it enforces a doctrine incomparably joyous, but because it abounds with the tender passions, is finely painted with the most beautiful images, and is to the mind what a charming and diversified landscape is to the eye.” In this parable our Lord pursues the same design as in the two preceding ones: namely, that of vindicating himself in conversing with publicans and sinners, of reproving the envy of the Pharisees, and of encouraging every sincere penitent, by moving representations of the divine mercy. A certain man had two sons — Now grown up to manhood; and the younger of them — Fondly conceited of his own capacity to manage his affairs, and impatient of the restraint he lay under in his father’s house; said to his father, Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me — As I am now come to years of discretion, I desire thou wouldst give into mine own hands that portion of thine estate, which, according to an equitable distribution, falls to my share. See here, reader, the root of all sin, a desire of disposing of ourselves independently of God! And he divided unto them his living — Gave them his chief stock of money, reserving the house and estate in his own hands. “It is plain no significant sense can be put on this circumstance of the parable, as referring to the dispensations of God to his creatures. It is one of those many ornamental circumstances which it would be weakness over-rigorously to accommodate to the general design.” — Doddridge.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

15:11-16 The parable of the prodigal son shows the nature of repentance, and the Lord's readiness to welcome and bless all who return to him. It fully sets forth the riches of gospel grace; and it has been, and will be, while the world stands, of unspeakable use to poor sinners, to direct and to encourage them in repenting and returning to God. It is bad, and the beginning of worse, when men look upon God's gifts as debts due to them. The great folly of sinners, and that which ruins them, is, being content in their life-time to receive their good things. Our first parents ruined themselves and all their race, by a foolish ambition to be independent, and this is at the bottom of sinners' persisting in their sin. We may all discern some features of our own characters in that of the prodigal son. A sinful state is of departure and distance from God. A sinful state is a spending state: wilful sinners misemploy their thoughts and the powers of their souls, mispend their time and all their opportunities. A sinful state is a wanting state. Sinners want necessaries for their souls; they have neither food nor raiment for them, nor any provision for hereafter. A sinful state is a vile, slavish state. The business of the devil's servants is to make provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof, and that is no better than feeding swine. A sinful state is a state constant discontent. The wealth of the world and the pleasures of the senses will not even satisfy our bodies; but what are they to precious souls! A sinful state is a state which cannot look for relief from any creature. In vain do we cry to the world and to the flesh; they have that which will poison a soul, but have nothing to give which will feed and nourish it. A sinful state is a state of death. A sinner is dead in trespasses and sins, destitute of spiritual life. A sinful state is a lost state. Souls that are separated from God, if his mercy prevent not, will soon be lost for ever. The prodigal's wretched state, only faintly shadows forth the awful ruin of man by sin. Yet how few are sensible of their own state and character!

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

And he said - Jesus, to illustrate still farther the sentiment which he had uttered, and to show that it was proper to rejoice over repenting sinners, proceeds to show it by a most beautiful and instructive parable. We shall see its beauty and propriety by remembering that the "design" of it was simply to "justify his conduct in receiving sinners," and to show that to rejoice over their return was proper. This he shows by the feelings of a "father" rejoicing over the "return" of an ungrateful and dissipated son.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

Lu 15:11-32. III. The Prodigal Son.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Ver. 11-16. The scope of this excellent parable is apparently to magnify the grace of God, who is willing to receive and to treat kindly the greatest transgressors, seriously repenting, and turning unto God; but in it we are also,

1. Instructed in the original state of man, like that of a child in his father’s house, happy and wanting nothing.

2. The most miserable estate of fallen men, such especially as run to great excess of riot.

3. The true way of a sinner’s returning to God.

4. The readiness of our gracious Father to receive, and his wonderful kindness in the receiving and embracing, repenting and returning sinners.

5. The envy that is sometimes found in good souls to others receiving (as they think) more favour from God than they do.

6. The gentleness and meekness of God in dealing with us, notwithstanding our infirmities and misbecoming passions.

God is again here represented under the notion of a man who had two sons: some that are his children by regeneration as well as creation; he having given them that believe a right to be called the sons of God, John 1:12. Others that are his sons by creation only. The latter are here represented under the notion of a younger son. This younger son is represented as dissatisfied with living in his father’s house, desiring his portion, &c. All men and women by nature were equally the sons of God, being all in Adam, who was so. All men swerved from him; in Adam all sinned, all died. But some again by grace are returned to their Father’s house. Others challenge a relation to God, as his creatures, but are not of their Father’s house, but desire only a portion of the good things of this life. Some desire honours, some riches, all of them life and health, &c. God, like a liberal father, gives some of these good things to one, others to another; to some more than one kind of them: whatever they have of this nature is from him who maketh his sun to shine and his rain to fall upon the just and unjust. Wicked men, when they are thus furnished by God, quickly take their

journey into a far country, are more alienated and estranged from God by lewd and wicked practices than they were by nature; waste their substance, the health of their bodies, their time of life, their estates, their great and honourable capacities, by giving up themselves to lewd and riotous kinds of life, to the high dishonour of Almighty God. It pleaseth God by his providence sometimes to bring these men into straits; when they are so brought, they will take any base, sordid course to relieve themselves, rather than they will think of returning to their heavenly Father; of themselves they will rather choose to serve swine. But if they be such as belong to God’s election of grace, the providence of God will not leave them. Though there be little food for a soul in the husks of sensible satisfactions, yet they shall not have a bellyful of them. God will bring them off from satisfaction in any thing, and make every condition uneasy to them.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And he said,.... The Syriac and Persic versions read "and Jesus said again"; he added another parable to the two former, at the same time, of the same import, with the same view, and on the same occasion; setting forth the different characters of the Scribes and Pharisees, and of the publicans and sinners; and what little reason the one had to murmur, at his conversation with the other:

a certain man had two sons; by "the certain man" is meant, God the Father: God indeed is not a man, nor is he to be represented by any human image; but inasmuch as man is the image of God, God is sometimes compared to man, and is called a man of war, an husbandman, &c. which no ways contradict his being a spirit; and true it is, that the second person only assumed human nature; and therefore, whenever a divine person is spoken of as man, Christ is commonly intended: but though the Father never appeared in an human form, yet he seems here to be designed; because the character of a Father, and having sons, more properly belong to him; and the reception of sinners, and the forgiveness of them for Christ's sake, agree with him: and besides, Christ is distinguished from the Father in this parable; and he and his blessings of grace, are signified by other things: by the "two sons" are meant, not angels and men, as that angels are the elder, and men the younger son; for though angels are called the sons of God, and may be said to be elder than men, with respect to creation; and good angels may be said to have been ever with God, and always serving him, and never sinned against him; yet they are never called the brethren of men, nor men their brethren; and besides, are never angry at the return and reception of repenting sinners; for this would be to represent them just the reverse of what they are said to be, in the preceding verse: nor are the Jews and Gentiles here intended, which is the more received and general sense of the parable: those who go this way, suppose the Jews to be the elder brother; and indeed they were so, with respect to external privileges; and were with God, being his household and family; all he had were theirs, that was external; and the character of the elder brother throughout the parable, agrees with the far greater part of that nation; and it is certain, that they did resent the calling of the Gentiles: and these suppose the Gentiles to be the younger brother, who indeed were brought into a church state, later than the Jews; and might be said to be afar off in a far country, and to have spent their substance in idolatry and wickedness; to have been in the utmost distress, and in the most deplorable condition: but to this sense it may be objected, that the Gospel was not as yet preached to the Gentiles; nor were they brought to repentance; nor were they openly received into the divine favour; nor as yet had the Jews murmured at, and resented the kindness of God to them: rather standing and fallen professors may be designed: since the former are very apt to carry it toward the latter, in like manner as the elder brother is represented in this parable, as carrying himself towards the younger: but the true sense, and which the context and occasion of the parable at once determine, is, that by the elder son are meant, the Scribes and Pharisees, and self-righteous persons, among the Jews; and by the younger, the publicans and sinners among the same people; as it is easy to observe, the same are meant by the two sons in the parable in Matthew 21:28. Now these are called the sons of God because the Jews in general were so by national adoption; and the self-righteous Pharisees looked upon themselves as the children of God, and favourites of heaven, in a special sense; and God's elect among them, even those that lay among publicans and sinners, were truly so; and that before conversion; for they were not only predestinated to the adoption of children, but were really taken into the relation of children, in the covenant of grace; and as such were given to Christ, and considered by him, when he assumed their nature, and died for them; and are so antecedent to the spirit of adoption, who is sent to witness their sonship to them; and which is consistent with their being children of wrath, as the descendants of Adam, and their being the children of God openly and manifestatively, by faith in Christ Jesus.

Geneva Study Bible

{2} And he said, A certain man had two sons:

(2) Men by their voluntary falling from God, having robbed themselves of the benefits which they received from him, cast themselves headlong into infinite calamities: but God of his singular goodness, offering himself freely to those whom he called to repentance, through the greatness of their misery with which they were humbled, not only gently receives them, but also enriches them with far greater gifts and blesses them with the greatest bliss.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Meyer's NT Commentary

Luke 15:11. Jesus Himself has very definitely declared the doctrinal contents of the two foregoing parables, Luke 15:7; Luke 15:10. In order now by more special detail and by all the liveliness of contrast to make palpable this doctrine, and especially the growth and course of sin, the growth and course of repentance, the joy of God thereupon, and the demeanour of the legally righteous towards this joy, He adds a third parable, as distinguished and complete in its psychological delicacy and its picturesque truth in depicting human circumstances and affections as in its clear and profound insight into the divine disposition,—the pearl among the doctrinal utterances of Jesus, which are preserved to us by Luke alone, and among all parables the most beautiful and most comprehensive. The parable has nothing to do with Matthew 21:28-30 (in opposition to Holtzmann, p. 155), nor is it a new form of the parable of the lost sheep (Eichthal). By the youngest son Jesus denotes generally the sinner who repents, by the eldest son generally the legally righteous; not specially by the former the publicans, and by the latter the Pharisees (so also Wittichen, Idee Gottes als d. Vaters, p. 35 ff.); the application, however, of the characteristic features in question to both of these could not be mistaken any more than the application of the doctrine declared in Luke 15:7. The interpretation of the two sons—of the eldest by the Jews, of the youngest by the Gentiles, in accordance with the relation of both to Christianity (already Augustine, Quaest. Ev. ii. 33; Bede, and others; recently carried out in great detail, especially by Zeller in the Theol. Jahrb. 1843, p. 81 f.; Baur, ibid. 1845, p. 522 f.; Baur, d. kanon. Evang. p. 510 f.; comp. Schwegler, Nachapost. Zeitalter, II. p. 47 f.; Ritschl, Evang. Marcions, p. 282 f.; Volkmar, Evang. Marcions, p. 66 f., 248; Hilgenfeld, Evang. p. 198; Schenkel, p. 195)—confuses the applicability of the parable with its occasion and purpose, and was in the highest degree welcome to the view which attributed to the gospel a tendential reference to later concrete conditions; but, in accordance with the occasion of the whole discourse as stated at Luke 15:1-2, and in accordance with the doctrine of the same declared at Luke 15:7; Luke 15:10, it is wholly mistaken, comp. Köstlin, p. 225 ff. It did not at all enter into the purpose of the compilation to refer to such a secondary interpretation (in opposition to Weizsäcker). Moreover, the more this parable is a triumph of the purely ethical aspect of the teaching of Jesus, and the more important it is on the side of practical Christianity, so much the more have we to guard against attaching undue significance to special points which constitute the drapery of the parable, and to details which are merely artistic (Fathers, and especially Catholic expositors down to the time of Schegg and Bisping, partially also Olshausen). Thus, for example, Augustine understood by the squandered means, the image of God; by the λιμός, the indigentia verbi veritatis; by the citizen of the far country, the devil; by the swine, the demons; by the husks, the doctrinas saeculares, etc. So, in substance, Ambrose, Jerome, and others. Diverging in certain particulars, Theophylact and Euthymius Zigabenus.

Expositor's Greek Testament

Luke 15:11-32. The third parable, rather an example than a parable illustrating by an imaginary case the joy of recovering a lost human being. In this case care is taken to describe what loss means in the sphere of human life. The interest in the lost now appropriately takes the form of eager longing and patient waiting for the return of the erring one, that there may be room for describing the repentance referred to in Luke 15:7; Luke 15:10, which is the motive for the return. Also in the moral sphere the subject of the finding cannot be purely passive: there must be self-recovery to give ethical value to the event. A sinning man cannot be brought back to God like a straying sheep to the fold. Hence the beautiful picture of the sin, the misery, the penitent reflections, and the return of the prodigal peculiar to this parable. It is not mere scene-painting. It is meant to show how vastly higher is the significance of the terms “lost” and “found” in the human sphere, justifying increased interest in the finding, and so showing the utter unreasonableness of the fault-finding directed against Jesus for His efforts to win to goodness the publicans and sinners. Jesus thereby said in effect: You blame in me a joy which is universal, that of finding the lost, and which ought to be greater in the case of human beings just because it is a man that is found and not a beast. Does not the story as I tell it rebuke your cynicism and melt your hearts? Yet such things are happening among these publicans and sinners you despise, every day.

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

11-32. The Son lost and found.

11. had tzuo sons] The primary applications of this divine parable,— which is peculiar to St Luke, and would alone have added inestimable value to his Gospel—are (1) to the Pharisees and the ‘sinners’—i.e. to the professedly religious, and the openly irreligious classes; and (2) to the Jews and Gentiles. This latter application however only lies indirectly in the parable, and it is doubtful whether it would have occurred consciously to those who heard it. This is the Evangelium in Evangelio. How much it soars above the conceptions of Christians, even after hundreds of years of Christianity, is shewn by the ‘elder- brotherly spirit’ which has so often been manifested (e.g. by Tertullian and all like him) in narrowing its interpretation.

Bengel's Gnomen

Luke 15:11. Εἶπε δὲ, moreover He said) This parable has a degree of distinctness and separation from the first and second parables.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 11. - And he said, A certain man had two sons. It seems probable that this and the two preceding shorter parables were spoken by the Lord on the same occasion, towards the latter part of this slow solemn journeying to the holy city to keep his last Passover. The mention of the publicans and sinners in ver. 1 seems to point to some considerable city, or its immediate vicinity, as the place where these famous parables were spoken. This parable, as it is termed, of the prodigal sou completes the trilogy. Without it the Master's formal apologia for his life and work would be incomplete, and the rebuke of the Pharisaic selfishness and censoriousness would have been left unfinished. In the apologia much had still to be said concerning the limitless love and the boundless pity of God. In the rebuke the two first parables had shown the Pharisee party and the rulers of Israel how they ought to have acted: this third story shows them how they did act. But the Church of Christ - as each successive generation read this exquisite and true story - soon lost sight of all the temporal and national signification at first connected with it. The dweller in the cold and misty North feels that it belongs to him as it does to the Syrian, revelling in his almost perpetual summer, to whom it was first spoken. It is a story of the nineteenth century just as it was a story of the first. We may, with all reverence, think of the Divine Master, as he unfolded each successive scene which portrayed human sin and suffering, and heavenly pity and forgiveness, man's selfish pride and God's all-embracing love, passing into another and broader sphere than that bounded by the Arabian deserts to the south and the Syrian mountains to the north, forgetting for a moment the little Church of the Hebrews, and speaking to the great Church of the future - the Church of the world, to which, without doubt, this Catholic parable of the prodigal, in all its sublime beauty and exquisite pathos, with all its exhaustless wealth of comfort, belongs. Luke 15:11