the role of the lukan parables in terms of the purpose of luke's gospel

the younger son here represents the vice of prodigality, the father that of liberality and the
elder son that of stinginess. On the whole, his argument is grounded on the assumption that
Luke's intended readers would have been familiar with Greco-Roman ethical and
philosophical rhetoric. In relation to Greco Roman influences, the other side of the coin is
that the parable describes the wisdom ethos of the household, especially in the ideals of
Hesiod that forms the preservation and accumulation of goods, and honest and hard work.
Wolfgang Pöhlmann argues that the outlook of the elder son in the parable, in keeping with
the thinking of Hesiod, 139 should be held in esteem, since his behaviour presents the need to
preserve and increase goods so as to avoid poverty and hunger. For him, such a perspective of
the elder son enables the audiences to perceive the kingdom. 140
However, the parable not
only goes beyond such moral instruction which may be a subsidiary theme, but also what is
worse neglects the Palestinian setting of Jesus’ ministry.
Rohrbaugh suggests a sociological approach that the parable is about propriety and shame
in a dysfunctional family, focusing on the reconciliation of the whole village and two sons.
For him the celebration takes places only to reconcile the village. In the setting of Jesus, the
parable is to instruct responsibility to both family and community, and generosity in the face
of scurrilous behaviour for the quarrelsome disciples. The parable displays an improbable
sort of kingdom in which prudence is not the highest value, just as the father who breaks all
the conventional rules of honour, and who divides his property, runs to deliver his prodigal
141
son, and even plead with his elder son humiliating himself.
142 143
G.V. Jones, M. Tolbert and Breech view the parable as mirroring human relations
139. He extends his studies concerning household literature to Xenophon, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the
Neopythagoreans, beginning with Hesiod. Wolfgang Pöhlmann, Der Verlorene Sohn and das Haus: Studien zu
Lukas 15:11-32 im Horizont der antiken Lehre von Haus, Erziehung und Ackerbau (WUNT 68; Tübingen:
Mohr-Siebeck, 1993).
140. Pöhlmann, Der Verlorene Sohn and das Haus: Studien zu Lukas 15:11-32 im Horizont der antiken Lehre
von Haus, Erziehung und Ackerbau; Herman Hendrickx, “A Man Had Two Sons: Lk 15:11-32 in the Light of
the Ancient Mediterranean Values of Farming and Household,” East Asian Pastoral Institute 31 (1994), 46-66.
For comparisons and contrasts between Synoptic parables and Greek literature, see Mary Ann Beavis, “Parable
and Fable,” CBQ 52 (1990), 473-98.
141. Rohrbaugh, “A Dysfunctional Family and Its Neighbors (Luke 15:11b-32),” 163-64.
142. He first thinks in the existential perspective that the parable is not only a microcosm of the human situation
in every era, but only an archetypal pattern of human existence and then he observes psychoanalytic aspects that
the parable presents the human predicament and dynamics as estrangement, longing and return, grace, anguish
and reconciliation. G.V. Jones, The Art and Truth of the Parables, 167-205.
143. By means of Freud’s analysis of the elements of the psyche, that is, id, superego and ego, Tolbert seeks to
understand the parable as bearing peculiar similarities in the three characters, in particular, in the father, the
central figure of the parable and the basic human desire for reconciliation and restoration of unity. Tolbert,
Perspectives on the Parables, 93-114.
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