Not To Be Solved, But Experienced

A teenage Sunday School Class was asked to comment on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. One young man rose and said the following:

The younger brother in the family talked his father into giving him a lot of money. Then he took off, left home. They called him the Prodigal Son because he spent half of the money on wine, women and song, and then he wasted the other half.

On somewhat the same level. a University drama department professor tells of the time he gave his students the task of producing a play based on their version of the “Prodigal Son” story. He said that when he went to a rehearsal, he discovered that the thirty-minute play the students had produced devoted five minutes to the scene in which the younger son talks the father into giving him the money, another five minutes on the homecoming scene and, according to the professor, “a most spectacular twenty minutes” on the prodigal son’s “life of…