Eric C. Smith
ecsmith@iliff.edu
Few of the parables found in the gospels have received more attention than the parable of the man with two sons, commonly known as the parable of the Prodigal Son. The story has been read and understood as a parable about sin and repentance, about the salvation of either Jews or gentiles or both, and about the promise and peril of freedom, to name only a few options.[1] In this paper, I argue that discourses of queer futurity can help make new sense of the parable, highlighting its use of family structures and its assumptions about time, and attending to the story’s reflections on the conditions of flourishing. Understood this way, the parable of the man with two sons reads as a debate over bodies, kinship, and possession of the future, and it provokes reflection on the limits that heteronorming structures place on thriving. Read alongside theorists of queer futurity, the parable of the man with two sons affords at least two possible interpretations. It can be understood as a gesture toward a new horizon, embracing a queer future free of the constraints of heteronormative reproductivity. But the parable can also be understood as a conservative cautionary tale that insists on temporal reproductive norms and pathologises deviance from full alignment toward a heteroreproductive future.
There Was a Man Who Had Two Sons
“There was a man who had two sons.”[2] So begins the parable found in Luke 15:11–32.[3] This opening establishes the premise for the story, and it introduces the reader to its most important characters: a man, an elder son, and a younger son. But the opening also gestures toward several temporal regimes, what Jack Halberstam has called a “logic of reproductive temporality:” a cultural performance marked first by a maturating from adolescence to adulthood, then progression toward a long and stable life, followed by an embrace of a reproductive timetable, and finally by a “time of inheritance” that Halberstam calls “an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next.”[4] By beginning with “a man who had two sons,” a description of a family structure, the parable situates its characters within the performance of reproductivity and its norms.[5] The parable orients its characters toward the future, and it embeds them both temporally and spatially in a normative reproductive structure of heteropatriarchal family. In doing so, the parable also orients its readers to both the future and the past, and to the present (of the parable) as an instance in a longer drama of inheritance.[6] The author’s framing of the parable as one about “a man who had two sons” alerts the reader to the importance of reproductivity and inheritance in understanding its meaning. This is not the sort of explicit genealogy one finds elsewhere in biblical texts (such as in Luke 3:23–38), but it is a formulaic introduction to generational family structures like the ones found elsewhere in biblical texts.[7] The reference to multiple generations of one family grounds the story in the tensions inherent in reproductivity and inheritance—ideas central to both Halberstam’s work and the unfolding of this story in Luke.
This normative and norming orientation to time also governs and orients bodies, and it governs and orients the spaces those bodies inhabit. As Sara Ahmed has pointed out, genealogy and genealogical language do the work of reproductive alignment, both representing and constructing heteronormative pasts and futures.[8] The language of genealogy serves to orient persons and their bodies within reproductive regimes. To use Ahmed’s example, when we point to a child and say “Look, there is a little John and a little Mark,” we are putting the child in a line from the father, and presupposing that the child will himself in time become a father to someone else.[9] The use of genealogical language both assumes and demands this; it places people in relationship to structures of inheritance and assigns them the teleology of reproduction. “One can think of such an utterance as performing the work of alignment,” Ahmed says: “the utterances position the child as the not-yet adult by aligning sex (the male body) and gender (the masculine character) with sexual orientation (the heterosexual future),” all of which conspire to align the child with a reproductive agenda for the future.[10] Returning to the parable of Luke 15, to say that “there was a man who had two sons” is to point to a lineage and align all three people and their bodies with the movement of that lineage through time, from childhood to “reproductive time,” and ultimately to the “time of inheritance” in which the accumulated capital and social capital of one generation passes to the next.[11]
The genealogical alignment of Luke 15:11 works to recruit all three persons—the father and both sons—into a project of reproductive futurity. This alignment makes clear to the reader that reproduction and inheritance are in view. This is true even if the reader remains unaware that they are being drawn into a discourse of reproduction and inheritance; much of Ahmed’s argument about the norming force of heterosexuality is rooted in the invisibility of its operation and the hidden inevitability of its power. For Ahmed, the structures imposed by heterosexuality appear in plain sight (like in the pattern of people seated around tables, in one of Ahmed’s signal examples), but they are rendered invisible to most observers because of the patterns’ own normative force.[12] Ahmed’s observations about the power of heterosexuality and its alignment toward heteroreproductivity also make sense of this parable’s complete omission of women within the family unit; under this logic of alignment, neither the sons’ mother nor any of their potential sisters signify anything about reproductive futurity or inheritance, and so the parable does not include them. Patriarchy is a remainder of the equation of heteroreproductivity.
In this parable of the man with two sons, the plot of the parable unfolds into the anxieties anticipated by Ahmed’s description of heteroreproductive alignment. The story turns on the threats to reproductive alignment that are brought on by the choices and actions made by the younger son away from the “logic of reproductive temporality,” and the fidelity to reproductive futurity embraced and embodied by the elder son. Both adherence to reproduction and inheritance and deviation from them drive the parable, as does the father’s status as possessor of the patrilineal inheritance in the present. If the chief anxiety of heteronormative reproductivity is the movement from one male heir to the next, and if that anxiety is assuaged by the alignment of male bodies toward that teleology, then the parable of the man with two sons is introduced in a way that emphasises the potential for misalignment and reproductive disaster.
In the case of the younger son, his actions seem to be prompted by various forms of desire. This desire is expressed most simply by the younger son himself, who asks his father for his share of the father’s property, the father’s ousia in the Greek—his property as the NRSV puts it or wealth as the NRSVUE puts it, the accumulated material of his life, and probably most significantly his land.[13] The younger son gives no reason for this request. But after the father complies by dividing his property, now described as his bios in the Greek, his life or his living, the reader gains some insight into the shape of the son’s desires by the editorial comment in Luke 15:13. There, the text reports that the son squandered the property or wealth, here again ousia, in what both the NRSV and NRSVUE translate as “dissolute living.” A third gesture toward the younger son’s desires comes from the older son’s comments in 15:30, where he accuses his brother of having “devoured” the father’s bios, translated “property” by the NRSV or “wealth” by the NRSVUE, with sex workers.[14] The effect of these references is to show that the younger son’s desires are misaligned with the performance that might be expected of him as a son, as a little version of the father, and the trajectory set by the logic of reproductive temporality.
Halberstam notes that the kind of interruptions to the stability of life that are brought on by the younger son’s desires are often perceived as threats to reproductive futurity. Halberstam writes that “long periods of stability are considered to be desirable, and people who live in rapid bursts (drug addicts, for example) are characterized as immature and even dangerous.”[15] The younger son’s actions would seem to fit that pattern; his desires drew him away from the long stability of domestic life and into a burst of “dissolute living,” and perhaps even into sexual activities that would have been considered outside of norms, if the older son’s accusations of visiting sex workers can be believed. The text is keen to make this clear; its movement back and forth between versions of the word ousia and versions of the word bios suggests that something more than stuff is in view here.[16] At stake in the younger son’s actions is the durability of the father’s life and way of living, which he had inherited from his father, and the younger son’s behaviour lessens the likelihood that the bios or way of living will be passed on successfully from one generation to the next. When viewed through this logic of reproductive temporality, the younger son’s desires are not only failing to lead him to reproduce his father’s life in the future, they are also working actively to diminish the father’s life in the present; they are lessening the father’s ousia, his stuff, the evidence that he has made a life, and the means by which he might continue to do so. Emphasising the estrangement from the ideal, and putting figurative and literal distance between the father and the son and the domestic stage on which the younger son had been expected to perform reproductive alignment, the son’s destination is a “distant country,” far from the home where his energies ought to have been focused.
The desires of the older son, by contrast, are a case study in alignment as Ahmed defines it. These desires are expressed only late in the story, as a response to the younger son’s return and the father’s embrace of him. “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command,” the older son says (Luke 15:29). The older son’s anger about the warm treatment of his younger brother is grounded in his own desire for fidelity and his choices in that direction. The older son has dutifully fulfilled the paradigm of reproductivity as described by Halberstam, moving from adolescence to adulthood, toward a stable life, and toward replacing his father. He has admirably performed chrononormativity as described by Elizabeth Freeman: he has enacted productive labour in concert with a teleology of inheritance and reproduction.[17] When he hears the celebration for his brother, the older son is coming in from the field, where he has presumably been labouring for the future he has been conditioned to want. Despite all of this, the older son protests, he has never been rewarded with anything like what the younger son received when he returned. Implicit and very nearly explicit in the older son’s words is a critique of the father for violating the logic articulated by Halberstam: that a “time of inheritance” could be expected by both father and son, “within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next.”[18] The older son’s remark, that he has been working “like a slave,” is more than just a throwaway hyperbole, as we will see in a moment. It is an accusation that both the father and the younger son have ruptured the social contract under which the older son had assumed they had all been living.
Looking for Utopia
On the very first page of his book Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz situates queerness vis-àvis the living of what the author of Luke might have called a bios, a life. “Queerness,” Muñoz writes, “is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”[19] Muñoz’s book then is a project of imagining a thick description of that missing thing, which he calls “Utopia” and characterises as a world of flourishing, a “space outside of heteronormativity.”[20] This he describes as “a manifestation of a ‘doing’ that is in the horizon, a mode of possibility … imbued with a sense of potentiality.”[21] Utopia arises from its own performance, for Muñoz, because its function is to draw into possibility the things precluded by the way things already are.[22] It is perhaps the very not-enough-ness of the younger son’s world that prompts him to ask for his share of the father’s life and stuff early. It is the boundedness of his experience within the reproductive paradigm that leads him to imagine and then to seek his own utopia.
As a way of summarising the stakes of both queerness and imaginative performances of the future, Muñoz asks a provocative question that would be at home in the work of both Ahmed and Freeman: “Can the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction?”[23] One can imagine the younger son of Luke’s parable asking the same question. Embedded in this question from Muñoz is an acknowledgement of and engagement with the work of Lee Edelman, who five years earlier had published his own work on queer futurity, a book titled No Future, in which Edelman famously engages with similar questions. Edelman is often credited with zeroing in on an important observation and critique of heteronormativity, which is that both our anxieties and our desires about the future become shrouded in what Edelman calls “the Child,” where the teleology of heteronormativity finds its fullest expression. The social order, in this way of thinking, is arrayed in defence of “the Child,” investing its energies in defending children from any threats real or imagined on the premise that children are the future and therefore the rightful subjects of civic life. “For the social order exists,” Edelman writes, “to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due.”[24] Edelman proposes that queerness is a form of resistance to this social practice; queerness for Edelman insists that “the Child as futurity’s emblem must die,” and that the subjectivity embedded in our notions of citizenship and value ought to centre the present more than the future and living people more than potential ones.[25] Muñoz’s question then, “can the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction,” joins and responds to Edelman’s challenge, and it might be found on the tip of the younger son’s tongue in this parable of the man with two sons.[26] If “queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough,” as Muñoz says, then the younger son appears in this parable like Muñoz, imagining something more, envisioning something beyond, and like Edelman, throwing sand in the gears of the machinery of reproductive futurity.
Read with and alongside these queer theorists, the parable of the man with two sons begins to look like a parable of two responses to the dilemma posed by chrononormativity, reproductive temporality, and its reliance on heteronormative alignment. The younger son rejects a future assigned to him by virtue of his status as “the Child,” asking instead if there might be alternative ways of living and different sites of flourishing available to him. The older son embraces the futurity invested in him by the social order, accepting even its abuses and indignities as the price of duty, and trudges with fidelity toward the “time of inheritance” envisioned by Halberstam as the culminating stage of a life, a bios, lived rightly and in alignment with and eventually in possession of the bios of his father.
Social Death
If this parable is a drama on the subject of flourishing, reproductive alignment, and what it means to have a life and a living, then it is played out on a stage that is appointed and attended by persons for whom those precise possibilities have been foreclosed. Five times in twenty-two verses, the story gestures toward a different way of life, one that the parable clearly understands to be deficient and undesirable—a way of life characterised by the loss and absence of the very kinds of agency and flourishing and inheritance that are in dispute between the man and his two sons. In Luke 15:15 when the younger son hires himself out as a feeder of livestock, he forfeits the status and privilege of his own identity to that of a stranger. To read the verb kollaō flatly, the younger son joins himself to a citizen of the strange country in which he was living, subsuming his own future in the service of someone else’s future. This leads the younger son in verse 17 to recognise that even his own father’s “hired hands” or day laborers, his misthioi, have a better life than he does. In verse 19, then, the son resolves himself to return to his father as a misthios, as a hired hand—as one who is bereft of place and inheritance, one who has given up his place in line for reproductive futurity, and who labours only for someone else’s interests. Finally in verses 22 and 26, both the father and the older son make use of those they have enslaved, douloi in verse 22 and a pais in verse 26, conscripting them first to prepare a celebration for the younger son and then to report on what is going on.[27]
These references to misthioi (hired hands) and douloi and a pais (enslaved persons), might be understood as a part of the generic kyriarchical background of the gospels, in which the text and those who inhabit it assume the existence of oppressive structures like slavery, patriarchy, and economic exploitation.[28] But in the case of this parable, I understand the references to these persons not only as background, but also as textual glances toward the full range of possibilities for how a person’s life might play out. It is not a coincidence that the idea of a way of life bereft of one’s own interests—cleaved away from any interest in the future, a life in which one has hired one’s self out to a stranger to serve them and their future—appears in the text just at the moment when the younger son has forsaken the “logic of reproductive temporality,” when he has hopped off the conveyor belt of progress through life to eventual replacement of his father, and chosen a different path. The category of misthioi appears in the text as a spectre, as the negative space left by the life and the privilege the younger son has just given up, a cautionary tale about the consequences of withdrawal from cycles of reproductivity and alignment. Here the misthioi represent a middle place between the autonomy and sovereignty possessed by the father and the abjection of the enslaved (the douloi), as considered below. Misthioi are not enslaved, but neither do they fully possess themselves. Luke’s text, and Jesus himself, evoke the misthioi as a warning about the perils of giving up or losing a birthright.
Likewise, while the appearances of douloi and a pais within the father’s household might make them seem like bit players in a larger drama, their presence does more than simply advance or support the plot. These enslaved people, who are ordered to attend to the comfort of the returning son and prepare a feast for him, are visible reminders of the stakes of futurity and the patterns of reproduction and inheritance described by Halberstam, Ahmed, and others. The agency, power, privilege, and wealth that the younger son is having returned to him are unavailable to the enslaved people in the father’s household; the enslaved people have no future of their own, no prospect of inheritance and nothing to pass along, and limited capacity to act in their own interest.[29] These enslaved people have already experienced the social death that the younger son has had a brush with; they are reminders of the way the social order proceeds well beyond fathers and sons, into positions ever less endowed with agency and power. [30]
The frequent references to hired hands and slaves are more effective at telling the reader about the man and his two sons than they are at telling the reader about the hired hands and the enslaved people themselves. The descriptions of the people at the bottom end of the social scale are mostly there to cast the people at the top end of the scale in relief, and in the text the misthioi and douloi are bereft of any nuance or characterisation of their own. Both sons compare themselves and the lives they are living to the life lived by these dispossessed figures. The younger son, at the low point of his trajectory, asks himself a rhetorical question: how many of his father’s hired hands are better off than he is? And the older son, in the climactic confrontation with his father, describes his devotion in terms of enslavement: “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command” (Luke 15:29). For both, the comparison comes at a moment of assessing their own places in the world and their standings within systems of belonging. For the younger son, the comparison to misthioi reveals how far outside the normative structures of flourishing he finds himself. For the older son, the comparison to douloi (in the verb douleuō) points to the path of self-negation he has followed in pursuit of the ideal of reproductive futurity—it underscores that he has been waiting patiently for his turn to assume full social standing in the way his father has, and that he has bought in completely to the kind of progression through life to the “time of inheritance” described by Halberstam. For both, the gesture towards the bottom of the social order tells them, and the reader, about what the view ought to be, but is not quite, or is not quite yet, from the top.
Conclusions
The insights of scholars working on queerness and queer futurity help to bring to the surface a few important dynamics in the parable of the man who had two sons. Ahmed’s observations help us to see that the two sons are acting out of different experiences of what Ahmed calls genealogical alignment—one son embracing a process of formation towards replacing the father, and the other rejecting it. Halberstam’s “logic of reproductive temporality” helps us see what precisely that the younger son has violated about the expectations imposed on him by the social order: he has punctuated what ought to have been a “long period of stability” with a short burst of what the narrator calls “dissolute living,” and he has opted out of the temporal regime of the “time of inheritance,” disassociating the inheritance of his father’s ousia and bios with the replacement of the father in the social order. The younger son seems compelled by the sense of something that is not enough, or the something that is missing, described by Muñoz as characteristic of queerness, and he dramatically rejects investment in “the Child” as described by Edelman. Read this way, the parable becomes a drama about reproductivity, a story about the irruption of queer sensibility into a system of heteronormative patriarchal reproduction, and a debate about the terms on which the future might be inherited. Insofar as it is a moralising tale, this parable is a conservative one, reinforcing structures and systems of reproductivity rather than challenging them. It brings the reader’s attention to people outside of systems of reproductive futurity, enslaved persons and hired hands, and it juxtaposes their lives with the lives of its main characters as a way of underscoring what’s at stake in the maintenance of the system and in the performance of the self within it. The parable narrates the younger son’s rejections and violations of reproductive futurity as a way to caution against the path he took, and even though the younger son is treated with compassion by the father, the text leaves little doubt that it thinks the younger son has acted incorrectly.
Although we usually call this story the “parable of the prodigal son,” centring the younger son’s actions, that is not the way the Gospel of Luke introduces it. Luke begins by saying that “there was a man who had two sons,” pointing to structures of alignment, reproduction, futurity, and inheritance that stem from the father and his rightful place in the world. Luke begins with this “logic of reproductive temporality,” as Halberstam puts it, this “overview of generational time,” because it is neither the father nor either son who is really the main character of the story. Instead, the logic of reproductive temporality takes centre stage, and that logic demands our attention as we search for a denouement and interpretation to the story. Luke tells the story on the very terms presupposed by the question posed by Muñoz: “Can the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction?” Reading through the lenses offered by scholars of queer futurity I see in the parable at least two possible responses to Muñoz’s question: “yes,” and “no.”
The first response is to view the father and his response as open to different ways and experiences of flourishing—as open to other Utopias. This first way of reading the parable with queer futurity sees compassion, understanding, and even willingness to move outside of norms in the father’s efforts to accommodate his younger son’s desires and to embrace his return. In this way of reading it, the text privileges the younger son’s desire for something more and his willingness to pursue it. The parable offers glimpses of alternative futures, and of diverse sites and ways of flourishing—even glimpses of forms of life that do not rely on reproduction or conform to its normativity at all. It opens the possibility of understanding this parable as opening spaces for other forms of life and other ways of flourishing, as leaving pathways open to other futures.
But in the other response, the one that answers Muñoz’s question with a “no,” the father’s actions appear far more cynical. Though his embrace and welcome of his son may be genuine, as they certainly seem to be in the text, the father’s acceptance of the younger son might not represent any embrace of queer conceptions of time or even of his son as a person imbued with desire. Instead, the father’s rejoicing at the younger son’s return might be because he sees the time of inheritance returning over the horizon—an absent reproductive future arriving again at last. In this way of reading it, the parable would insist that the future must remain a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction, because in the end the parable wants the reader to see the folly of moving outside of that. While it is presented in the text as a meditation on forgiveness, and the history of its interpretation often reads it that way, this parable begins with, upholds, and ends with the logic of reproductive temporality and futurity. In the end it may not be forgiveness that motivates the father, or any sense of seeing his son as a full (or queer) person. Instead, the father might simply be motivated by Edelman’s Child, celebrating and rejoicing at the restoration of a lost future: “this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found” (Luke 15:32).
It is the nature of parables to insist on an openness to multiple interpretations, and perhaps it is the nature of queer reading to resist closure. The two options above demonstrate both the openness and the resistance, and they flaunt an open-endedness to both Bible and time. These options correspond roughly and reductively to the futurity proposed by Muñoz and Edelman, respectively: Muñoz’s embrace of utopian possibilities on the horizon, and Edelman’s realistic appraisal of the strength of heteronormativity. One may understand queer futurity either way, or in other ways in the middle or to either side. The same is true for biblical interpretation itself; the interpreter may always choose whether to read biblical texts generously, or not, and whether to understand them as pointing toward some new horizon of possibility even liberation, or backward and downward toward the normative patterns and structures upon which they rest.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. doi:10.1515/9780822388074.
Amy-Jill Levine. “A Parable and Its Baggage.” The Christian Century, 3 September 2014.
Bovon, François. Luke 2: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 9:51-19:27. Hermeneia – A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Carol Schersten LaHurd. “Re-Viewing Luke 15 with Arab Christian Women.” Pages 246–268 in A Feminist Companion to Luke, edited by Amy-Jill Levine. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2001.
Charel D. du Toit. “The Parable of the Two Mothers: An Unhiding Reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.” Verbum et Ecclesia 45, no. 1 (2024): e1–6. doi:10.4102/ve.v45i1.3169.
Cobb, Christy. Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke-Acts and Other Ancient Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-05689-6.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
George W. Ramsey. “Plots, Gaps, Repetitions, and Ambiguity in Luke 15.” Perspectives in Religious Studies 17, no. 1 (1990): 33–42.
Glancy, Jennifer. Slavery in Early Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Golden, Mark. “Pais, ‘Child’ and ‘Slave.’” L’Antique Classique 54 (1985): 91–104.
González, Justo L. Luke. Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010.
Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Hoke, James N. “Unbinding Imperial Time: Chrononormativity and Paul’s Letter to the Romans.” Pages 68-89 in Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Gospel of Luke. Sacra Pagina 3. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1991.
Marchal, Joseph A. “Bio-Necro-Biblio-Politics? Restaging Feminist Intersections and Queer Exceptions.” Culture and Religion 15, no. 2 (2014): 166–76. doi:10.1080/14755610.2014.911036.
Mena, Peter Anthony. “Flaming Faggotry, Fractured Futurities, and Horizons of Hope in the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca.” Pages 100-121 in Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion, edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Marie Tonstad. London: Routledge, 2024. doi:10.4324/9781032638454-6.
Menéndez-Antuña, Luis. “Black Lives Matter and Gospel Hermeneutics: Political Life and Social Death in the Gospel of Luke.” Currents in Theology and Mission 45, no. 4 (2018): 29–34.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Orlando Patterson. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. doi:10.1515/9780822390442.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1999.
Tamber-Rosenau, Caryn. “‘He Changes Times and Seasons’: Daniel, Sinthomosexuality, and Queer Time.” Pages 79-99 in Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion, edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Marie Tonstad. Gender, Theology, and Spirituality. London: Routledge, 2024. doi:10.4324/9781032638454.
Tannehill, Robert C. Luke. Abingdon New Testament Commentaries. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996.
[1] François Bovon, Luke 2: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 9:51-19:27, Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013), 430–38. By far the predominant interpretation of this parable understands it as a part of a triptych of parables about lost things in Luke’s 15th chapter, alongside the parables of the lost coin and lost sheep. This parable thus becomes a story of a “lost son.” Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1991), 239–42. Bovon, though, cautions that while “the first two are twin parables,” the third is “much more developed” and focuses on the son, rather than on the father’s search for him. Bovon, François, Luke 2, 400.
[2] In this article I take this citation from Luke 15:11 as the title of the parable, rather than the traditional title, the Prodigal Son. Using “a man who had two sons” preserves both the family structure and the generational dynamic of the parable, which are both diminished when the “prodigal son” title is used.
[3] Translations here and elsewhere in this paper are from the NRSV, except where the NRSVUE is brought in for comparison. Those instances are noted in the text.
[4] Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 4–5.
[5] Charel D. du Toit argues that for early hearers of this parable, women would have been understood to have been included in the family, especially the mother of the two sons and the father’s mother. Charel D. du Toit, “The Parable of the Two Mothers: An Unhiding Reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son,” Verbum et Ecclesia 45, no. 1 (2024): e1–6. In an article for popular audiences meant to disabuse Christian readers of misguided interpretations, Amy-Jill Levine points out that the formula “a man who had two sons” ought to be understood “as a convention” in keeping with other biblical introductions of family structures. Amy-Jill Levine, “A Parable and Its Baggage,” The Christian Century, 3 September 2014. See also footnote 7 below.
[6] Some readings of this parable argue that the younger son’s request might imply that he is anticipating his father’s death, perhaps even eagerly. González imagines the younger son implying to his father, in his request, “I can’t wait for you to die.” Justo L. González, Luke, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 188. In an interesting cross-cultural analysis, Carol Schersten LaHurd collects the reactions of Arab women to the story, in which her interlocutors are frequently scandalized by the younger son’s brashness. Carol Schersten LaHurd, “Re-Viewing Luke 15 with Arab Christian Women,” in A Feminist Companion to Luke, ed. Amy-Jill Levine (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2001).
[7] See for example Genesis 6:10, Genesis 25:4, Judges 10:4–5, and Ruth 1:3.
[8] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), chap. 2.
[9] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 83.
[10] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 83. On the structuring power of heterosexuality, and its ability to situate bodies in space and with relation to each other, see Ahmed’s larger argument on pages 79–92. Thinking with Adrienne Rich’s work on compulsory heterosexuality, Ahmed considers the various kinds of compulsion that accompany it and stem from it.
[11] Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place, 4–5.
[12] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 80–83.
[13] Liddell and Scott offer a range of definitions for ousia, ranging from the physical (“that which is one’s own, one’s substance, property”) to the philosophical (“being, essence, true nature of a thing”). Here I view ousia in complement and some contrast to bios, which Liddell and Scott gloss as “life…state of life, course of life, manner of living.” I therefore read ousia as pointing frankly toward the material possessions of the father, and I translate it colloquially as “stuff” to capture both the NRSV’s “property” and the NRSVUE’s “wealth.” Although the NRSV and the NRSVUE both translate bios in parallel with ousia, as “property” and “wealth” respectively, I read bios as a bigger-picture way of describing what’s at stake in inheritance: not only stuff, but also status, lineage, place in the world, and so forth.
[14] Both the NRSV and NRSVUE translate the Greek word here, pornē, as “prostitute,” which captures the pejorative and denigrating sense of the older brother’s remarks. This comment from the older son has garnered attention from interpreters. George W. Ramsey identifies this comment as an example of a “repetition” in the text, contrasting the narrator’s sentence in 15:13 with the older son’s version in 15:30. Ramsey finds that “every element in the sentence is given a sinister nuance” in the elder brother’s account. Where 15:13 says that the younger brother “squandered his property (ousia) in dissolute living,” 15:30 says that the younger brother has “devoured your property (bios) with prostitutes.” In the older brother’s telling, the younger son’s action has changed from “squandered” (dieskorpisen) to “devoured” (kataphagōn), the son’s stuff (ousia) has become the father’s life (bios), and “dissolute living” has been specified as “prostitutes.” George W. Ramsey, “Plots, Gaps, Repetitions, and Ambiguity in Luke 15,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 17, no. 1 (1990): 36–37. Luke Timothy Johnson understands this repetition as exaggeration on the part of the older son. Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, 241. Tannehill sees the narrator’s restraint in the matter of details as strategic narrative ambiguity, “leaving the audience to speculate whether the elder brother exaggerates.” Robert C. Tannehill, Luke, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), 240.
[15] Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place, 4–5.
[16] Bovon distinguishes the uses of these two words: “When the young man speaks of ousia, he is referring to his father’s fortune. Luke says that the father divided his estate (bios) between them (vv. 12 and 30) …We should remember that the ousia is the word for “existence,” “substance,” and whatever “possessions” there are. In the agrarian context of the parable, we should think first of all of real estate, beginning with the land. The Greek word bios has as its first meaning “life,” then “means of subsistence,” “resources.” So the father gives his son the means to make a living.” I have transliterated Bovon’s use of Greek font. Bovon, Luke 2, 425. Tannehill too focuses on land (and therefore status, coded as “family property”) as the content of the inheritance. Tannehill, Luke, 240.
[17] Elizabeth Freeman links chrononormativity with habitus: “as with all legitimate groups, families depend on timing.” This timing, for Freeman, is linked to the performance of class, which is certainly in view in Luke’s parable. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 28–32. Caryn Tamber-Rosenau uses Freeman’s work interrogate the chrononormativities (and reproductivities) of the Daniel traditions. Tamber-Rosenau, Caryn, “‘He Changes Times and Seasons’: Daniel, Sinthomosexuality, and Queer Time,” in Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion, ed. Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Marie Tonstad, Gender, Theology, and Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2024), 89–92. James N. Hoke follows Freeman’s logic to trace the workings of imperial time in Romans. Hoke, James N., “Unbinding Imperial Time: Chrononormativity and Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” in Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, ed. Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
[18] Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place, 4–5.
[19] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
[20] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 35.
[21] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 99.
[22] Muñoz, Freeman, and Ahmed all rely to some degree on theories of performance. The enactments of sociality both reflect and shape social relations and conceptions of the self. In that sense, they all reflect something of the influence of Judith Butler, for whom performance is the most salient engine of norms. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007).
[23] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 49.
[24] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 11.
[25] Edelman, No Future, 31.
[26] On the differences between Edelman and Muñoz and their considerable sympathies with each other, see Peter Anthony Mena, “Flaming Faggotry, Fractured Futurities, and Horizons of Hope in the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca,” in Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion, ed. Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Marie Tonstad (London: Routledge, 2024).
[27] The word pais can have several meanings: a young boy, one’s own child, or an enslaved person. In this case, Luke’s use of pais demands that we read it as an enslaved person, possibly a young one. Because the text elsewhere describes each son as a huios, a clear indicator of familiar bonds, and because the elder son is in Luke 15:26 ordering the pais around and demanding information from him, the NRSV and NRSVUE both rightly translate this as “one of the slaves.” On the potential meanings of pais, see Mark Golden, “Pais, ‘Child’ and ‘Slave,’” L’Antique Classique 54 (1985): 91–104. On the ubiquity of enslaved people in biblical texts, specifically in Luke and Acts, see Christy Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke-Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019), 27–33.
[28] The term “kyriarchy” was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1999), ix. On kyriarchy and its compatibility with queer and queering discourses, especially the work of Jasbir Puar, see Joseph A. Marchal, “Bio-Necro-Biblio-Politics? Restaging Feminist Intersections and Queer Exceptions,” Culture and Religion 15, no. 2 (2014): 166–76.
[29] See the comments of Jennifer Glancy on this point. Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 110.
[30] Although it is focussed on different Lukan pericopes, Luis Menéndez-Antuña’s discussion of precarious figures in Luke’s gospel offers a helpful framing and parsing for the notion of social death and how it can inform readings of biblical texts. His use of “political” and “apolitical” to describe the embeddedness (or not) of people in social fabrics strikes me as amenable to the observations of Ahmed, Halberstam, and others about reproductivity and futurity. Luis Menéndez-Antuña, “Black Lives Matter and Gospel Hermeneutics: Political Life and Social Death in the Gospel of Luke,” Currents in Theology and Mission 45, no. 4 (2018): 29–34. Like many who treat social death, Menéndez-Antuña is reading with Orlando Patterson. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Although there is not space to consider it fully here, this discussion also reminds me of the work of Jasbir Puar, who theorizes queerness as it is ensnared in various forms of power. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).