The prodigal son breaks the rules while the elder brother keeps them all (“I never disobeyed your command,” Luke 15:29), but both are running from the Father to get control of their lives. The two sons represent the two different audiences listening to Jesus’s story: the moral failures gathering around Jesus (“the tax collectors and sinners” of Luke 15:1) and the morally upstanding (“the Pharisees and the scribes” of Luke 15:2), whose very virtue keeps them from seeing how much they too need the grace of God. “So [Jesus] told them [both audiences] this parable” (Luke 15:3) about two different
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