According to the Oxford English dictionary, a parable is a simple story that is used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. In the Christian Bible, Jesus Christ often uses parables as allegories to teach and to communicate the hidden values of God's kingdom. In Luke 15, Jesus is responding to the challenge of the religious leaders of why he would make friends with the sinners and even eat with them. Jesus then tells a series of parables of a woman who has lost her coin, a man whose sheep is lost, and the story of the lost son. With all three parables, Jesus conveys his ideology that God is more interested in finding and celebrating what was lost and is now found than in all the good behaviors of the religious leaders. In particular with the parable of the lost son, the story creates a sense of the "unfairness " of the father's extravagant celebration over the repentant son. However, the deeper message Jesus wants to express to the audience is that God's favor is not based on how good or bad the son is but on the forgiving grace of the father. The parables Jesus uses to teach are simple in meaning but deep in their significance; his teaching is easy to relate to but requires his audiences to have a heart of repentance and forgiveness to understand the hidden values.
Jesus begins the parable by painting an extreme picture of a disrespectful young son who commits unforgivable misbehavior in Jewish culture toward his father. The story opens with the younger son's voice talking to his father, "Father, give me my appropriate share of the property " (Luke 15). First of all, his father is still alive. In other words by requesting the share of the property, he wants to get his inheritance prior to his father's death. It is an extremely rude and disgraceful action in Jewish culture that usually would deserve a severe punishment (Barry Wilder). The father is expected to explode with anger but instead, the father's response is to "divide his substance between them " (Luke 15).
