Unsealed: Prodigal Son

Where Story Becomes Mirror

Oct 21, 2025

I’ve been living inside the parables for months.

Not as lessons, but as worlds. Not to study them, but to let them dismantle me.

We turned dangerous stories into Sunday school. Put varnish on revolution.

Jesus told these tales—parables—not to answer questions, but to upend them. He spoke of farmers and fathers and lost coins, then walked away, leaving his listeners haunted.

We’ve spent two thousand years taming these stories into moral lessons. We’ve made them safe, predictable, palatable.

This is an unsealing.

These retellings are not about informing you. They will confront you. You will see yourself in these pages. The runaway, the rule-keeper, the one who has buried their potential, the one who cannot forgive.

Some will comfort. Some will wound. All will ask everything of you.

Read them slowly. Let them work on you. The stories are mirrors before they are maps.

Consider yourself warned.

And welcomed.

PRODIGAL SON

There was a man who had two sons, and his heart was a wide country that knew no borders.

In the season of his restlessness, the younger son came to his father. “Father,” he said, the words tasting of distant dust and foreign skies, “give me the share of property that falls to me.”

It was a request that broke the rhythm of the world. A son asking for his inheritance while the father still breathed was to wish him dead. To treat a living man as a ghost already buried. The servants who overheard it gasped. The older brother, working in the field, would later say he felt the earth shift beneath his feet at that moment, though he did not yet know why.

But the father, whose love was a river that could not be dammed, said nothing of the insult. He divided his life between them. He split the flocks, the land, the silver—everything he had built across a lifetime. He gave the boy his portion and watched him gather it with hands that trembled, not with gratitude, but with fever.

The younger son left before the sun had set. He did not look back.

He journeyed to a far country, where no one knew his name or his father’s name, where he could be anyone, or no one. There, in that distant land, he scattered his substance like seed thrown into the sea. He poured out his silver at feasts where the wine never stopped flowing and the laughter never rang true. He bought friends whose names he could not remember by morning. He spent his days like a man trying to outrun his own shadow.

For a while, it worked. For a while, the money made him king of a kingdom built on sand.

Then the famine came.

It arrived quietly, the way death arrives. A whisper in the market, a thinning of the stalls, a worry that crept into every conversation. The crops failed. The herds died. The wine dried up. And one by one, the friends whose laughter had filled his rented rooms vanished like smoke.

The money was gone. The son was alone.

He attached himself to a citizen of that country, a man who looked at him the way you look at a broken tool—still useful, but only just. The man sent him into his fields to feed the pigs.

There, among the husks and the grunting beasts, the boy who had once eaten at his father’s table now envied the swine their meal. He knelt in the mud, the smell of waste thick in his throat, and something inside him finally broke open.

Not his pride.

That had broken long ago, somewhere between the last coin and the first hunger.

What broke was the lie. The lie that had driven him into the far country in the first place: that freedom was found in distance, that life was found away from his father’s house.

He came to himself.

It was not a sudden blinding. It was more like waking—slow, painful, the way you wake from a dream that has become a nightmare. He saw where he was. He saw what he had become. And for the first time since he had left, he remembered what he had left behind.

“How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare,” he murmured to the empty field, “but I perish here with hunger.”

The thought rose in him like a fragile, trembling thing: I will arise and go to my father.

Not as a son. He had forfeited that. But perhaps as a servant. Perhaps there was a place for him, even now, at the edges of his father’s household. Perhaps mercy had a minimum threshold, and he had not yet fallen beneath it.

He rehearsed the words as he walked.

“Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”

It was a good speech. Humble. True. The kind of thing that might soften even a hard man’s heart.

But the father was not a hard man.

While the son was still a long way off, his father saw him.

The old man had been watching. Not with the eyes of a merchant, calculating loss or tallying debts. Not with the eyes of a judge, weighing crimes and measuring punishments. He had been watching with the eyes of a father, which see further and deeper than any other kind of sight.

Every evening, as the sun began its descent, he would walk to the edge of his land and look toward the horizon. The servants saw him. The older son saw him. They said nothing, but they knew. He was looking for the shape of a boy who might never return.

And then, one evening, the shape appeared.

A figure on the road, thin and bent, moving with the gait of someone who has walked too far and carried too much. The father’s heart recognized him before his eyes did. That particular slope of the shoulders. That way of walking, even now, even broken.

His son.

The father ran.

Dignity was forgotten.

The measured steps of a patriarch were abandoned.

He gathered his robes in his hands like a boy and he ran—down the path, through the gate, past the shocked faces of his servants who had never seen him move faster than a stately walk.

He ran to the son who had wished him dead, who had squandered half of everything he had built, who reeked of pig and shame and the far country.

And he fell upon his neck and kissed him.

The son tried to begin his speech. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy—”

But the father was not listening to words. He was listening to the heartbeat he had feared he would never feel again. He was holding the child he had thought he might have lost forever.

He turned to his servants, his voice trembling with a joy that shook the very air.

“Bring the best robe—the one I wear on feast days. Put it on him. Put a ring on his hand—the signet, the one that bears my seal. Shoes on his feet. Quickly now. And bring the fattened calf—the one we have been saving. Kill it. We are going to feast. We are going to celebrate.”

The servants stood frozen, uncertain they had heard correctly.

The father’s voice rose, almost desperate with gladness.

“This my son! This one, here, standing before me! He was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found!”

And they began to make merry.

Now the older son had been in the field, doing what he always did: the work that needed doing.

He had not run off to a far country.

He had not squandered anything.

He had stayed. He had served. He had obeyed every command his father had ever given. Year after year, sunrise to sunset, he had been the faithful one.

As he drew near to the house that evening, he heard something strange.

Music. Dancing. Laughter.

The kind that spills out of windows and doorways, the kind that fills a house until the walls themselves seem to sway.

He called one of the servants. “What is this? What’s happened?”

The servant’s face was bright.

“Your brother has come home! And your father, he’s killed the fattened calf. There’s a feast. Everyone’s celebrating because he’s come home safe.”

The older son felt something cold and sharp lodge itself in his chest.

His face hardened like clay left too long in the sun.

He would not go in.

The father, in the midst of the celebration, noticed his absence. He came out and found him standing in the courtyard, arms crossed, jaw set.

“Come,” the father said, his hand extended. “Come inside. Join us.”

But the older son did not move. And when he finally spoke, his voice was tight with a fury that had been building for years.

“Look,” he said, and the word came out like an accusation.

“These many years I have served you. I never disobeyed your command. Not once. Not ever. And yet you never gave me so much as a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.”

He gestured toward the house, where the music still played. “But when this son of yours—this one who devoured your property with prostitutes—when he comes crawling back, you kill the fattened calf for him?”

The father heard the words beneath the words.

This son of yours. Not my brother. The older son had just severed the bond, drawn the line, made clear where his loyalties lay.

And the father’s joy, which had been so bright and full just moments before, was now tempered with a sorrow so profound it bent him like a weight.

“Son,” he said, and his voice was gentle, almost pleading. “You are always with me. All that is mine is yours. It has always been yours. You have never had to earn it. It is yours by birthright, by blood, by being my child.”

He paused, and when he spoke again, there were tears in his voice.

“But it was fitting to celebrate and be glad. Your brother. Your brother was dead, and is alive. He was lost, and is found.”

The story ends here.

The music still spills from the house. The younger son sits at the table, wearing the robe, eating the feast. And the older son stands in the twilight, poised between the party and his pride.

Two sons. Two invitations.

The robe is ready. The ring waits. The music has begun.

Which son are you?