Luke 15

Luke 15 is the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke the Evangelist composed this Gospel as well as the Acts of the Apostles. This chapter records three parables of Jesus Christ: the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost or 'prodigal' son, a trilogy about redemption that Jesus tells after the Pharisees and religious leaders accuse him of welcoming and eating with "sinners". Biblical commentator Heinrich Meyer refers to this chapter, the following chapter and Luke 17:1 10 (NKJV) as a "new, important, and for the most part parabolic set of discourses" linked by the murmuring of the Pharisees and Jesus' responses to them and to his disciples. Arno Gaebelein notes that while these parables have wide appeal and application, in studying them "it must not be overlooked that the Lord answers in the first place the murmuring Pharisees".

Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to Him to hear Him. This is the third mention by Luke of the tax collectors (, hoi telōnai, also translated as "publicans"); they were previously one of the groups who answered John the Baptist's call to repentance, and Jesus ate with them, amidst the Pharisees' earlier complaints, in chapter 5. Frederick Farrar suggests that "the sinners" refers in general to all "the degraded and outcast classes".

Verses 3–7 record this parable, which appears in two of the canonical gospels of the New Testament, as well as in the non canonical Gospel of Thomas. According to the Gospels, a shepherd leaves his flock of ninety nine sheep in order to find the one sheep who is lost. Compared with Matthew's version of this parable, Luke emphasises the shepherd's responsibility for the loss (verse 3: if he loses one of them; in Matthew, one of them goes astray), the unconditional nature of the search, and the joy which was brought about by the sinner's repentance. Franklin notes that in both of these stories, the primary narrative about God's search for the lost is supplemented by a comment on repentance (verses 7 and 10), which "appears to have been introduced, not because the movement of the parable itself required it, but because Luke was sensitive to the charge that emphasis upon the gracious outreach of God could underplay the necessity for response on the part of those it met." the Running Father, and the Loving Father, the third and final part of the cycle on redemption, also appears only in Luke's Gospel (verses 11 32). It tells of a father who gives the younger of his two sons his share of the inheritance before he dies. The younger son, after wasting his fortune (the word 'prodigal' means 'wastefully extravagant'), goes hungry during a famine. He then repents and returns home with the intention of begging to be employed and renouncing his kinship to his father. Regardless, the father immediately welcomes him back as his son and holds a feast to celebrate his return. The older son refuses to participate, stating that in all the time the son has worked for the father, he did not even give him a goat to celebrate with his friends. His father reminds the older son that everything the father has is the older son's, but that they should still celebrate the return of the younger son as he has come back to them.

In Western Catholic tradition, this parable is usually read on the fourth Sunday of Lent (in Year C), while in the Eastern Orthodox Church it is read on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son.