Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” (1978) vs. The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32)

Oh, that’s a fantastic and fun comparison! Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” (1978) and The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) both revolve around themes of reckless behavior, getting into trouble, and the consequences that follow—but they have very different tones and messages.

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Warren Zevon — Lawyers, Guns and Money

• The song is a darkly comic, frantic tale of a young man who gets himself in way over his head in a foreign land, facing dangerous trouble and calling for help — “Send lawyers, guns and money, the shit has hit the fan.”
• It’s full of wild misadventures, reckless decisions, and a sense of chaos and desperation.
• The narrator doesn’t really own up to his mistakes but desperately wants to escape consequences.
• It’s cynical, sarcastic, and captures a kind of wild, self-inflicted mess with no easy redemption.

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The Parable of the Prodigal Son

• This biblical story is about a younger son who demands his inheritance early, squanders it recklessly, hits rock bottom, and then humbly returns home.
• The father’s response is one of forgiveness, welcome, and restoration—symbolizing grace and redemption.
• It’s a story of repentance, humility, and the power of forgiveness after foolish or sinful behavior.
• The tone is hopeful, loving, and focused on reconciliation.

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Comparing themes:

Aspect	Lawyers, Guns and Money	Prodigal Son Parable
Recklessness	The narrator’s reckless and dangerous escapades abroad	The younger son’s squandering of inheritance
Consequences	Facing dire consequences, desperate for rescue	Hits rock bottom and realizes mistake
Attitude to mistakes	Cynical, sarcastic, not fully repentant	Humble, repentant, seeks forgiveness
Help and rescue	Calls for external rescue (“lawyers, guns and money”)	Returns home seeking grace and restoration
Tone	Dark humor, chaotic energy	Hopeful, loving, redemptive

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So basically:

• Zevon’s song is a wild, tongue-in-cheek saga of reckless trouble and trying to get out of it by any means.
• The Prodigal Son is a timeless parable about making mistakes, recognizing them, and being forgiven with love.

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you first, no you first

Herbert McCabe and the Unfathomable Mystery of Divine Forgiveness

“Both portray God as anthro­pomorphically changing his mind about us: when we sin, God becomes angry and punishes; when we repent, God puts aside his wrath and re-friends us. But the reality is that God never changes his mind. He is always and eternally in love with us. McCabe puts it bluntly: “In a fairly literal sense, God doesn’t give a damn about our sin. It is we who give the damns” (Faith Within Reason, p. 157). We do not need to win his forgiveness, for in Christ he has already embraced us in grace and mercy.

‘If we are going to understand anything about the forgiveness of sin we cannot just be content with pictures; we have to think as clearly as we can…. The initiative is always literally with God. When God forgives our sin, he is not changing his mind about us; he is changing our mind about him. He does not change; his mind is never anything but loving; he is love. The forgiveness of sin is God’s creative and re-creative love making the desert bloom again, bringing us back from dry sterility to the rich luxuriant life bursting out all over the place. When God changes your mind in this way, when he pours out on you his Spirit of new life, it is exhilarating, but it is also fairly painful. There is a trauma of rebirth as perhaps there is of birth. The exhilaration and the pain that belong to being reborn is what we call contrition, and this is the forgiveness of sin. Contrition is not anxious guilt about sin; it is the continual recognition in hope that the Spirit has come to me as healing my sin.

So it is not literally true that because we are sorry God decides to forgive us. That is a perfectly good story, but it is only a story. The literal truth is that we are sorry because God forgives us. Our sorrow for sin just is the forgive­ness of God working within us. Contrition and forgiveness are just two names for the same thing, they are the gift of the Holy Spirit; the re-creative transforming act of God in us. God does not forgive us because of anything he finds in us; he forgives us out of his sheer delight, his exuberant joy in making the desert bloom again.‘ (God, Christ and Us, pp. 16-17; emphasis mine)

McCabe invites us to contextualize the inter-personal model of forgiveness within a proper construal of divine transcendence and the Creator/creature relationship. When we tell a story of two or more persons, we of course must present them as acting and reacting: I do something, and you respond; I respond to your response, and you do something. That is what happens between persons who live in time. Hence it is not surprising that when the biblical writers sought to tell the story of the God who had entered into covenant with Israel and the Church, they portrayed him as one person among a universe of persons, a person who believes and feels and acts and reacts, who gets angry when his creatures rebel against his just rule and who puts aside his anger when they repent. But it cannot be literally true. The literal truth is something infinitely more marvelous:

God does not respond to his world. He does not adjust his reaction to suit good people or bad. You do not have to be good before God will love you; you do not have to try to be good before God will forgive you; you do not have to repent before you will be absolved by God. It is all the other way round. If you are good, it is because God’s love has already made you so; if you want to try to be good, that is because God is loving you; if you want to be for­given, that is because God is forgiving you. You do not have to do anything, or pay anything, in exchange for God’s love. God does not demand anything of you. Nothing whatsoever. (p. 27)

The literal truth is Love—absolute, unconditional, infinite, unrelenting Love.”