Day 38 - The Prodigal

Happy new year! It’s the sixth of April, which used to be called the 25th of March, up until 1752, when 11 days fell out the western world’s pocket, in what was frankly an embarrassing and confusing time, and one of the most most messy puddings we ever put on the calendar. We stepped straight from Wednesday the second of September to Thursday the 14th of September, and the only real bit of relief is that Thursday followed Wednesday, as God surely intended.

Up until that year, when, unrelated, Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, the 25 of March was the UK’s official first day of the year! And then, come October, March 25th got bumped to April, lost its year-starting status, and since then it remains the start of the tax year. Time to get fiscally responsible, or fiscally prodigal. You do you.

The Bible warns against prodigality, but the word ‘prodigal’ is as wrapped up in its parable as ‘Samaritan’ as to have lost almost all meaning to the common ear. We all know the prodigal son was prodigal, but where else do you hear that word. It sounds like ‘prodigious’, which is positive, or prodigy, which is an unnerving child with so much potential to mis-spend. The words are not, in fact, connected. ‘Prodigy’ and ‘prodigious’ are from prodige, from prodigium, an omen, a portent, a prophetic sign. A wonder! ‘Prodigal’ is from ‘prodigus’, wasteful, given to using up and squandering.

The prodigal son asked his father for his inheritance early, and then squandered it, spent it foolishly, he spaffed it up the wall, which was both insulting and reckless, and it’s a wonder he didn’t die, as people tend to do in cautionary tales. You’d think, in a proverb about foolish action, that someone like this, who is the author of their own downfall, would get a bad ending — but the real thing of wonder in the parable is that, having fallen on hard times and sloped back home to offer himself as a slave or servant, he’s entirely forgiven.

What’s the opposite of prodigal? Etymologically I want to suggest ‘antidigal’, but the word is really avaricious, which isn’t the quite same as being prudent and keeping from squandering. It’s Scrooge McDuck style hoarding, penny-pinching, sitting on your wealth like it’s a glorious commode, and you will never part from your golden egg. Fun fact: in German ‘besitzen’ is to own something and ‘besetzen’ is to occupy, something, whether it’s a town you conquered or a chair you’re sitting on. I like that the two are one and the same for dragons and their hoards.

Prodigality and avarice are both sins on opposite end of the spectrum. Which are you more given to? Yeeting or yoinking money? The best bit of avarice I can find in the Bible is the Parable of the Rich Fool, in Luke 12. The fool in question has such a successful farming business that he expands and expands, building bigger barns to hoard his wealth. And he says to his own soul, "Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.” I realise the last part feels a little spendy for a scrooge, but I think the big point here is that he has so much wealth, he need never work again. And then he dies. In 1990, I had a one-line role as God in a school rendition of this: ‘You fool! This very night you must give up your life, and then who will have all these things you have piled up for yourself?!’

Is it a parable on early retirement and laziness, or perhaps about the reality of mortality - which I love to remind myself about? Jesus spells it out in the surrounding verses: ‘So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God’. It’s about covetousness, avarice. Our life does not consist of the abundance of things we possess.

Two parables to keep in mind for the new tax year. Don’t spend incontinently, and don’t hoard constipatedly. Don’t buy all the drugs and snort ‘em away. Don’t buy all the homes and keep them from first-time buyers. Don’t McDuck ‘em! To reference another favourite parable, if you have a portion of money, don’t lay it up in a napkin, don’t yeet it out the window. The parables don’t actually say a lot about how we *should* spend our money( though Jesus and the early church had plenty of advice on that, and generosity and support are way up there). There’s plenty of advice there for the new tax year. If you got money, don’t be extreme, and maybe beware. Someday soon it won’t be yours.