PRODIGAL

In the old lectionary, the prime place for our Word of the Week shows up on the Saturday before the third Sunday of Lent. Not the word, but the idea, so that when you say prodigal to a speaker of English, he’s likely to think of the parable that Jesus tells, about the lad whom we now know as The Prodigal Son. A father had two sons, and the younger one came up to him one day and said, “Listen up, Dad. Give me my share of the inheritance already.” I’ve put it that way, because to this day if you go to somebody from the Middle East and you ask him, “What is the younger son really saying?”, you will get an answer that is perfectly reasonable yet perhaps astonishing to Western ears: “The boy is saying that he wishes his father were dead.”

So the father does what the boy asks, and sure enough, it doesn’t take long for the boy to pack up, go to a far country, and waste all of his inheritance on loose living — on drink and prostitutes, and who knows, maybe a little gambling, maybe he’s an easy mark for swindlers; the old song. That is why we call him prodigal: he spends and wastes. Then a famine hits, and he’s got nothing, so he hires out his service to a rich man who sends him to his farm to feed the swine. That sure must be a far country, because Jews did not raise swine. It gets even worse. The poor fool is so hungry, and so far from anything a Jewish person would recognize as home, that he longs not to eat the pork or the bacon, but to eat the slops they feed to the swine, stuff that not even the pagans roundabout him would touch. When he finally comes to his senses and returns to his old home, ashamed and penitent and ragged, and asks to be treated as a slave or a hireling, his father welcomes him with open arms and slays the fatted calf for a feast, because, as he says, “This my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and now he is found.” And here the story ends, right? No, not at all. There is still the older brother — and another kind of sin, the sin that threatens the most righteous of people. But I’ll save that for another day. I’ll say this now: I know of no other story so compact and yet so full of wisdom and unsettling surprises; it is stunning.

Jesus wasn’t recommending prodigality, nor does the parable take the sin lightly. Yet it was the same Jesus who told the rich young man that if he wanted to be perfect, he should go and sell all he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and come and follow Him. Alas, the young man went away sad, because he was quite rich, and was used to that life. When Machiavelli asks, in The Prince, whether an ambitious man or a prince should be free with his money, he answers that it all depends on whether you have the power yet or not, and whose goods you are giving away. It’s always good to give away other people’s money and land and take the credit for it, winning supporters, but once you have the power you want, you should err on the side of stinginess, because most people will simply want to be left alone to enjoy their own patrimony. That is a long, long way from the world-changing and soul-reviving wisdom of Jesus.

The best dramatic presentation of this parable that I’ve ever seen is in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus has baffled Peter and his other disciples by deigning to have dinner with the wealthy tax collector Matthew. Tax collectors were despised by other Jews. Romans engaged in “tax farming”: they said to you, “Here’s what we want from your district. You can keep for yourself all the overage.” The actual tax rate was very modest, because the Romans understood that they could never govern their vast empire unless they could get people to feel comfortable with the status quo. Anyway, Zeffirelli’s Jesus has dinner with Matthew, and it’s rich and glitzy, and there are some women in attendance who clearly practice the world’s oldest profession. Jesus is comfortable with Matthew and the guests, and then he suddenly says he wants to tell them a story. By this time, Peter, who has been hanging around, is in the doorway, glaring in. And Jesus tells the story of the Prodigal Son. It strikes Matthew and his guests to the core; and Peter too, Peter in the role of the elder son. Zeffirelli himself may have needed a lot more of the gospel in his life and a lot less of the world, but he did understand.

The word prodigal comes almost intact from Latin prodigalis, wasteful, free-spending, irresponsible. The prefix pro- and the root verb agere mean, together, to drive (something) forward, that is, to push away, fling forth, shove on. You’ve got your living, and you take a shovel and you fling it all in front of you, putting it not to use but to waste. The consonant d intrudes there for euphony, between the prefix ending in a vowel and the root beginning with a vowel. For example, Latin emere, to buy, becomes with the prefix re- not re-imere but re-d-imere, to buy back, to ransom, to redeem. Latin unda is a wave, but the verb re-d-undare is what you get when the waves slap back against you: as in redound. So here we have pro-d-igere, to drive forward. The agere root had quite a few Latin derivatives, many of which have entered English: action, nav-ig-ate (to drive a ship), mit-ig-ate (to make mild), and plenty of others. The pro- prefix has Germanic cousins we all know. One of them is fore, which means in front of, and whoever or whatever is most in front is, with our common superlative ending, first.

Return of the Prodigal Son,” Bartolome Esteban Murillo. Public Domain.

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