I have always found the parable of the Prodigal Son a bit unfair and unsatisfactory. He gets his half of the inheritance early, goes off, spends it all, comes back with his tail between his legs and then ends up getting half of his brotherÂ’s money as well. If you were the brother who had done naught but good and who had not gone out and blown all his money out of his arse you might feel a little aggrieved. You may recall that me and Stew did a sketch about it for Fist of Fun. It concluded that you could live as bad a life as you wanted, enjoy yourself until youÂ’re dying in the gutter and as long as you apologise at the last minute you still get to go to Heaven with all the other idiots who have been boring and good.
The more I think about it, the more I realise that the prodigal son knew exactly what he was doing from the outset. He made a conscious decision to get his money and then just go and spend it. No-one is stupid enough to think that they can booze and whore the nights away and do no work during the day and not run out of cash eventually. He knew this was going to happen and he didnÂ’t care. I also think that he must have been aware that all the friends who hung around him when he was splashing the cash were going to piss off the minute he was poor again. ThatÂ’s obvious. He was spending the money exactly because he wanted to acquire the drinking companions and the loose women. He canÂ’t have expected them to hang around and to be honest he probably didnÂ’t want them to. He was using them as much as they were using him.
Logically it must have been his plan to spend the money and then go home and pretend he was sorry and then get half his brotherÂ’s money too. There is no other explanation. So the parable really does the opposite of what it intends. Unless Jesus really was saying go out and have a good time and then apologise at the last minute, because youÂ’ll end up with much more in the long run if you do. Was he satirising the religion of his fellow countrymen or had he found a loophole which would justify his own wine-bibbing and hanging around with low-lives and prozzies?
It wasnÂ’t until today that I made this mental leap that maybe Jesus meant the parable to be read this way. The traditional reading doesnÂ’t make any kind of sense. The Father wasnÂ’t clever enough to spot that his son had done this deliberately and forgave him, which means that God would make the same mistake.
With this in mind I went out and drank loads of red wine and whisky and tried to find some loose women. But I just got a head-ache and the night sweats.
The Bible lied to me again.
