The Robe Came Out First

Serafina had the speech. She had had the speech for four years and she had improved it considerably in that time.

It covered everything. Why she went. Why she did not ring. The bit about the money, which she had a whole paragraph on and which she had rewritten more than any other section. The part about her father's birthday. An acknowledgement that she understood if things could not go back to how they were.

She had it in the order she wanted. She had the first sentence memorized so that the first sentence at least would come out properly, because she knew she was going to cry and she wanted the first sentence to be clear.

The yard was full when she came up the lane. It was somebody's christening. She had picked the day badly or well, depending on how you look at it, and there were about forty people out there and a table with a cloth on it and someone's speaker playing something.

She got about eleven steps into the yard.

Her aunt saw her first. And her aunt did not say anything at all. Her aunt took off her own cardigan, which is not even a good cardigan, and put it round Serafina's shoulders, because it was March and Serafina had come on two buses in a jacket.

And that was it. That was the moment.

She got the first sentence out. She had memorized it and she got it out and she is glad she did.

She did not get the second one. Her mother arrived, and then somebody's child arrived, and then somebody said something about a plate, and the speech, all four years of it, all of the rewrites, went absolutely nowhere and has never been delivered and never will be.

She said afterwards that she had spent four years believing that the way back in was through a door made of explanation, and that the door had turned out to be a cardigan.

You may have a speech too. Most people who have been away from something have one, and it is usually good, and it is usually rehearsed, and it usually covers the money. And nobody has told you what happens in the most famous homecoming story ever told, in what order.

Read The Order Of Events

Everybody knows the story. Almost nobody notices the sequence, which is where the whole weight of it sits.

The son has a speech. Luke gives it to us in full, twice, once when he composes it and once when he starts saying it. It is a good speech. It has a plan in it about being made a hired servant, which is a proposal, a way of paying his way back into something.

He gets partway through.

"But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet."Luke 15:22

The father interrupts him.

Not unkindly, and not to correct him. He turns to the servants mid-sentence and starts issuing instructions about clothes, and the son's proposal about being a hired servant never gets an answer, because it never gets finished.

You have been rehearsing a speech that was never going to be evaluated. Luke 15 has the robe called for before the speech is complete, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that ordering and stands it in a yard in March with forty people and a christening going on.

And notice what the three items are. A robe, a ring, and shoes. Not one of them is a payment or a probation. They are all things that go on a person, and all three are things that say, to everybody in the yard, what this man is. The father does not argue with the speech. He dresses it out of existence.

You were dressed rather than assessed, and the order of those two things is the entire point of the story. That is what the written word does with a person coming back, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an order of events land in somebody who has rewritten a paragraph about money more times than they can count.

No Speech Is Required Here Either

Now let this page be what it is describing, because an article about an interrupted speech that ends by asking you for something would be a very poor joke.

Nothing here asks you for anything. There is no figure in this article, no proportion, no percentage, no practice you are being enrolled in, no sign-up sheet, no membership, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

And if money is part of your speech, as it is part of most people's, then hear this precisely: this site does not want it, will not mention it again, and has no view on it. The paragraph you have rewritten forty times is not going to be read here and does not need to exist.

You have not been asked to explain yourself to get in. It is written that while we were yet without strength Christ died for the ungodly, which settles the timing question before anybody could compose anything, and His Spirit is the one who has been walking up the lane beside you for the whole of the four years.

And you are fully welcome today with an undelivered speech in your pocket, because the robe in that story is called for before the sentence ends, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from putting a door made of explanation at the end of it.