I Did Not Get to Finish the Speech

Róisín has been back for four years and she has not sat down properly once.

She was away for eleven. That is her own number and she says it evenly, and there is nothing in the eleven years that would shock anybody who has lived a while, and there are two things in it that she has told one person.

She came back on an ordinary Sunday, quietly, and sat near the door.

And people were good to her. That has to be said, because the story where they were not is the story everybody expects and it is not this one. A woman she barely knew put a hand on her arm and said something perfect and did not follow her about afterward, which is a skill.

And ever since, for four years, Róisín has been on her best behavior.

She is first there. She stacks the chairs. She never says anything in a discussion until it has gone round twice and she is sure her contribution is genuinely needed. She has never once asked anybody for anything, and she has never once been late, and when they do the thing where everyone says what they are thankful for she says something short and true and small.

It looks like humility and it is not.

It is a woman serving out a sentence, carefully, so as not to be noticed, in case somebody remembers.

They asked her to read something at a service in the spring. Two minutes. A passage, out loud, that is all.

She said no.

And afterward, in the car park, Maeve asked her why, and Róisín did the light deflection thing and Maeve did not take it.

And Róisín said, "I do not think I have earned that yet."

And Maeve said, "Earned it since when?"

And Róisín could not answer, because there is no date. Nobody ever put her on probation. Nobody ever set a term. She invented the whole arrangement herself on the drive home from that first Sunday, and she has been serving it faithfully for four years, and the only person in the world who knows about it is her.

She noticed something else after that conversation.

She has never once told anybody about those years without putting an apology on the end of it. Not the words I am sorry. A tone. A small closing gesture that says: and I know.

Every time. For four years.

Now let me ask you how long yours has been running.

Because if this is yours there is no start date and no end date and no judge, and you have been keeping the terms of it perfectly.

The interruption

Everybody knows this story and almost nobody notices the interruption.

The younger son is on the road home and he has a speech. He has written it, and the text gives it to us twice, and the last line of it is the important one: make me as one of your hired men. He is not coming back as a son. He is coming back to apply for a job.

And he starts it.

But the father said to his slaves, "Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet."Luke 15:22

Look at where that sentence falls.

The son has got through the first part. Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son. And the next line, the prepared one, the offer, does not appear. The father speaks over the top of it.

He never gets to say hired men.

And look at what goes on him. The robe is the household's best, which is a public statement. The ring is authority, because a ring seals documents. The sandals are the detail everybody misses: slaves went barefoot in that house, and a son did not. Putting shoes on him is the father settling, physically, in front of the staff, what category this man is in.

All three go on before the boy has finished speaking. Not after an assessment. Not after a season of proving. The father is running before any of it, which is the other thing that scandalized the first people who heard it, because men of that age and standing did not run.

So hear this said over you, standing in a car park unable to answer a simple question. You are not on probation and you never were, and the terms you have been keeping so carefully for four years were written by you and by nobody else. That is written into a story Jesus told about a father who talked over the top of the speech, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry Abba, Father, and adoption is a legal word about standing and not a mood.

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to be careless about the eleven years.

They happened. There are two things in them you have told one person and I am not going to breeze past that with a phrase about grace, because you would rightly stop listening.

And I am not going to tell you the years cost nothing. Some of them cost other people something, and you know exactly which ones, and a God who pretended otherwise would be no use to you at all.

Here is what I am telling you.

Your standing was never the thing that was damaged.

You have been treating the whole of it as a debt to your position in the family, and it never was. It was a debt to particular people, some of which you have already dealt with and some of which you may still need to, and that work is real and it is a different piece of work from this one.

The son in that story owed his father money. What he got back was not a repayment plan. It was a ring.

And here is the part that will actually change your week. The choosing that put you in this family did not happen when you came back on that ordinary Sunday. It happened before the foundation of the world, which means it also did not stop during the eleven years. You did not leave the family and reapply. You were somewhere else, and you were His the entire time you were there.

The word says nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and Paul makes a list first and puts things on it worse than anything in your eleven years. And the Spirit of God is the one who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, and that is present tense and it has no probationary clause in it.