He Ran Before the Speech

He has it word for word and he has had it since about February.

It starts: I know I have no right to ask. That is the first line and he is proud of it in a grim way, because it takes the ground out from under any objection before anybody can raise one. Then there is the middle, which lists what he did in the order it happened and does not soften any of it. And then there is the last line, which he has changed four times and which currently ends with him saying he would understand if the answer was no.

He says it in the car. He said it to a bathroom mirror once and could not finish.

And the whole speech, all of it, is aimed at getting to a door.

Because he believes something about that door, and it is the thing this article is actually about. He believes the door opens at the end of the speech. That the sequence is: full account, honest, unspared, and then, if it is good enough and if it is heard properly, a face that softens and a hand out.

So he has been standing outside for six months, rehearsing, because the speech has to be right.

And it has never once occurred to him that somebody might come out.

The father runs before a word is said

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him (Luke 15:20).

Read the order of events, because the order is the whole point.

The son is a great way off. He has not spoken. He has a speech; the story tells us so, and it is a good one, and he has clearly been working on it on the road, and it includes a line about being made a hired servant.

And before any of that, the father sees him, and has compassion, and runs.

The running happens first. The kiss happens first. The speech gets started later and is not allowed to finish, because the father interrupts it to call for a robe.

You are met before the speech and the meeting does not wait on your wording. That is the sequence in the text, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old story into a real welcome for a man who has been rehearsing since February, because Scripture says it is the goodness of God that leads a person to repentance rather than repentance that produces the goodness (Romans 2:4).

What the rehearsing is really doing

Now let me name it, because I think you believe the rehearsing is humility and it is not quite.

The speech is control. As long as you are still working on it, you have not gone, and as long as you have not gone, you cannot be refused. A perfect speech is a way of guaranteeing an outcome, and a man who is still perfecting one is a man who has not yet risked anything.

That is not cowardice. That is somebody who has been refused before, by somebody, somewhere, and who is not going to walk into that again unprepared.

You are welcome at that door and you have never once had to earn it. The word says while we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6), which is the whole gospel arranged in the same order as that parable, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that order believable to a man who has spent months getting his words right.

Compassion is a word about the body

There is a detail worth having in the Greek of that verse, and I will give you one and then leave the language alone.

The word for compassion there is a gut word. It describes something happening in the body, deep and involuntary, the way grief happens in a chest before a person decides anything.

The father did not consider his position. He did not weigh whether it was wise. Something moved in him at the sight of a figure a great way off, and his legs did the rest, and an old man in that culture running in public was undignified in a way we no longer feel and every original hearer would have felt immediately.

He did not care. That is the point of the detail.

You are the one somebody runs toward, and dignity was not consulted. Scripture says God is rich in mercy for His great love wherewith He loved us (Ephesians 2:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that into something a man can walk toward a door with rather than a doctrine he can recite.

And I will keep it honest, because you would smell a sales pitch. Nothing here promises that the human being at the end of your particular story reacts the way the father in the parable did. People are people and I cannot speak for them. What is settled is what God's face does when you turn round, and a man who knows that walks up a road differently even when he does not know how the door will go.