The Third Line of the Speech

The tea from the hatch is too hot to drink and too thin to be worth it, and he holds it anyway, because it gives his hands something to do while the under-tens lose four nil.

He is on the rope with the other parents, in the line they always make, coats zipped to the chin, and his boy is somewhere in the pack of them chasing the ball across a pitch that is more mud than grass. Somebody's grandad is shouting instructions nobody follows. A dog has got onto the far end and a woman in wellies is going after it. It is a Saturday like every Saturday, and inside his own head, where nobody on this rope can hear, he is doing what he has done on Saturdays for longer than he wants to count.

He is working on the speech.

He knows it nearly by heart now. It has three parts. The first is what happened, or as near as he can put it, because nothing really happened, he just stopped. The second is the part where he says he knows he has no right to walk back in as if he never left. And the third is the part he keeps rewriting, the part about terms. He would not ask for much. He would come quietly. He would not expect it to be like it was. He would take the back row, so to speak, and be grateful, and he would not make a fuss. He has honed that third part on a hundred touchlines. It is the best written thing he has ever done, and he has never once said it out loud, to God or to anybody, because it is not finished. The terms are not right yet. He is still working on the terms.

The whistle goes for half time and the pack breaks up and his boy comes running, not toward the oranges, toward him. Both arms up. Mud to the eyebrows. Not a word out of him yet, and the man has already put the tea down on the grass and opened his coat.

You know that speech. Yours has three parts too, or two, or five, and it is very good, and it is not finished, and the third part is the one you keep coming back to: the terms. What you will settle for. How little you will ask. How you will make it easy for Him. I am not going to tell you the speech is wrong. I want to read you a speech from Scripture that was almost exactly like it, and show you where it stopped.

The speech had three lines

The younger son in Jesus' story wrote his speech in a pigsty, and Luke gives us the draft. Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants. Three lines. Read them slowly, because they are exactly yours. What happened. What I no longer deserve. And then the terms: the offer to come back on a reduced footing, to take the back row, to be staff.

Then he gets up and goes, and Luke writes the sentence I most want you to hear. While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran, and embraced him, and kissed him. Before a word. Before the first line, never mind the third. The welcome did not wait at the gate for the speech to be delivered. It came down the road to meet a man who had not opened his mouth.

Sit in the pit with me a moment first, because it is a real one. Living with an undelivered speech is its own kind of tired. It is a rehearsal that never gets a performance, and every rehearsal makes the terms a little smaller and the walk a little longer. You have not been refusing to come home. You have been trying to arrive properly, and the trying is what kept you on the touchline. I am not going to grade it.

Now hear this, in the present tense: you are welcomed before the explanation, and the welcome is not waiting on the speech. I am not laying my own kindness over your Saturday. Luke 15:20 says the father ran while the son was still far off, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a road in a story and lays it under the feet of the person reading it.

He talked over the third line

Now watch what happens at the gate. It is the most precise thing in the parable, and almost nobody notices it. The son starts the speech. Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. And then, before the third line, before the terms, the father turns to the servants. Bring quickly the best robe.

Count the lines. He got two out. The third, the one about hired servants, the one he had worked on hardest, is not in the text of what he said. It is in the text of what he planned. Between the pigsty and the gate, the third line disappears, and it disappears because the father talks over it. He interrupts. The son is still explaining what footing he would accept and the father is already calling for the robe that makes the footing irrelevant.

Before they call I will answer; while they are yet speaking I will hear.Isaiah 65:24

That is Isaiah, hundreds of years earlier, saying the same thing in one line. God does not wait for the sentence to finish. He answers in the middle of it. You have a Father who interrupts, and He is interrupting now, and the terms in your third line are the part He is talking over. That is not my reading imposed on the text. It is written in Isaiah 65:24 and enacted in Luke 15, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old promise sound like a voice in the room.

Look at what the father does not do. He does not say, go on, finish. He does not weigh the second line to see whether it earned the third. He does not accept the reduced terms as a sensible starting point. He calls for the robe, the ring, the sandals and the calf, and the sandals are worth a pause: readers have long noticed that a servant in that world commonly went barefoot and a free son did not. The father's answer to a request for a servant's place was to dress the man as a son. Staff was never on the table.

You are received as a son and not as staff, and the footing you were going to offer is not the footing you have. Scripture says the father put shoes on feet that had come to ask for a servant's place, and the Spirit who inspired that detail is the same Spirit who can make you feel the ground under your own feet change while you stand on it.

The last mile was never yours

Here is what I most want you to see. The son did the walking. He got up and he went. But the last stretch, the part where a person is close enough to be seen and not close enough to be reached, where you can see the gate and are still working out what to say at it, that stretch the father ran. The son did not do the last mile. He was met on it.

Paul puts it without a story. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Not after the apology. Not once the terms had been agreed. Still. And to a church that had been very far off he writes that they had been brought near by the blood of Christ. Brought. It is a passive verb, on purpose. Nobody in that sentence walked the last mile on their own feet.

You were brought near, and you are near, and the last mile is not on your list of things to finish. Romans 5:8 is where that stands, and Ephesians 2:13 beside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from reading a verse about distance to standing inside its answer.

And now the honest part about your mouth. The speech has to go somewhere, and it is not going to be delivered. Jesus put the moving of a mountain into a spoken sentence, and He set the faith it takes to say it very small, smaller than a boy's shin pad, so small the whole weight rests on the One being spoken to and not on the one speaking. Your mountain is a speech, and it has a third line, and you have carried it a long time. You have the standing to speak to it, because you are in Christ and He is in you, and the authority to say what is true over your own road was given to you at the same time the shoes were. The word puts the running on the father's side, and the Spirit is the one who carries a plain sentence further than a rehearsed one ever went.