Still a Long Way Off

So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him.

Stop there.

Everything I have to tell you in this chapter is in that half sentence, and if you get it you can skip the rest.

His father saw him first.

Not at the door. Not when he came up the steps and knocked. While he was still a long way off, which means the old man was looking down that road, and had been, for however long it takes a boy to spend an inheritance and starve through a famine and work a season in a pig field and walk home.

Nobody told the father he was coming. There was no letter. The son didn’t send word ahead, because a man rehearsing an apology does not announce himself. Luke doesn’t tell us the old man had been watching. But a man who picks out a figure at that distance was looking.

At the end of chapter one I told you the father let him go and then started watching, and that both of those were true about the same man. This is where I show it to you.

He didn’t chase him. He didn’t send anybody after him. He didn’t cut off the money, because he’d already handed it over. He let a young man walk out of his life with a bag of cash and no argument recorded anywhere.

And then he spent the rest of it looking at the horizon.

Now watch the order of what happens, because the order is the argument.

His father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

Saw. Felt. Ran. Held. Kissed.

Five things, and not one of them required the son to say a word.

The boy has not opened his mouth yet. The famous speech, the one he wrote in the pig field and polished for a hundred miles, has not started. The father has no information at this point beyond a shape on the road that he recognizes.

He runs anyway. Toward a kid who cost him a third of everything he owned.

And when he gets there he grabs him.

I want you to hold in your mind what that boy smelled like. He’d been sleeping rough. He’d been in a pig field. He had walked for days or weeks in whatever he had left, and he had no money to clean up before he arrived, and there was no version of this where he presented well.

The embrace happened at that smell. Before the apology. Before the explanation. Before one single thing about his condition was corrected.

Then he starts his speech.

Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

Part one. Part two.

And then it stops.

In almost every Bible you can pick up, part three is not there. The line he built the whole plan around, the make me like one of your hired servants, the carefully drafted terms, the hedge, the thing that was going to protect him from an answer he couldn’t survive.

It isn’t in the sentence.

I’ll be straight with you, because there’s a version of this where a preacher makes a meal of that and doesn’t tell you the whole story. A handful of very old copies do have the line in there, and the careful translations put a note at the bottom of the page about it. I’ve written what I know about that at the back of the book.

I’m telling you now because it turns out not to matter nearly as much as you’d think, and the reason why is the next thing I want to show you.

Here’s the detail that took me years to notice, and I’d read this parable a thousand times.

The father never responds to the son at all.

Look at the text. The son speaks. And the father’s next recorded words are to the servants.

Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.

He doesn’t argue with the boy. He doesn’t say no, son, you are worthy. He doesn’t correct the self-assessment, doesn’t debate it, doesn’t reassure him, doesn’t even acknowledge that an assessment was offered.

He turns his head and starts calling for clothes.

And that is a far more complete answer than any argument would have been, because arguing with the boy would have kept the negotiation open. If the father had said you’re being too hard on yourself, there’d have been a discussion, and in a discussion the boy has standing to make his case, and the case he wants to make is that he should be demoted.

You cannot win an argument you’re not having.

The father simply proceeds as though the question of the boy’s status was never on the table. Which, from where he was standing, it wasn’t.

Then look at what he calls for first.

A robe. A ring. Sandals.

He sends for food too, a verse later, and there’s a whole calf involved. But the first three things out of his mouth are not about hunger.

Those aren’t comforts. They’re markers. In that household, the best robe is the one that says whose house this is. The ring is a mark of standing, and plenty of people who know more than I do think it’s the kind you press into wax when you’re acting on behalf of the family. And the shoes matter because in that world the people who worked barefoot in your house were not your children.

The father’s response to a boy asking to be demoted to hired help is to dress him, immediately, in every visible sign that he is not hired help.

Not gently. Not eventually. Quick.

And then the line that ends it.

For this son of mine was dead and is alive again.

This son of mine.

The exact word the boy had just told him he was no longer worthy to be called. The father uses it inside of a minute, not as a correction, not as an argument, but as a plain description of a fact he had never once stopped holding.

The son had worked out for himself what he was. He was wrong. And he was not told he was wrong. He was simply dressed in the truth and handed a party.

So here’s where that leaves you, at the end of the first part of this book.

You have a speech. I asked you to write it down in the last chapter and I meant it. You have a set of terms you’re prepared to offer, and you’ve been carrying them a long time, and they’re the reason you can bear to think about this at all.

You may never get to use them.

That should be a relief and it probably isn’t, not yet, because the speech has been doing a job for you and I’m telling you the job may not be needed and that leaves your hands empty.

Empty hands are the whole point. We’ll get there.

Here’s your move, and it’s the first thing in this book that I’d call spiritual, so I’ve put it at the end of the first part on purpose.

Go somewhere by yourself. Your truck is fine. Most of the honest praying in this country happens in trucks.

Say the true part out loud. Just the true part.

Not the whole speech. Not the terms. Not the qualifications, not the and I’m not asking for anything, not the I know I don’t deserve, none of the underlined phrases from the last chapter.

Say the one sentence that’s actually accurate. For him it was I have sinned against heaven and against you. Yours will have your own words in it and it may be shorter than that.

Then stop talking.

That’s the whole exercise. Say the true thing and then close your mouth and don’t fill the silence with your own terms.

You’ve been running this conversation for twenty years by making sure it never got past your opening statement. Try letting it go past.

You don’t have to feel anything. You don’t have to mean it the way you think you’re supposed to mean it. Chapter two already settled that. Clear thinking counts.

Just say the true part, and stop, and sit there a minute in your truck.

Because here’s what the first part of this book has been walking toward, and now you know it:

You’ve been rehearsing for a conversation with somebody who has been watching the road.

Part One ends here. What follows is the harder half.

The boy is inside now, in a robe that doesn’t fit the way he feels, at a party thrown in his honor by people who all know exactly what he did. Nothing about his history has changed. Not one thing. He is the same man who took the money, and everyone at that table could tell you the story.

Which is the actual problem, and it’s the one the parable never solves.

For that we need twelve other men.