My mother said she would always take be back home whatever state I’m in, whatever happened – I’d always be her son – she said. I’m lucky – I have a good mum and a good dad for that matter too.

Although the Prodigal Son is a fantastic parable – one of the best in the Bible – there’s something very normal about it. All you mums and dads here today worry about your children – you worry when they’re growing up and get a high temperature, you worry when they’re teenagers and it’s a different set of temperatures which rise, and then you worry when they’re adults – you worry about their jobs, their finances, their relationships, their health, their families - on and on it goes. It’s no wonder the forgiving father in the story stands at the window worrying about his long lost son. 

“Whatever happens – she said – you do know, don’t you, that you’d always have a bed here. We couldn’t give you much, but you’d have somewhere to go”… said my mum. Not that it meant that she’d always agree with me, of course, … not that it meant that she’d always be proud of me …. She might think I’ve been a stupid so and so – I might even have done something genuinely bad – broken the law or whatever – what my mum was saying to me was not – whatever you do, whatever state you get yourself into, doesn’t matter… what she was saying was “whatever you do, whatever state you get yourself into – you’ll still be my son.” And that’s not quite the same thing, is it … and although we like to think of this parable as the prodigal son and the father who forgives …. The father doesn’t actually forgive – he doesn’t actually say the words “I forgive you” – he does something of even greater significance… “ Quickly, bring out a robe – the best one – and put it on him” he says .. so what’s going on? What’s the Father doing? In a simple and single gesture he is instantly restoring a stranger to being a son again … the prodigal son is given the status not of a servant or hired hand, but of ‘the son’ . In fact the Father probably thinks his son has been an absolute irresponsible fool – but he is still his son and that’s what counts … “Quickly, bring out a robe – the best one – and put it on him.” 

Now this parable is not just a good story – a wise tale of sin and forgiveness – error and restitution. The father is God, the Prodigal Son is us – we have all sinned, we have all gone our own way – and we should all come to our senses and return to our Father and ask forgiveness. And the robe – the best one – isn’t just any old best robe. If we were reading this in Greek we would see that the word for best is ‘first’ - it is “the first robe” - God is doing something big here and to understand it you need to go back to story of the Garden of Eden? Adam and Eve lived in paradise – what more could they want, they had everything – health and happiness, and wealth didn’t matter. They had no physical clothes of course, but it didn’t matter, they were not ashamed. But then they sinned, in the story they disobeyed God and they suddenly felt naked and made ‘breeches’ out of fig leaves for themselves. What’s all that about, you might ask? - Well it’s not just about covering up our private parts - private parts aren’t really embarrassing, not theologically any way, - what Adam and Eve are trying to do is cover themselves up – hide bits of themselves which they don’t want God, bits that they don’t want others, to see. And that’s what we do. We all know what we’re like inside – and generally speaking we don’t want others to find out. We have secret shames, secret deeds, secret fantasies, secret histories, - and we hide them. Not with fig leaves, that would be daft, but with smart clothes so that people think we’re successful or important or rich or respectable. Or with trendy clothes so that people think we’re one of the crowd, or not one of the crowd, or with attitudes or speeches or strongly held views or high morals - there are hundreds of different kinds of fig leaves we can hide behind. But although fig leaves look good on a fig tree they make rubbish clothes, and our usual efforts to look better or smarter or younger or even happier than we are never really work. 
Even my black shirt and my clerical collar is of course, just a fig leaf.
And in the New Testament Parable, God the Father says – enough of fig leaves - “Quickly, bring out a robe – the first robe – and put it on.” God puts back onto us the clothes we should have had in the garden of Eden. He reclothes us to be as we should have been from the first – not servants, not grovelling penitents, but sons and daughters…. 
And to make the point even clearer, the word St Luke uses for ‘robe’ when he writes up this story isn’t even a robe at all – it’s a stole – Stola – the long robe of the priests, of the scribes and the Pharisees – just in case we missed the theological significance, St Luke makes the point that the robe which the father puts round us is a robe of ‘righteousness’ – it means being right with God – being who we truly are.

And so let’s look a bit more at what this First Stole – this robe of righteousness – might look like?

“As God’s chosen one, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience. … above all clothe yourselves with love….”

That – my friends - is what the Best Robe looks like. That is what the sons and daughters of God look like, that is what we are meant to look like …. Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience and love.

And I’m sorry to do Greek to you again, but you can do two things with that reading from Colossians – you can think it means that you have to go out and find these things and put them on - that you have to work harder and harder at being more compassionate, more kind, more humble, more meek, more patient and more loving. – and I’m sure we should work hard at all these things – but in the end working harder and harder at all these things is just a bit like sewing breeches out of fig leaves and putting them – even if they are gold plated fig leaves….. or you can translate “clothe yourselves” by “Be clothed” - in other words, that God the Father puts these things on us … that it is God the Father who puts compassion and kindness and humility and meekness and patience and love onto us , day by day, over and over again. Clothing us with the Best Robe.

Ah – I can hear you saying …. But it’s not like that. I’m not very compassionate, I’m not very kind, I’m certainly not very humble or meek or patient and I don’t love as much as I should. If God is putting all these things onto me, why are they not working?

And for that you need the next part of the parable of the Prodigal Son – the bit Jesus didn’t say.

“The next morning the servants were busy tidying up the tent where the party had been. There was food to put away, dishes to wash, mess to clear. The prodigal son rolled over in bed, he had a stinking hangover – his head was throbbing like hell and he wished that he were dead. As he stood up the tent began to spin around him and pushing the servants out of the way with a Hebrew four letter word he threw up all over his father’s best Persian carpet. 
The Elder Son, who had only been drinking mineral water and had had an early night, since he wanted to be up at dawn to milk the goats, said to his Father “See I told you so, he’s just the same lazy selfish drunk he always was.” And the Father said “Yes, I know, but he’s still your brother and he’s still my son!”


At your baptism you were clothed in the Best Robe – in the letter to the Galatians St Paul writes: “for as many of you as were baptised into Christ, have put on Christ.” And I know ‘put on Christ’ is hard theology – what does it mean to ‘put on Christ’? but those of you who have been doing the Lent groups should by now have seen that when St Paul and the early church write about Jesus and the resurrection they don’t talk about what’s going to happen to us when we die and go to heaven, they don’t say that because Jesus died and rose again, so when we die we will rise again, they say something much stronger – they say that we have already died and that we have already risen again as new people. If we choose to be a Christian – and yes that is a very big ‘if’ – if we choose to be baptised, then we choose to ‘put on Christ’ and that means more than just copying him, it means more than just being like him, it means that we choose to be the Son or Daughter of God the Father – we willingly accept the Best Robe, we accept the ring on our finger and the Sandals on our feet. From now on, we are no longer just Paul, or Mary or Simon or Anne, we are Paul, Son of God, Mary Daughter of God, Simon Son of God, Anne daughter of God … each one of us – a new title, a new role, a new creation. The bond of Father – Son, Mother – daughter can never be taken away from us. 

And so the Parable of the Prodigal Son is not a parable about what will happen to each one of us when eventually we repent and turn to the Father, when eventually we die and beg for forgiveness. The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a parable of what has already happened to us – the Best Robe was put on us when we were Christened when we took onto ourselves the mantle of Christ …. God is now daily clothing us with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience. … and above all …. with love - we call that sanctifying grace, and it is usually for most of us a slow case of ‘work in progress’ ….. and we wake up with a hangover and vomit on the carpet.

The Rev'd Paul Kennington