Cut from the Cloth
The Very Revd Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
Sunday 21 June 2026
‘Cut from the Cloth’
1 Samuel 24: 1–17
Luke 14: 12–24
Last week the Church of England issued a formal apology for its involvement in historical adoption practices. The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of the ‘pain, trauma, and stigma’ inflicted by many Anglican-affiliated mother and baby homes in the mid-twentieth century. Tens of thousands of unmarried mothers and their babies lived in these. Poorly furnished, offering little privacy and inadequate sanitation, they operated in a social context dominated by patriarchal notions of family and of women’s sexual purity. Too often they afforded vulnerable mothers little dignity and little support for making independent choices about their babies and their futures.
The report which has informed the apology ends with a quote. It is from a woman adopting a baby girl. She is told that the baby’s dress was a parting gift from her birth mother. ‘I looked at the little white dress with its blue smocking’ she says, ‘and realised with a pang that this spelt heartbreak. But I was not privileged to understand quite how much heartbreak’.
There’s no trace of heartbreak among David’s men when King Saul stumbles into the cave where they are hiding. They rejoice: he is their enemy; he has been relentless in his pursuit of them; now the tables have been turned, and he is at their mercy. David steps forward, knife in hand…and cuts off a piece of the king’s cloak. Then he follows the king out of the cave. He does obeisance, and presents the cut cloth.
I imagine Saul staring at the fragment of fabric that David is clutching. I imagine him then looking down at his own royal cloak. It matches the fabric… and one corner of it is missing.
When we describe two people, or two works of art, or two institutions, as cut from the same cloth we mean that they have much in common: comparable backgrounds, outlooks, tastes, values, and opinions. Yet although David’s fragment is indubitably cut from the same cloth as Saul’s cloak – although it is cut from Saul’s cloak – it reveals the two men as cut from very different cloth. Saul has defended his crown, his authority and his popularity by driving David into the wilderness and seeking to take his life. David has responded with mercy, acknowledging Saul’s kingly status and refusing to lift his hand against him. Standing in the road outside the cave, his cloak ruined but his life secure, this truth dawns upon Saul. ‘You are more righteous than I’ weeps the king.
It’s a realization that never dawns on the dinner guests of Jesus’s parable. They believe that they are indeed cut from the same cloth as their host, or, quite possibly, from slightly superior cloth. So they issue their excuses for their ingratitude, a land purchase here, a livestock purchase there. Their host is one of them; there are pressing financial matters to which they must attend; he will understand because he and they are righteous. And their places are taken by the poor, the crippled, the bind and the lame; by people swept up from the roads and the lanes, by people cut from very different cloth…
But perhaps they are not. For they recognize their host’s generosity and the lengths to which he has gone. They acknowledge the value of hospitality and they appreciate the importance of thankfulness. In the righteous flood, decked out in cloth that is doubtless tattered and tasteless, filling the tables, overflowing with joy.
According to the social mores of the mid-twentieth century the adopting mother and the birth mother with whom I began were cut from very different cloth. In the common parlance of the day – for which the Church has at last apologized – the latter was probably called a fallen woman, sent away in disgrace to give birth to her child at a safe distance from respectable society. Yet the adoptive mother glimpsed the cloth of the baby’s dress – her birth mother’s parting gift – and she recognized in an instant that it spelt heartbreak. It spoke of a grieving mother’s love for a child from whom she did not wish to be parted. Perhaps the two women were cut from the same cloth, after all.