Lukes gospel emphasizes
God's love for the poor, the disadvantaged, minorities, outcasts, sinners and
lepers. Women play a more prominent part than in the other gospels.
All of Luke 15 concerns
finding lost things. Lost
sheep, lost coins, and celebration over one sinner who repents — Jesus' stories
are in response to criticism that he receives that "sinners" and
shares meals with them. The tax collectors and sinners were detested by
respectable people with good reason. The Roman authorities contracted out
collection of taxes; how a tax collector got the money was up to him. Usury,
fraud and excessive profits were common. Tax collectors worked for tax farmers,
who were usually foreigners. As such, they were ritually unclean. Nevertheless,
Jesus attracts them. Jesus did
not spend
his time with the
respectable religious people, he spent his time with ordinary people, people
who did not go to the synagogue on a Sabbath or church on a Sunday and he ate
with them. Jesus' contemporaries were staggered by the fact that he shared food
with sinners. What would be the equivalent today? Pharisees of course were forbidden to eat
with sinners and shepherds were such people. So he tells the story of the lost
sheep.
100 sheep was the nomal size for a flock. The shepherd in the story
leaves 99 well behaved docile sheep to follow the
naughty one who has wandered off.
What kind of a shepherd do we have here? We would sack him! He continues the search until he finds
the lost sheep. Once finding her he lays the sheep on his shoulders and plans a
party with his friends. The story
tells us that the God rejoices over the lost being found.
We move on to the next story keeping in our minds the
word "lost".
The lost coin in the story is equivalent to the cost
of a sheep- it is
the woman's life savings. It was a coin that women
saved to put on some sort of headband during their marriage ceremony. Once they
collected 10, they could be married "properly." So they saved and
collected these coins because their identity in first century Palestinian
society was entwined with married
status. This woman lives in a
poor house with a low door and no windows. She has to light a lamp to see to sweep. She searches carefully until she finds
it. And on finding it, she plans a
party to celebrate with her neighbours. God rejoices at the lost being found. The coin could
also represent a day’s wage.
We find the word repentence only on Jesus's lips in
Luke 15v7. In Aramaic it means returned to a rational state of mind. Luke’s stories of Jesus find us
returning again and again to those who have a change of heart; the tax collector
who stops cheating, the rich man who stops coveting, the conceited man who
becomes humble. Repentance is something done wholeheartedly, it is a permanent
change. Repentance is God driven, overwhelming.
So Jesus defends associating
with these people, using parables. Jesus asks if you had many and lost one,
wouldn’t you search until you found it? God is the shepherd/housewife; the lost
sheep or coin is symbolic of people who repent, who turn back to God. Neither the sheep nor the coin can find
their owner. Nothing is more frustrating than losing something from right under
your nose like misplaced keys. But, as so often in the parables, there
are twists which helps people remember them: what shepherd would leave his
flock in the wilderness? The Pharisees would find God symbolized by a woman as
outrageous (women clergy/bishops), and first-century shepherds were considered
lawless and dishonest. Would a shepherd really care about one sheep out of 100?
But God is like that?
These are small stories with
large points. These are parables not so much telling us what to do as describing
the nature of God. Jesus has chosen two examples of people who were
outcasts, shepherds and women. And it is one thing to lose someone or
something. It is quite another thing to know yourself as lost and needing to be
found. Can you remember feeling lost? I can.
The searching was to restore
the fold to 100, the coins to 10, and make a whole again. The reasons we need
to search for the 'lost' is because we are incomplete without them ... the
searching is so that we, too, can be whole. Carl Jung called his patients
"lost sheep" and the English word “pastor” is taken from the Latin
word for shepherd. There is no blame directed toward the straying sheep. Jesus in this
parable is seeking out something which is lost, finding it, and celebrating the
discovery. Israel is not the lost
sheep here, but the tax collectors and sinners -- they are the lost sheep of
the house of Israel that Jesus is sent to. Jesus is the good shepherd.
Is the church full of lost
sheep and lost coins? The church should be a great lost and found
department. Jesus is on a search-and-rescue mission. The main requirement for
being found by Jesus is to be lost. Who are the lost in our society? The
homeless, asylum seekers,
people sick with worry over money, people with stigmas. Simply someone you
meet? You know them. They live in our communities. Being lost makes us vulnerable and its good to come home, very good.
We are to let go of religious ritual and respectability and to mix with people who are not religious as Jesus did, to help those who are lost and want to come home. In recognising our lostness, there is a coming home, a celebration, rebirth, reconciliation and beyond
death, resurrection.
