My wife discovered one day that one small diamond was missing from her engagement ring. I could not - in those days - afford to replace it. We turned our house upside down; in mid-winter it got a spring clean. We even emptied out the vacuum cleaner and pawed through the contents!
How distressed we become over the loss of even trivial things. We feel ... incomplete. We spend time and energy in the search out of all proportion to the real value of what we have lost. It is not what it is worth so much that makes us so anxious to find it as the simple fact that it is ours. And when we find it, our delight in its recovery is again out of all proportion to its worth. This improbable delight is a common experience. How we do like to tell our friends about it!
Now this experience - this very common experience - of losing and finding is the experience Jesus appeals to in the stories we have in Luke 15. The sheep, the coin, the sons (two of them) were homely examples from the lives of His hearers.
Let us follow our rules of interpretation.
One hundred sheep was in fact about the average size of a flock in those days. And it is no reflection on the shepherd that his flock was in the wilderness: the word simply describes land no-one owned, and green pastures would be found in it. The five thousand whom Jesus fed in the wilderness (same word) were ordered to sit down "on the green grass." The shepherd would have to carry the sheep draped round his shoulder, because when it was in a state of shock it was as stubborn as a mule, and would not budge.
In the second story, the drachma was not a valuable coin. But for a poor peasant woman barely able to make ends meet, it could mean the difference between desperation and peace of mind. More likely, it was one of ten coins worn as a chaplet round the forehead by married women, so its loss would be like the loss of a stone from an engagement ring. She lights a lamp and sweeps the floor because her peasant home consists of just one room, with only one gap in the walls for the door. So it is gloomy even by day. And the floor (stone or dirt) is covered with rushes which must be swept up.
The calling together of friends and neighbours goes on all over the world, in supermarket queues every bit as much as round village wells.
In the third story, the teenage son's restlessness under parental restraint hardly needs comment. An Egyptian clay tablet has been found dating back to at least 1,000 BC which bemoans the fact that "young people nowadays are undisciplined and show no respect for their elders"! But it should be noted that in the contemporary Semitic culture, the son's request would have been regarded as the height of impudence and an unforgiveable insult - as though he couldn't wait for the old man to die.
The laws of inheritance are faithfully reflected in the story too. It is a fact that even though the father had settled the estate on his two sons, he would still enjoy the management of it (and its usufruct) until he died.
In all three stories, the pain of loss and the joy of recov-ery, whether of a sheep or a coin or a son, is the whole point of them. That is where Jesus puts the emphasis ... "likewise, I tell you, there is joy in heaven."
The phrase about the angels was an everyday way of referring to God, for the Jews did not feel at ease speaking of Him too directly lest they "take His Name in vain." God's joy is reflected in the angels who surround Him, as a star's attitudes are reflected in his fans. "God rejoices," Jesus is saying, "the way any farmer or housewife or father does when they recover something lost that belonged to them."
This very human experience, which is the same all over the world, reflects something in the character of God. We are, after all, made in His image; God too has a care for what is His; He too is distressed by its loss and overjoyed by its recovery.
That is the point the stories make.
Now for the second rule.
Luke has supplied the reason Jesus told these stories in 15:1: Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear Him and the Pharisees and the Scribes murmured, saying, "This man receives sinners and eats with them." They were scandalised, and Jesus told these stories to answer their criticism.
By "receiving " sinners, they believed, Jesus was ignoring or condoning their immorality. The word 'received' means that Jesus welcomed them with open arms. It is the same word Luke uses to describe the spirit in which old Simeon embraced the hope of Israel when he took the infant Jesus into his arms. It means much more than that Jesus merely tolerated their presence in the congregation. That He enjoyed table fellowship with them meant very clearly, in that society, that He pledged His friendship to them. And He ought not, the Pharisees reckoned, not if He really was a man of God, not with tax collectors and sinners. Tax collectors were heartily despised because they were collaborators with Rome. The Jews in those days felt about them as the French and the Dutch felt about collaborators with the Nazis in World War II.
And the word 'sinners' described both those whose occupation rendered them ceremonially unclean by Jewish laws - like tanners and shepherds - and those who lived openly immoral lives - like thieves and racketeers and adulterers and harlots. As though Jesus today were to enjoy the very closest friendship with pimps, tarts and strippers, con-men and protection racketeers. Would this Jesus have us understand that God approves such lives - that He does not care how people sin? "It won't do," said the Pharisees. "It isn't right."
It was to deal with that situation that Jesus told these stories. That is the criticism these parables meet. "So ..." says Luke, to answer their criticism, to justify His own actions, Jesus told these stories.
Their point is clear as day.
"I am doing," Jesus says, "exactly what any of you would do for a sheep, what any of you would do to recover a lost coin. As any of you seeks diligently for what belongs to you when you've lost it, so does God. As folk rejoice out of all proportion to a thing's worth when they find it again, so does God. These sinners are people - people who belong to God because it is He Who gave them life. They're His, because He made them. Did not God Himself say, through the mouth of His prophet Ezekiel (18:4), 'All lives are mine'? These folk, who belong to God, are lost to Him. And their loss is a grief to Him. God Himself cannot rest so long as they're lost. And so, in His Name, I seek them. I go among them. I make real the love the Father bears them. And in my interest in them and my care for them, they understand how my Father in Heaven yearns over them.
"And look! See how they respond! They are finding forgiveness, and coming home. Do you see nothing, you blind Pharisees? You see me welcome them in my Fa-ther's Name, and you think in your prejudiced minds that I am setting a seal of approval on their sinfulness. I tell you, I am doing no such thing. Do you not see that in coming to me, they are coming to God? They are return-ing to God, these folk. Do you not see beneath the surface the change of heart in them that brings them to me? They are being freed from their sin. But you by your rejection would imprison them in it. My Father's forgiveness frees them from it. They are finding a new life with me. Do you not see that in walking with me, they are walking with God again? The forgiveness they find in my friendship is changing them."
This was Jesus' defence. It was Grace He was defending - the forgiving Grace of a loving and forbearing Father.
The Pharisees were obsessed by a morality of Law. These people had broken the Law, wilfully and persistently, and they were fit only to be condemned and rejected. There was nothing more to be said or done. But in the mind of Jesus, there was much more to be said and done. Divine Law is, indeed, directed against sin. But its purpose is that sin should cease. What more need the Law ask than that sin should cease? And if the Good News of forgiving grace - embodied in the Lord's own love for sinners - was achieving that end, then Grace was the fulfilling of the Law. Could they not see that?
God justifies the ungodly! If He did not, what hope would there be for any of us? Their trust in His forgiveness 'rightwises' them to Him. "By grace you are saved through faith" ... here it is in the Gospels - Paul's doctrine of justification by faith! This is what that means. (How much of his understanding of Jesus did Paul owe to Luke, who was so often his travelling companion?)
We may now gather up the teaching of these parables (including the story of the two lost sons along with the lost sheep and the lost coin.)
Why did Jesus tell three stories? One, surely, was enough to make the point.
True, but the three stories elaborate it with subtle, but splendid effectiveness.
The story of the sheep would appeal to the men in the crowd, while the story of the coin would appeal to the women, and help them to feel included in the yearning of God over His lost children. In a society where women were degraded, that surely mattered to Jesus.
The first two stories, because they appeal to a universal instinct, lower our guard. It is only sheep and coins that are lost, and all unsuspectingly we nod agreement with the point they make. But the third story strikes closer home -it is people who are lost, and you realise, "It is people - like me - He is talking about!"
Lost we all are; but we do not all get lost the same way.
(a) Sheep get lost by their stupidity.
They do not mean to get lost. They just nibble their way from one green patch to another, with no idea where they are going, till after a while, just satisfying their appetite in the comfortable company of all the rest, they find they are lost.
Masses of men and women get lost like that. They let their appetites lead them on from one excitement to another, from one appealing experience to another in the reassuring company of all the rest who are doing it with them without any idea where it is all leading - with no serious thought for the goal life was given them by God to reach. And one day they wake up puzzled, bewildered and dismayed to realise they are lost and they do not know why!
Lost like sheep, by sheer stupidity, thoughtlessness, waywardness.
(b) Others, like the coin, are lost by neglect
... and not always, or only, their own! Either they neglect the spiritual dimension of life themselves, just leaving God out of their thoughts; or they grew up in the care of folk who took no thought for them of their need of God. Nobody bothered; they did not bother themselves. And they end up lost. They never took any account of God, and then they wonder, like a man trying to arrange the spokes of a wheel without a hub to fix them to, why the wheel of life won't turn properly.
(c) Others, like the prodigal Son, are lost by sheer self-will.
They are not going to be told what to do or what not to do ... what to believe or what not to believe ... where to go or where not to go, by anybody! Not by their parents, not by their teachers, not by the church, not by God. And like the younger son in the story, they take all the capital God has vested in them - their brains, their bodies, their skills, their vigour, their personalities, and all the rest (which they were given) - and make off with it all in pursuit of their own selfish dream, and end up, like the boy in Jesus' story, not the master of their own destiny, but the victim of their own folly ... lost!
(d) Still others, like the elder brother, get lost through their self-righteousness.
Men and women still try to avoid close personal contact with the living God under cover of their own goodness. They hide under it, as though to say, "You don't need to trouble yourself with me, God. I'm OK. I'm keeping to the rails. Watch out for the others." But lost to God they are.
We are all lost to God.
It is easy to see why Jesus told more than one story. Just as the sheep is lost away from the fold while the coin is lost in the house, so the prodigal is lost away from the home, while the elder brother is lost at home.
Now to the last and most important point.
Whoever we are, whatever we have done, that is the truth. It is God who gave us life: He made us, so we are His. Whatever I make - a model boat, a knitted jumper - is mine by right of my having made it. We are all God's by right of His having made us. We belong to God. That is why he loves us. Whether we are a believer or an unbeliever makes no difference.
"What you are worth is what you are worth to God." We may not have much worth in ourselves. Indeed, about the only lasting worth that any of us has is that it has pleased God - the great God of Heaven - to set His love upon us; we matter to Him. You belong to God, however lost you may be, and He loves you as though He had no-one else in the world but you to love.
There is not one of us who does not ask at some time in our lives - despairingly - "Who am I, really?" Now we have the answer: "I am the one sheep - lost and away from the fold - whom the Shepherd loves and for whom He yearns." And He will not rest until He can bring us home.
It is because He so loves us that there is forgiveness for us, and the hope - the marvellous hope - of a new life that has no ending.
Do notice how different is the appeal of Jesus from the appeal so commonly made by evangelists. They are prone to say, "Look, God loves you, and because He loves you, you ought to belong to Him." That is not what Jesus says. He says, "Look, you belong to God. That is why He loves you and wants you back. Come home. There is no home for you anywhere in the universe but in the Father's house. That is where you belong. You have forfeited your right to it by your sinning - your waywardness, your neglect, your rebellion, your pride - and nothing but God's unfathomable mercy can give it back to you. But that is what He wants; that is what He yearns to do. Like the prodigal, come to your senses. Let God's forgiving love lead you to a change of heart (to repentance) ... and come home to the Father."
He sent His Son, who told these stories, to seek and find each one of us.
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