Ah, the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Such beloved and well-known stories, reminding us that Jesus goes after the least of us, that no one is beyond Jesus’ searching. What could the Pharisees possibly be so angry about?
Well, a lot of things, actually. We know these stories so well that the shock value of them has worn off a little bit. Let’s really think about these stories for a minute. First off, this chapter picks up with the Pharisees grumbling about Jesus welcoming sinners and eating with them. It’s easy with our modern worldview to wonder what the Pharisees are so uptight about, but think about it from their perspective. In their minds, their entire identity, their very value as people, is built on their ability to properly follow the morality codes as they had interpreted them. We can argue about whether they had the correct interpretation, and from my personal study of scripture, they didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that in their minds, their self-worth was dependent on their ability to keep these codes. So when Jesus came in and started breaking all the rules of who was in and who was out, it didn’t just challenge their power, it and of itself a hugely threatening thing, it challenged their very identities as people.
And then in response to their grumblings, Jesus told them these parables. Which, let me tell you what, especially the first one, really did not help their mood at all. Why was the first one so offensive? The first parable in our minds probably calls to mind all the beautiful image of God as the Good Shepherd that we think of in the Old Testament. Psalm twenty-three, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” Isaiah forty, “[God] will feed his flock like a shepherd,” we could go on. These are the images that come to mind for us, because we do not have experience with actual first century shepherds. The Pharisees knew the biblical images, for sure. But more real to them were the shepherds they saw in front of them every day. And those shepherds, actual, real-life shepherds, were shiftless, thieving, and untrustworthy. Shepherding was listed among the despised trades by the rabbis, so Pharisees would have had an especially low view of the profession. So it felt pretty offensive for Jesus to follow up their grumbling about sinners and tax collectors with a story where the hero was a shepherd.
The other problem, of course, was the Pharisees would have considered themselves among the ninety-nine. Remember what we’d talked about earlier, their entire identity, their self-worth as individuals was built on this idea that they followed the rules, lived rightly, and thus were good in the eyes of God. So it hurt when Jesus started telling a story about how God was more interested in the people whom they saw as less than, who didn’t seem to be trying as hard as they were. If, and that in and of itself was a big if, but if they were going to accept this image of God as a shepherd and them as sheep, then at the very least that shepherd ought to be staying and protecting them, the good sheep, the sheep who did what they were supposed to do, and not wandering all over creation leaving them alone with no protection against thieves or wolves to look for some slacker sheep that had wandered away.
Similarly with the coin parable, the coin in question is a drachma, in other places in scripture it’s called a denarii, so about a day’s wages. We’re not talking about an excessive amount of money here. It’s not like the woman misplaced her million dollar lottery ticket. The looking for it is fine, sure. But if God is this woman, and the Pharisees the coins, does it make sense that God would spend more coins throwing a huge party to celebrate the lost coin being found? Doesn’t it make more economic sense to just be happy with the coins you’ve got?
Of course it does. In these parables, neither the shepherd nor the woman makes the smarter economic decision. These are bad decisions. Unless, of course, you are the sheep. Unless, of course, you are the coin. Unless, of course, you are the one lost, alone, and in an unfamiliar place. Unless you are the one who wandered off; or the one whom the flock wandered off from, and you don’t know where to go, what to do, how to get back. When that happens, when you are the sheep, when you are the coin, then these parables matter a lot.
As today is the fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I’ve been thinking a lot about that day. That memory is an important turning point in my life, because I was eighteen on September eleventh, two-thousand and one. It was my third week of college, I had just moved twelve-hundred miles from home, and nothing, no one, in the school, city, or state I lived in was familiar to me. I remember waking up to the sound of my roommate’s cell phone ringing, and her sleepy one-sided conversation with her boyfriend in Alaska, and assuming there must have been an earthquake in Anchorage, because what other twin tower could possibly have fallen? I remember standing in the communal bathroom brushing my teeth, when my neighbor walked by and remarked with total seriousness, “well, I guess we’re at war.” I remember skipping class, because how could something as meaningless as Critical Thinking 101 still be happening in a world such as this. I remember walking to the blood bank, and being turned away, because there was in fact not a need for blood donations in the Pacific Northwest. I remember standing at a vigil that night, arm-in-arm with a woman I barely knew, who I don’t think I ever saw again, looking up at the oddly silent night sky and feeling so very much alone. The strange silence of a planeless sky reminded me that home, without air travel, was an impossible distance away. I felt like the sheep, like the coin, alone without the flock that I had wandered away from, and that was now cut off from me, with no way to get back.
We’ve all had those sheep/coin moments. That moment where the world shifts beneath our feet and we cannot find our way back to where we were before. Maybe for some of you, like for me, 9/11 was that moment. Maybe for you it was the middle of the night phone call, the doctor’s diagnosis, the pink slip, the words spoken in anger that, once released, could not be taken back. For the Pharisees, this was that moment. That moment when everything they thought they knew, everything they’d built their lives on, was gone in an instant, and they didn’t know how to get back to where they were before. Their anger prevented them from seeing the ironic truth that Jesus spoke this good news for them. Because that is the promise of this parable, that no matter how lost you find yourself, whether you wandered away from the flock or the flock wandered away from you, nothing, not nothing, will stop the Good Shepherd from seeking you out. Nothing, not nothing, will stop the Patient Housewife from searching for you. And when you are found again, and you will be found again, for persistence is the hallmark of the kingdom of God, what a celebration there will be! Everyone is invited to the party, because the lost, the precious to God, have been found again.
Parables always have this deeper level, this description of the nature of the kingdom of God. But they also always have a surface level interpretation, a lesson on how we live together in this life. And I think the surface level message for us in this parable is that because God always comes and finds us, because no matter how lost we may feel, we can trust in the promise that Jesus seeks and finds us, then the work we do seeking and finding others, matters. The work that we do seeking and finding brings the kingdom of God to earth. Yesterday we joined with Lutherans all over the country in being God’s hands and feet in the world. We painted, we cleaned paths, we sorted clothes, we wrote cards, we’re actually still writing cards, and in fact, if you’d like to take some cards home with you to write, please do. We did a lot of work yesterday! And that work matters. That work made a difference in the world. Every new outfit, cleaned trail, painted room, opened envelope, told someone, hey, you are worth finding. You matter to us and to God, and you are worth finding. And so, dear sheep, dear coins, you are not lost, but you have been found. And today we celebrate with friends and neighbors, saying “Rejoice with me, for God has found what was lost,” and we got to be a part of the finding. Thanks be to God. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment