The Text: Luke 15:1-10
1Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were drawing near to Jesus to
hear him. 2And the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were murmuring and saying “This man receives sinners and eats with them!” 3And Jesus told them this parable, saying 4“What one of you having a hundred sheep and having lost one of them, does not leave behind the ninety-nine in the desert and pursues after the one being lost, until he finds it? 5And finding it, he lays it upon his shoulders, rejoicing. 6And coming to the house he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them ‘Rejoice with me! For I found my sheep that was lost.’ 7I say to you that in the same way, there will be joy in heaven over one sinner repenting than the ninety-nine righteous who have no need to repent. 8Or what woman, having ten coins, if she has lost one, does not light a candle and sweeps the house and carefully seeks until she has found it.” 9And having found it, she calls together her friends and neighbours, saying ‘Rejoice with me, because I found the coin which I lost.’ 10In the same way, I tell you there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
There are ‘Lost and Found’ departments everywhere―in shopping centres, hotels, public transport offices and schools―where people can go and claim that which is valuable to them they have lost. I remember when I was in primary school the lost and found department was a giant cardboard box with piles of shirts, shorts and jumpers to sort through, which I did once, hoping to find my lost drinker.
A drinker is not so bad but when we lose something that is valuable or necessary to us, and we still can’t find it after turning the house upside down, then we know the feelings of frustration, desperation and perhaps even despair: it might be our keys, a wedding ring, that critical part to a tool or toy, our watch, our wallet, an earring, important documents…
There’s a sense of that in today’s Gospel reading where Jesus tells a parable which we tend to refer to as the ‘lost coin’. Jesus says: “Suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?” Speaking of turning the house upside down, here is this poor woman searching frantically for her lost coin―not just a lost coin, but one of ten coins. The ten coins probably represents this woman’s life savings. One of them would therefore be incredibly significant amount of money―who of us wouldn’t be worried if we had lost a tenth of our life savings! And without the social security services in those days, a tenth of this woman’s life savings was all the more important! So she lights a candle and sweeps the house hoping to brush it out of the cracks and hear it tinkle on the floor, so that it can be heard and seen and found.
This parable is of course searching for something far more important that money. Jesus’ parables use earthly realities to show us how God works in his grace. The initial audience of Jesus’ parable are the Pharisees who grumble about Jesus welcoming sinners into his presence. They think that if Jesus were really God, he would not make himself ritually unclean by associating with them. But the Pharisees have not understood. Everybody is in need of God’s grace!
That’s precisely what God says in today’s Psalm:
The Lord looks down from heaven
on all mankind
to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek God.
3 All have turned away, all have become corrupt;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.
4 Do all these evildoers know nothing?
They devour my people as though eating bread;
they never call on the Lord.
5 But there they are, overwhelmed with dread,
for God is present in the company of the righteous.
In our natural condition humanity is so darkened by sin and in fact dead in sin, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, that rather than seeking out the one true God, the human race has all turned from God, become corrupt, and are not capable of even making a choice to believe in Jesus. Jesus says in John’s Gospel “you did not choose me, but I chose you”. There is not even one in the entire human race that is able to do good―sure, people do good works, but this is speaking of living each day with God.
Today’s Psalm says: “God is present in the company of the righteous”. This is the sticking point for the Pharisees in the Gospel reading. It is why they grumbled that Jesus welcomed sinners and had table fellowship with them. They reckoned that if Jesus were really God, he wouldn’t―and shouldn’t―be in the company of sinners. They, the Pharisees, were the righteous ones (or so they thought).
Herein is the problem and Jesus’ own issue with the Pharisees. It was not that they revered the Law. After all, God’s law is holy and righteous and good and he does want all people to keep it—and to keep it perfectly—even as we promise that we will strive daily to lead a holy life just as Christ has made us holy. The issue is that they were self righteous; they revered their own efforts at trying to keep the Law according to their interpretation of it and they failed to see nobody is able to perfectly keep God’s Law. They established thousands of man-made rules for how to live out that interpretation in daily life. In the process they obscured God’s own commandments, and they rejected his saving help in Jesus as the Christ, and made them look to themself as being somehow able to earn righteousness before God. The parable of the lost sheep brings this out―Jesus in effect is saying that the Pharisees, the shepherds of Israel, have lost their sheep through leading them astray with false teaching, and yoking them with the crushing burden of trying to earn righteousness before God, for as James says in James 2:10: “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” So the Pharisees had set themselves up with a burden impossible to bear. They had failed to realise that everybody―including them―needs God’s grace. It is actually those who recognise that they are unrighteous and helpless to help themselves and see their only hope in Jesus’ good works who are the very ones in a right relationship with God.
The sheep in the first parable offers no service to the shepherd and in no way earns or deserves its rescue. Jesus tells these parables to teach the Pharisees that they are among the lost. Like the coin in the parable, a lifeless object which doesn’t even know it is lost, so too are the Pharisees, for they trust in their own works to earn God’s forgiveness and favour.
Yet the central message of the parables does not lie in that which is lost but the ones who are searching. [I thought this was a most appropriate picture for God’s ‘Lost and found’ department, and it is precisely what Jesus would have us see as central to these two stories]. The woman and the shepherd are the central and active figures. They search for what is lost because it belongs to them, and they search until it is found. These characters represent Jesus―he is the Messiah who comes to seek and save the lost sheep of Israel. He is to be seen as the woman, lighting the lamp, sweeping the house carefully. Each parable highlights God’s grace in searching for the lost and his joy at restoring sinners back to him. Jesus never actually called these parables ‘The parable of the lost sheep’ or ‘The parable of the lost coin’―they’re names that scholars and commentators have given them over the years.
I wonder if they would be better called: “The parable of the searching God” because they are about God in Christ searching out lost sinners in his gracious and extravagant love. He sent his Son into the world and to the Cross to seek and save the lost, to pay the price to buy us back by taking our sinfulness upon himself and ransoming us with his own blood, that we would be his own, alone, forever. All this is a reality for you in your baptism. It was in your baptism that the God who searches for and finds the lost found you even when you didn’t know you were lost. It was there that he washed you, forgave you and united you with Christ and his own death and resurrection so that you may belong to him as his alone. It was there he gave you his Spirit to make you spiritually alive; to daily die to sin and rise with him to newness of life and see with the eyes of Jesus and love others with his heart. It was there that heaven was filled with the resounding noise of the angels rejoicing over you. It was Jesus who was lost for a time; abandoned and forsaken by his Father on the Cross so that you wouldn’t be lost to God.
There are still many who are lost who Jesus would have his church reach out to. Joined to Christ we are called to share in his mission as his holy priesthood, and made new in him in baptism, we are able to follow, albeit imperfectly. Through his word, the Spirit he gave us at Baptism continues to battle with our old spirit, the spirit of the Pharisees in which we think we’re really not that bad, not like those other people. He calls us not to wait for people to come back to church, but he calls us to be the church and follow him as his search party. When Jesus visibly walked this earth in his ministry, he did not wait for people to show up at the synagogue―it was often in his daily interactions with people in everyday settings that he taught them and showed them his love and grace. When Jesus ate with sinners, he didn’t just give them food on a plate. He gave them time in his day, he sat with them, he had conversation with them; he affirmed that they were important, he attended to their needs with his care. And that’s what we have all been called to as Christ’s church—not for the prospect of boosting our attendance figures and balance sheets, but simply because they are people who are lost and can’t find their way back home and they matter to him, so much so that he stretched his arms out on the Cross for them too.
It is a challenge―one that usually makes us feel uncomfortable. But we don’t have to search high and low to know who we should be engaging with―they are usually right before us. The lost are not necessarily always those who are the socially undesirable or trapped in terrible sin. There are the respectable lost, the law abiding citizens lost, the educated lost, the lost who contribute to society. They are our next door neighbours, the people in the supermarket queue, those we mix with in work and leisure. And after we’ve got to know them, and listen to them, we see that they are really not much different to us. They have the same needs, the same fears, the same longing for peace and hope. And they might even say: “There’s no way God would want a sinner like me”. That’s when we can say: “Let me tell you a story. There was once a shepherd who searched for one of his sheep. And when he found him he carried him home, and there was rejoicing in heaven…”
And as you retell that story, remember this is how joyful God and the company of angels in heaven is for you, for it was Christ who searched for and found you, and carried you safely home to God, rejoicing all the way. Amen.