Loving God, may my words inspire thought and reflection on the marvelous complexity that is your creation.
I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I hate losing things, and if I do I can get quite obsessive about it. It’s most extreme when it comes to things like tools in the garage. Some of these have been with me for decades and though they are inanimate objects, they feel like faithful friends. I search several times over, huff and puff a few times, search again, throw a little tantrum and generally make a complete mountain out of a molehill. If do find the offending spanner anyone would think I had just won Lotto.
In our Gospel from Luke this morning, Jesus tells parables of loss and restoration, bringing powerful messages for in just10 verses. However if we left it at that, first I’d have to find something else to talk about, and second there is more in Jesus’ message than first meets the eye.
The last time it was my turn to preach, it was the story of the Good Samaritan. This time we have the lost sheep and lost silver coin, almost as well known. The problem with preaching on the well known parables is that everyone has heard just about everything there is to say about them before. To be frank, some of the things I’ve heard make me a little uncomfortable. Occasionally the words of Jesus in the Gospels are open to some pretty uncompromising interpretations. Take last week’s gospel from Luke in which Jesus tells us that to follow him we have to put him before even our closest family members. Michael Smart did a superb job of putting that into context and explaining it, but extreme groups have been known to use that very text to ‘convince’ their followers into cutting off all contact with their families and loved ones.
Though it’s not quite as forceful an example perhaps, I often feel the parable of the lost sheep falls into the same category. I’ve heard preachers use their sermon to gently (well we are Anglican after all) chide the congregation, suggesting they may be just a teeny weeny bit like the Pharisees because they’re not busy going out corralling sinners and hauling them in to Sunday morning service. It may be true, but the reality is that most of the people in church are probably struggling along with their own full lives, trying to fit a Christ-like ministry in with everything else, and if the opportunity presents itself – trying to reach out to love the unlovable. To offload the Pharisee guilt onto them is, in my opinion, inappropriate.
I also feel that to concentrate too much on verse seven, the repenting sinner, at the expense of the whole story is to miss the point a bit. Not that that I underestimate the joy in heaven at the event, but it’s only part of the whole picture. Some interpreters have used this story to place great responsibility on individuals to repent at the expense of the collective responsibility of all the baptized to take their mission out into the world.
Many interpreters of the parable of the lost sheep make is to take it out of context and assume it was for a wider audience. I have to be honest here and let you know when I say I believe, I mean I had a bit of a hunch, and when I researched it, I found more learned people than me had written on the subject. In effect the first seven verses of the Gospel reading show Jesus aiming a scathing critique at the Pharisees, making references to Old Testament scripture and calling into question their religious leadership. My primary source is a book called Jacob and the Prodigal by Kenneth Bailey, which as the title suggests is mainly about the parable of the prodigal son and the Jacob story in Genesis, however I gained many insights from it into the story of the lost sheep.
So what are we seeing in his first seven verses? Well the Pharisees are whingeing because Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners. Though Jews, tax collectors were universally reviled because they were contracted by the Romans to collect local taxes, and allowed to keep any monies they took over and above for themselves. And in this context, sinners, though it can mean naughty people, tended to mean people of low social standing who were lax in their observance of Jewish law. The Pharisees took this as a snub whether or not Jesus intended it. Hearing their carping, Jesus told them the parable, laden with a symbolism the Pharisees should not have failed to grasp.
When he asks them which one of them, upon losing one of their hundred sheep would not go and look for it, Jesus is cleverly playing with words: firstly with the words he chooses he’s equating them with shepherds, an occupation well below their social status, but also by doing so he is clearly alluding to Ezekiel 34: 1-10 Shepherds who feed themselves but not their sheep,… the sheep with no one to seek or search for them. They sit in judgement on the spiritual virtue of others, but do nothing to encourage or enable people to attain it. It is possible that the reference to shepherds may also have reminded the Pharisees of the prophecy in Jeremiah 23:1 which rebukes the shepherds of Israel and foretells of a righteous branch who shall reign as king.
Some commentators have made much of the fact that the Shepherd left 99 sheep in the wilderness to search for one, but wilderness actually refers to open country, suitable for sheep grazing and relatively safe. In any case it is likely the Shepherd would have had an assistant with whom to leave the sheep. That distraction aside, the shepherd would have been taking some risks going out into the night into less hospitable countryside in search of the lost sheep. Apart from natural hazards there were wild animals and bandits, and when he finally found the sheep he would have had no hesitation in putting it over his shoulders and carrying it, all 50 kilos or so, back to the village. It could be suggested that having referred the Pharisees back to old Testament scripture Jesus was now being prophetic, giving us a foretaste of the extraordinary sacrifice of one individual to save the lost sheep, which could be taken to represent humankind, indeed the physical image of the Shepherd carrying the sheep across his shoulders has been compared with Jesus carrying his cross.
At this point you may be thinking that if I can spend so much time delving into just seven verses of one chapter of one gospel, then perhaps I should get out more, but in doing so I have discovered rich symbolism and addressed my concerns about some interpretations of this parable.
So I’d like to deal with them one by one in the light of what I think I have discovered:
1. Pharisee guilt – though we are all capable of being little Pharisee-like from time to time, we are not the target of the scathing critique in the parable, but before we congratulate ourselves too much we must realise that we are in fact the 99 other sheep. In this context, not a bad thing, we are the extras in this movie. However if any one of us should stray and get lost we know that our Shepherd will drop everything and come and find us.
2. Repenting sinners and sheep – when a sheep goes astray it doesn’t plan it, it’s a sheep, it has a limited attention span. Sheep are usually preoccupied with the next mouthful of grass. Humans don’t usually stray from God with ‘malice aforethought’, often it’s just one thing after another’ and before you know where you are, God is just not in the picture in any more. In the story, Jesus is not dismissing the wider community of the people of God as mere sheep, he is denouncing the poor spiritual leadership of that time and the sheep symbolism points back to Isaiah 53:6 all we like sheep have gone astray.
3. Repentance and atonement – Christ reminds us that the lost sheep did not have to earn its rescue, it was enough for it to be lost.
In the story it was rescued by the freely offered grace of the shepherd, and the full cost of its atonement borne by the shepherd.
So apart from hopefully sharing my sense of wonder at the richness of imagery in this short parable, what is it telling us for today? Are we more than sheep thoughtlessly straying from time, occasionally getting totally lost, and less than hypocritical Pharisees looking down on the less devout than ourselves? Are we tax collectors and ‘sinners’ seeking to eat with Jesus?
I will speak for myself and say I am all of the above at various times, but most importantly, and this is the one thing I share with you all, I am also a shepherd. By being baptized I share a common ministry with all the baptized which brings a commission to be a shepherd, to seek the lost sheep and do all I can to return them safely to the flock.
But I won’t find any if I don’t look for them.
