The Parables of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin

Today we leave Matthew’s parables discourse behind and start another sequence of parables, scattered throughout the middle chapters of Luke. If Matthew’s were “parables of the Kingdom,” we might call these parables in Luke “parables of the lost and found.” And so, appropriately, today we’ll look at the first two of these, the Parables of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin, found in Luke 15.3-10.

Text

The Parable of the Lost Sheep is found in both Matthew and Luke. However, today we’ll be looking at Luke’s version, which also includes the Parable of the Lost Coin:

[15.1] All the tax-collectors and sinners were approaching him in order to listen to him [2] And the Pharisees and scribes grumbled, saying, “This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them!”

[3] So he told them this parable, saying: [4] “Which of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, would not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the lost one until he finds it? [5] And upon finding it he places it on his shoulders and rejoices. [6] Returning home, he calls up to his friends and neighbours, saying to them: “Rejoice with me because I found my sheep who was lost!” [7] I tell you, there will be joy like this in heaven over one repentant sinner, rather than for ninety-nine righteous people who do need to repent.

[8] Or, what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? [9] And finding it, she calls out to her friends and neighbours, saying “Rejoice with me because I found the coin that I lost!” [10] I tell you the joy before God’s angels will be like this over one repentant sinner. (Luke 15.1-10)

Experience

Reading these two parables feels like a warm hug. They’re just feel-good stories about God’s love and concern for the lost, and incredible joy at the found. But this time around, I did notice the context more: Jesus tells these parables to a group of scribes and Pharisees who are scandalized by his welcome of unsavoury characters. It was an interesting contrast: happy stories told in a contentious moment.

Encounter

In Luke’s narrative we encounter here a group of religious leaders who are disgusted by the company Jesus keeps. Interestingly, in Matthew’s version, he tells the parable to the disciples after they start debating which of them is the best.

In the parables themselves, we encounter a shepherd and a woman (possibly a widow) stressing over money. In both stories they lose something of great value to them and experience incredible joy when they find it.

Explore

So we have some questions to guide the rest of the discussion today:

• What are the similarities in the two narrative contexts in which we find this story and what might they tell us about its meaning?
• Is there anything else we can learn from the details of the stories?
• What does this tell us about God?

Jesus’ Audiences

The story of the Lost Sheep is found in two places in the Gospels, in Matthew 18 and here in Luke 15. The parable has a different audience in each case, and so it’s worth exploring this a bit to see what might connect them.

Matthew 18 revolves around the theme of greatness. When the disciples ask him what greatness looks like in God’s Kingdom, Jesus responds by pointing to a small child. In other words, their question is based on a faulty assumption: in God’s Kingdom, there is no ‘greater’ (18.1-5). Jesus then goes on a rant about ‘stumbling blocks’ (18.6-9). The word here is skandala in Greek, from which we get our word ‘scandal’, and the word carries both the figurative and literal sense in the New Testament. Jesus exhorts his disciples not to be a scandal to “these little ones,” and hyperbolically tells them to cut off any body part that acts as such. Then, going back to his original theme, he tells the Parable of the Lost Sheep to illustrate that what is insignificant and small in our eyes is precious to God (Capon; Scott 406; NIV BTS).*

Luke’s context is quite different. Here, Jesus tells these parables to a group of religious leaders who are scandalized by Jesus’ welcome of ‘sinners’ (15.1-2). Now, they are by any standard of ‘good religious wisdom’ correct — their Scriptures, after all, warned against associating with sinners (Psalm 1.1; Proverbs 1.15, 13.20, 14.7) (Walton & Keener). And yet, in that characteristic ‘anti-religion’ way of Jesus, he turns this on its head: what if one should be less concerned about others being a bad influence and more on being a good influence on others?

It’s fascinating to me how these two different contexts — one in which Jesus is talking to his closest followers and the other to his most dangerous opponents — are actually similar. In both cases, Jesus is talking to people whose minds jump to ranking and rating others, for whom questions of who is good and who is bad, who is in and who is out, are always top of mind. Both contexts also involve the idea of scandal: In the one, Jesus warns against being a scandal to the small and weak among them. In the other, Jesus is being a scandal — but crucially to the connected and powerful.

What we might call the theme of ‘anti-greatness’ in God’s Kingdom is common in all of the parables we’ll be looking at over the next couple of weeks. Robert Farrar Capon captures this well, noting that “the work of the Messiah will be accomplished not by winning but by losing.” He then identifies five types of ‘losing’ that embody who the Kingdom is for: the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead (Capon). Implicitly or explicitly, this theme is all over these passages.

Narrative Details

Framed in this way, we see that the Pharisees and scribes — especially as protrayed in the Gospels — understand themselves to be winners: they are not only sons of Abraham and therefore God’s people, but they also know their Bibles inside and out and are rigorous in keeping the Law. So, rather than be impressed that Jesus is attracting those who associate with Gentiles and are lax in their religious purity, they are scandalized by it (Green 572; Just 587; Levine & Witherington 414). As Justo Gonzalez put it, Jesus is not addressing the ‘lost’ here, but “the never lost” (Gonzalez 184). It’s a fun detail that the word translated as “grumbled” here was used in the Greek Old Testament translation exclusively for the grumbling of the Hebrews during the Exodus; by this word choice, Luke is drawing a parallel to another group that did not appreciate what God was doing among them (Walton & Keener; Just 587).

The stories he told would likely not have helped win them over. They feature a shepherd (Levine & Witherington 412 claim it would be an upper class sheep-owner and not a shepherd, but I don’t find the argument convincing) and a woman. These are both classes of people who would be viewed by the Pharisees as ritually (and therefore morally) suspect and inherently untrustworthy (Case-Winters; Walton & Keener; Gonzalez 187; Spencer 388; but see Levine & Witherington 416 for important nuance about women in first-century Judaism). The antipathy toward shepherds is strange considering that the shepherd was a common image for God in the Scriptures (e.g., Psalm 23, 87.52, 80.1; Isaiah 40.11; Jeremiah 31.10-11; Ezekiel 34.11-12), where it carried connotations of leadership, protection, and care (Scott 413). In that framing, it would be a natural analogy for how the Pharisees understood their own role (Just 588). But, as the Israelites’ collective memories of their pastoralist origins dissipated, what came to the fore were the difficulties this profession presented in keeping the strictures of the Law (especially as practiced by the Pharisees) (Scott 413; VanEck 128; NIV BTS; Walton & Keener). As Scott and VanEck note, this contrast between the positive biblical imagery and the negative cultural connotations of shepherding may have been critical to the narrative tension for Jesus’ audience (Scott 417; VanEck 133). (The distrust of women’s opinions does not deserve much comment; it was simply misogyny, with an added layer of ritual distaste for menstruation.)

At any rate, the man in the first parable is said to have one hundred sheep, one of which goes missing. He leaves the flock to track it down and when he finds it, he rejoices and invites his friends and neighbours to celebrate with him. A lot of scholarship has centered around whether this would have been considered ‘normal’ behaviour (Scott 415; VanEck 130; Green 574; Gonzalez 185; Just 589). While this is an interesting question whose answer would certainly impact how we understand the conflict of the story, it thankfully doesn’t really matter for the purposes of the parable: The only point is that this shepherd was concerned enough to track down the one lost sheep — and that, according to Jesus, God is just like that with sinners (Scott 407; NIV BTS; Crossan 38). And lest we miss it, collective celebration and joy — the things the Pharisees and scribes are unwilling to join when it comes to the ‘sinners’ Jesus attracts — is at the heart of the parable (cf., Green 573; Spencer 387; Just 588).

In the second story, a woman loses a coin in her home, and searches high and low for it. When she finds it, she too rejoices and invites her friends and neighbours to celebrate. Again, questions of her personal finances and the amount of money this entails don’t really matter. What’s important is just that she cared enough to look everywhere for it and celebrate when she found it (Crossan 38; Scott 102).

It’s interesting that each of the three parables in this sequence (including the one we’ll look at next time) raises the stakes, from 1/100 in the Lost Sheep, to 1/10 in the Lost Coin, to 1/2 in the Prodigal Son (Green 573; Spencer 380).

In both stories, what is found is compared to a repentant sinner. This offers an interesting commentary on what repentance looks like, since neither the lost sheep nor lost coin has done anything ‘bad’ and nor can they ‘repent’ of it (Levine & Witherington 187). Howard Thurman offers a lovely reflection on the lost sheep linking sin to separation and isolation, from God and from one another (Thurman; cf. Just 589). Similarly, Capon comments that “A lost sheep is, for all practical purposes, a dead sheep,” separated as it is from the protection of the flock and shepherd (Capon). And “a lost coin is likewise a dead asset” (Capon). All they can ‘do’ is allow themselves to be found and thereby be brought back to ‘life.’ And so repentance is nothing more in this schema than recognizing that one is lost.

What is God Like?

God is therefore described as a God who who goes out to seek the lost in order to make them found, who finds the dead to make them alive. The strange thing is that this teaching of Jesus’ is nothing new (Case-Winters). The word of the LORD came to Ezekiel in exactly the same metaphor, and goes even further than Jesus does here:

I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the LORD our Lord. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.” (Ezekiel 34:15–16)

And so, as Capon put it: “Give him a world with a hundred out of every hundred souls lost — give him, in other words, the worldful of losers that is the only real world we have — and it will do just fine (Capon).

Challenge

Subversion of First-Century Expectations

Jesus’ choice of images wouldn’t have gone over well with his audience, especially in Luke’s telling. These simple stories are a challenge to their worldview: Not only is being a ‘winner’, an ‘insider’, and ‘among the righteous’ not the golden ticket they think it is, but God is throwing a party for the very people who are ‘losers’ by their standards (Capon; Scott 102; NIV BTS; Nuechterlein Proper 19C). The criticism of the Pharisees is twofold: Not only are they not going after the lost (as Jesus implies is only natural behaviour (”Which of you…”), but they won’t even celebrate when they are found.

And, if we follow the logic behind all this, as Gil Baillie puts it, as far as God is concerned, “Repentance … is better than righteousness.” Why? Because “you can’t get to righteousness by trying to be righteous” (quoted by Nuechterlein Proper 19C). Once again we see the anti-religion of Jesus at work. To return to the imagery from the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, righteousness doesn’t look like what we think it does and so we’re in no place to judge, rank, or rate others. We can’t look down on ‘sinners’ or refuse to celebrate their repentance, because we’re all sinners and by our judgement we only serve to judge ourselves.

Contemporary Challenge

The Pharisees in Luke’s story don’t take kindly to the invitation these parables present to put oneself in the shoes of a person they despised (Green 574; Spencer 384). This always presents a helpful challenge for us as twenty-first century readers. Who are the despised in our midst? And are we willing and able to put ourselves in their position and empathize with the realities of their lives?

On another tack, Paul Nuechterlein quotes extensively from the late French philosopher Michel Serres, who saw these parables as offering a strong critique of Western capitalist societies:

[The lost sheep] express[es] the principal of the non-sacrificial economy … The one who brings back the lost animal turns the entire economic logic upside down …. And as friends celebrate the return of the stray one, sacrifice is transformed into a positive feast: we will all rejoice together, without execution or expulsion, that the victim has returned to the fold. … Not only does this gesture refuse all the economy founded on calculation, even though minimum, of the one percent loss. It demonstrates positively that what has to be done is precisely to save that which by custom and reason we allow to be lost … Economist, turn your science upside down in order to go searching purposefully for the miserable, the sacrificed. Scientist, change your logic to save the victims of progress. (quoted by Nuechterlein Proper 19C)

It’s hard to fault the logic here: If God refuses to allow one sheep to remain lost, so must we be committed to ensuring no one slips through the cracks of society.

Expand, with Summary & Conclusions

How does our emerging interpretation far against our criteria of growth in faithfulness and love? In these parables, Jesus confronts those who would rather cling to their own judgments than rejoice at God’s mercy. If we’re honest, that’s all of us sometimes. The good news is that that means, paradoxically we’re all lost, and if we just recognize that fact and let go, God will find us and bring us back into the fold. Anything that tears down the altar of self-righteousness and promotes humility helps us to grow in love and grace. And of course, this means there’s always cause to join the party.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.