19 - Chapter 19

CHAPTER XIX THE LOST SHEEP AND THE LOST COIN Mat 18:10-14; Luk 15:3-7; Luk 15:8-10.

HITHERTO we have dealt with parables which answer the question why so many reject the invitation to the Kingdom, which picture the transcendent worth of citizenship in the Kingdom, and show that there is a searching test for candidates for citizenship. We turn now to other parables which tell us something about the King and about the qualifications for citizenship. One would naturally take these points separately, but in the parables the relation of the King to the citizens is so vitally connected with the relation of the citizens to the King and to each other that they must be studied together.

We have seen that Matthew places the Lost Sheep in a different context from Luke, and gives the parable a somewhat different turn.

Yet it may well have been that the first application of the three “ lost ’ parables was a defence of the ministry to the religious outcasts. They were included among the “ lost,” though Jesus knew that among the Pharisees there were many that were more hopelessly lost. The “ sinners ’ of the Gospel story corresponded with some degree of accuracy to the nonChurchgoers of our day. It would require more courage than most of us possess to suggest that attendance or non-attendance at Church is the hall-mark of the distinction between the sheep and the goats. The “sinners” might be bad men or women; but the designation covered all who did not choose, or who (as in the case of the tax-collectors) for reasons connected with their occupation were unable, to fulfil the requirements of the ceremonial law. Prostitutes and thieves might be “sinners,” but those who did not or could not avoid contact with “ unclean ’ persons or things, and who did not or could not attend the stated religious celebrations in the Temple, were also ’ sinners.” The stigma attached to the ’ sinners ’ of our Lord’s day would tend of itself to a feeling of moral inferiority and consequent moral deterioration. The possibilities that Jesus saw in the class are witnessed by the story of the woman of the city in Luke vii, by the call of Levi, by the story of Zacchasus and that of the repentant tax-gatherer in the parable. In the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin we usually emphasize Jesus’ thought of the worth of the individual. We know the saving virtue there is in the thought that somebody cares; in these parables Jesus taught that God cares.

God thinks not only of the flock, but of the individual sheep; and when a sheep strays from the fold, it is, for the time being, the only sheep that counts. Human thought swings backwards and forwards between emphasis on the individual and emphasis on the community. In our own day, after a long period of individualism, we are beginning again to think of ourselves as members of a social group, to realise the importance of leavening society with Christian ideals and standards.

Jesus teaches that God sees the group as a group of individuals and the individual as a member of the group. Jesus felt the passion, which the early Church inherited, for the koinonia, for the fellowship, that they might be One, an unbroken whole, all in all to each other. Our Lord’s conception of his followers as a family, brothers and sisters of each other and of himself, went to the very root of his thought. Our Lord’s mission was primarily to his own people, but he saw that they were not all Israel that were of Israel, Israel after the flesh must become Israel after the spirit. In the very forefront of his ministry he put the healing of the breach in Judaism itself. The Israel of our Lord’s day was a house divided against itself: there were the clean and the unclean, the righteous and the sinners, those within the pale and those without the pale; and between the two there was a great gulf fixed. This middle wall of partition must be broken down. Jesus’ longing for the restoration within the fold of those whom “ the righteous ’ shut out was so deep that the ministry to the publicans and sinners took a prominent place in his work.

He could even say that it was his chief work; he was not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Our Lord’s heart was profoundly moved at the sight of the outcasts. He thought of them as sheep who had strayed from the flock, as treasures lost to God and man, as children who had in wilfulness left their home. He reminded the Pharisees how it is the sheep on the mountains, not the sheep safe in the pasture, that is the centre of the shepherd’s love and care; that though a woman has plenty of other coins in her purse, it is the coin she has dropped that occupies all her thought; that the father’s heart goes out to the wayward child in the far country and is at rest about the boy hard at work on the farm. Whether men have gone astray in ignorance like the sheep, through someone’s negligence like the coin, or by free choice like the prodigal, there is a gap in the circle; the number is incomplete; God’s love and longing are with the wanderer while there is even one sheep away from the fold or one vacant chair in the home.

There are sayings in the Gospels ascribed to Jesus which, read by an unsympathetic reader, might almost suggest a gloomy gloating over the fate of the unrepentant. “ Shall cast them into the furnace of fire; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” “ He will come and destroy the farmers and give the vineyard to others.” Surely in this fifteenth chapter of Luke we get Jesus’ true thought of God, that when men are “ lost ’ it is not to themselves they are lost, that their refusal to come back to the home is a wound to divine love such as we cannot know. It was the thought of Jesus himself as he wept over Jerusalem.

All through Luk 15:1-32 Jesus pictures the joy, the social joy in the unseen world, over a single wanderer who comes home.

There are multitudes in the Christian Church who feel no such joy as they hear of one after another in far-off lands professing the Christian faith, whose joy is kept for every testimony, often without foundation, that ’ the native Christians are no better than the heathen.” It was in that spirit that the Pharisees watched Jesus’ ministry to the “ sinners,” regarding as a traitor to their order this preacher whose friendly approach to the outcasts challenged the established order of things that suited them so well. Thus Jesus’ ploughshare became a sword; the movement that was meant to restore the broken unity of Israel’s home resulted in the estrangement from Jesus of the leaders of his people, and in that long controversy with them which ended only on the Cross.