Hilton Head Island, SC – November 7, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 15:1-7; Luke 15:1-2, 8-10
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear (Jesus). And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, “This man receives sinners, and eats with them.” – Luke 15:1-2 (RSV)
There are three parables in the 15th chapter of Luke. The reason Jesus told these remarkable stories is explained in the first two verses of that chapter. You just heard those two verses. They tell us that “tax collectors and sinners” were crowding around Jesus to hear what he had to say. By this time in Jesus’ public ministry, which was probably no more than two or three months away from his crucifixion, those whom Luke identifies as “the scribes and Pharisees” had become his theological adversaries.
These leaders of the religious establishment were upset that Jesus spent any time at all with people widely acknowledged to be disreputable types. They believed that anyone who did that was defiled just to be in the presence of such reprobates. So they murmured among themselves, expressing their disapproval of Jesus. These people are losers, they thought to themselves; they are lost souls.
In response, Jesus told three parables centered on the word “lost”: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the two lost sons, or the name by which it is almost universally and unfortunately known, the parable of the prodigal son. In each of these stories, Jesus is indirectly declaring that God always seeks the lost, and He does so precisely because they are lost. He is a persistent seeker, and He never gives up on anyone who is lost. Those who discover themselves to be lost for whatever reason may therefore also discover that God has somehow managed to find them in their lost state. That is the essential message of these three wonderfully God-affirming stories. In each parable, the primary character represents God: the shepherd, the woman who lost the coin, and the father whose two sons were lost to him.
In the Bible, references to shepherds are almost always positive. In the Gospel of John, Jesus refers to himself as “the good shepherd.” The prophets spoke of themselves as shepherds of the people of Israel. The most famous reference to a shepherd comes in the best-known passage in the entire Bible, the 23rd Psalm, our responsive reading for this morning. It begins with that most comforting verse, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
Thus it is that Jesus opens the parable of the lost sheep by directly confronting those who were complaining to themselves that Jesus not only did not stay away from tax collectors and “sinners,” all of whom were considered flagrant sinners, but that he actually welcomed them into his presence. He asked the scribes and Pharisees, “Who among you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it?”
In that subsistence economy, sheep were expensive animals. Every sheep in the flock was a valuable investment to the shepherd. Nevertheless, despite the many positive biblical references, shepherds were considered to have a very low-class occupation. The angels in the Christmas story appeared to shepherds, which was therefore a theological statement that was made. The birth of the Messiah was initially announced to low-class people, not high class people. Shepherds spent their lives out in the wilderness, taking the flock from place to place in search of better pastures. They were usually either too hot or too cold, constantly fighting the weather and predatory animals and desert terrain with little water or respite, in a dirty job with dirty, smelly animals.
Still, if a sheep became lost, the shepherd probably was tending someone else’s sheep, since shepherding was not a lucrative job in itself. He knew that losing a sheep might mean losing whatever meager remuneration he might receive for tending these wooly, willful creatures who had a tendency to wander off by themselves. Too late the lost sheep would realize all his bleating buddies had disappeared. Therefore the shepherd, said Jesus, would leave the flock and go to find the lost sheep.
For over twenty-five years I organized church groups to go to Israel. Every time, every group was taken up and down the Jericho Road, at least twice each way. This wasn’t the original Roman road, but the newly constructed and paved Israeli road for tourists and normal folks to use. At a certain place on the south side of the road there are black goat-hair Bedouin tents. I will never forget the first time my first tour group went up that road in the late afternoon on our way to Jerusalem. There, beside the road were three young Arab boys keeping a sharp eye on a flock of fifty or more sheep. At first it looked as though they were herding cats, except that most of the “cats” approved of being herded. But there were a few straggler sheep which kept wandering away from the others. The bus was stopped for everyone to look at this never-seen sight, and everyone was clicking away with their cameras at this “biblical” saga unfolding before our very eyes. The boys were leading their flock to a large tent off in the distance. Most of the sheep were willing to be led, but a few wanted to go where they wanted to go, and not where the shepherd boys and the rest of the sheep were going.
Because sheep would be a common sight to everyone who heard Jesus tell this parable, they could easily imagine what he was telling them. You probably have seen a copy of a famous painting called The Lost Sheep. The animal is down below a canyon rim, stuck on a narrow ledge far above a very narrow gorge. A shepherd is reaching down to grasp the poor creature before it plunges in its terror into the abyss below. In fact there are a few valleys like that in Israel, so the painting authenticates the parable, both of which share the same title.
In his story, when the shepherd found the lost sheep, Jesus said that he carried it on his shoulders back home to his village, rejoicing among his neighbors when he got there. “Even so,” said Jesus, “I tell you there will more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine persons who need no repentance” (15:7).
Now do you see why Jesus told these three parables? He wanted to state a singularly-important theological point. There are lots of people who have followed God’s laws all their lives, and that is all to the good. But there are also lots of people who either have no idea of what God’s laws are, or they know them but they won’t follow them. They are the people God is most concerned about, said Jesus. God doesn’t need to be concerned about the good people. Jesus wanted his religious adversaries to know that he also was more focused on the not-so-good people rather than the good people.
The last statement in the parable of the lost sheep led directly into the first statement in the next parable of Jesus, the one about the lost coin. A peasant woman had ten silver coins, and she lost one of them. William Barclay wrote that in his time, well over half a century ago, he had seen Palestinian peasant women in Israel who had silver coins attached to a narrow chain they wore around the top of their head. It was an adornment, but it also signified something of considerable monetary value to them. To lose one of those coins in 2021 CE would be a loss, but to lose it two thousand years ago would have been a financial catastrophe.
Therefore, said Jesus, the woman in his story stopped everything she was doing and she swept the entire house until she found the coin. Barclay noted that many twentieth-century peasant houses had only one small window, so homes past or present were very dark, and it would require much diligent sweeping twenty centuries earlier to find the missing coin. When the woman found it, “she called together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!’” (15:9). Then, to reinforce what he had just told the Pharisees and scribes, Jesus said again, “Even so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Too many religious people are too convinced of their own righteousness and are too disapproving of the unrighteousness of others. Bad behavior is a big problem. Distraught mothers do drown their babies. Young men do take the law into their own hands and shoot rioters, supposing they are trying to maintain the peace by their violence. Respected attorneys do embezzle millions from their fellow law partners, and keep the insurance awards which should go to their clients, and fake their own deaths, and those kinds of people appall people like us. We want the justice system to convict them, and the judges to give them the stiffest sentences the law will allow. Nonetheless, there is more joy in heaven over any such defendants who repent than over all the people who never commit such crimes and therefore do not need to repent of having done so.
“The Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them’” (15:2). In the Middle East, then as now, having meals together was one of the most socially-cohesive activities in which anyone could engage. Therefore the religious adversaries of Jesus were incensed that he sat at the same table with these disreputable pariahs.
Jesus never just happened to be in the presence of people who were widely known to be reprobates. He consciously and visibly sought out such people. He wanted them to know that God loved them as much as God loved everyone who “(does) justice, and loves kindness, and walks humbly with (their) God” as the prophet Micah said (Micah 6:8).
People who are lost, and know they’re lost, have a hard time in life. They know what is right, but they don’t seem to do it. They may feel guilty for a while about their misdeeds, but they may keep doing them for so long that bad behavior becomes the only kind of behavior they exhibit.
We must never sit in judgment of those people who do bad things. We shouldn’t even judge their worst behavior. God is their judge; we aren’t. It is part of the divine job description for God to judge them, but it isn’t our job to do so. Jesus said that time and again in ever so many cogent and surprising ways. However, many of the brightest and best in first-century Judean society didn’t want to hear that, and it drove them to conspire to drive Jesus out of this world for having the audacity to say it.
God is much more kind in His judgments of people than people are of people. There is more joy in heaven when the unrighteous jump on the Gospel train than there is on earth among any of us who think we have understood the Gospel all our lives and therefore don’t need to hop aboard.
Jesus sought people who were lost because He was certain that God also seeks such people. That was a revolutionary new idea which Jesus constantly tried to inject among the people of God. They had always supposed it is our duty to seek God, and it never occurred to them that God is seeking us. But He does. He always has. For whatever reasons we concoct for ourselves, we can’t imagine God would possibly seek anyone. Instead, we think, it is our responsibility to seek God. But if any of us is lost, we can’t even think like Jesus thinks, because we’re lost.
I am afflicted by remembering lots of hymns that no one else seems to know. One of my favorites has this as its first stanza: “I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew/ He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me;/ It was not I who found, O Savior true -/ No, I was found of Thee.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a great twentieth-century Jewish rabbi and scholar who lived and taught for years in New York City. He wrote many books, but one of his best-known tomes, especially among Christians, was called God in Search of Man. He came up with that title before the word “man” became associated exclusively with males of our species, when the word innocently just meant “humanity.” But that word also eventually offended, because of its emphasis on the second syllable, “hu-man-ity.” Rabbi Heschel’s point is that God is ever and always in search of humankind, if that is the preferred, politically and theologically correct, word.
From Genesis through Malachi, and from Matthew through Revelation, the Bible hints that God is seeking all of us, righteous and sinners alike. In Matthew through John, that truth is trumpeted from the rooftops. But Jesus says that God has a special concern for obvious sinners, because they are the ones who most appear not to have realized that God is also seeking them. And whether it is a lost sheep, or a lost coin, or two lost sons (as it shall be next Sunday), Jesus tells us that God is on the hunt, and He will never give up until all of his lost children --- the good, the bad, and the theologically and philosophically indifferent --- are gathered into the divine kingdom. More than anyone else in the Bible, that was the message that Jesus proclaimed. And that’s why, in that sense if in none other, it really is The New Testament.
If we had nothing else that told us of the words and deeds of Jesus Christ, if we had only the 15th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, we would have the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Good News of God is the declaration of God’s search for people, especially for people who are obviously lost. And, like the shepherd and the woman and the father in these three parables, God is always searching for those who are lost. If we have been found, God is glad. If we’re lost, He will keep searching for us until He finds us, even if the search lasts until our dying day. And on that pivotal occasion, He will surely find all of us.