By now, we are quite familiar with the notion that Jesus told parables to help people think about their lives. Rather than giving people instructions, Jesus asked them questions so they could change their mind about a certain number of things, a certain number of people, and even change their minds about God. In the end, they were also expected to change their behavior. So for us, the way we may want to start when we hear a parable is to ask ourselves: What is it that Jesus wants us to think about? Unfortunately some parables are so well known that it is hard for us to do the work for ourselves, we typically read them the way they have always been read. It is certainly the case with our passage today.
We are here at the beginning of Luke 15, which is kind of “the lost and found” chapter. In this chapter, we have actually three parables that seem to deal with the same subject: Something was lost and then it is found again: The shepherd loses a sheep and then finds it again, a housewife loses a coin and then finds it again, a father loses a son, and then he finds him again (“The prodigal son”). And so, it is easy for us to assume that this is what Jesus talks about: he talks about what is lost, and what is found again, the shepherd, the housewife and the father representing God or Jesus himself who came to save sinners. And of course it’s not a wrong interpretation, but it may leave us a little bit dismayed, dividing the world between the lost and the found, wondering if we ourselves are lost or found or maybe somewhere in between.
Yet, if we pay attention to the first verses that introduce the story, we may realize that Luke clues us in a different, or maybe just a deeper way, of understanding the story (-ies), by bringing it back into context. Luke says that : “All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus, and the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling…so Jesus told them this parable“.
Luke wants us to realize that Jesus tells the stories to “righteous people”, and this is not necessarily said in an ironic way, they are good people, religious people, and yet people who are “grumbling”, people who are unhappy with Jesus because Jesus welcomes everybody, especially those whom, because of their sins, lifestyle or would it be only because of their low social status, they consider as “the lost”. So yes, the stories talk about the lost, but they are all directed to the unhappy, righteous people, and so we have to push through each story to find the point, which is always the same: “Rejoice”. “Rejoice and celebrate with me”.
The stories are told to holy and yet unhappy people and Jesus asks them to be receptive to God’s joy, to the joy of heaven. The stories are not mainly about sin, about salvation from moral or existential failure, it’s about how holy people (or “wannabe holy“) need to learn how to rejoice. And it must be something really important to Jesus because he does not tell the story once, or even twice, he tells the story in three different ways: a shepherd losing a sheep, a housewife losing a coin, a dad losing his son, and the joy they feel at finding them again and how they want all their friends, family and neighbors to rejoice with them.
And yet we still don’t hear it. What about that? Maybe it happens because we don’t think that rejoicing is something very important or something very holy. Yes, St Francis de Sales once said: “A sad saint is a sad kind of saint“, and maybe we can agree on that. After all, it’s always better to be smiling whatever you do in life. But most of the time, this is just what it is, right? It’s nice and pleasant to be joyful but it does not seem to us the stuff life is made of, it’s not really serious, is it? We think that joy most of the time is quite superficial, a little foolish even ? Joy can even be a bit suspect too. There are selfish and even cruel joys, we can rejoice at the misfortune of our enemies.
And yet for Jesus joy is a big deal,he literally says that joy is the stuff heaven is made of and it’s the daily bread of angels, and he invites all the sad and grumbling saints we all are somewhere inside of us to rejoice with him.
So maybe we need to understand better what joy is about.
Joy as we know it in our world can be superficial, foolish and sometimes selfish and even cruel. There’s the joy of eating ice cream and the joy of infatuation, the joy of having a bump in salary and there is the joy of hearing that the boss who fired you was fired himself.
That’s not the kind of joy Jesus is talking about though. There is no room in Jesus’s life for selfish acts and thoughts. The Gospel of Luke is all about compassion. Jesus is always touched by the misfortunes of the people, healing the sick and the possessed, teaching and feeding the crowds. And we see that in the story, the shepherd looks for the sheep because he worries. Indeed, holiness is the ability to be affected and even saddened by the misfortunes of others. That’s what compassion is about, the ability to feel not only our own feelings and needs but those of others. In the sense though, compassion should also be about being able to feel other people’s joy, to rejoice at their good fortune even if they don’t benefit us. And to me, this is this joy Jesus is talking about. Not all joys are equal and not all joys are good, but rejoicing at the blessing of others, this is certainly a holy joy, the joy of heaven, a joy that sadly a lot of holy people lack or don’t know how to practice. In our passage certainly the Pharisees and scribes, aren’t happy when people they don’t associate with enjoy Jesus’s company.
It’s not a good sign not to be able to rejoice. Sometimes we can’t rejoice because we have a physical or mental illness and it’s certainly not a sin, but it’s still a symptom that something is wrong. In the same way on the spiritual level: A sad saint is a sad kind of saint. There is something wrong with our holiness if we cannot rejoice for the sake of others, if we cannot be happy for them.
Now the question is, what is it that Jesus wants us to be happy about? And he is also very specific about that.
It’s a good thing to learn to rejoice at the joy of others, and we could certainly all learn at rejoicing at our friends’ good fortunes, our neighbor getting a new car, our friend welcoming a new grandchild. Rejoicing only about the good things that happen to us, it’s a always a bit limited. But imagine if we could rejoice at all the good things that happen to others, we would certainly never run out of reasons to rejoice!
It’s not directly what the stories are about though. Jesus asks the sad holy people to rejoice that God looks for all, receives them all and can forgive them all, even those we judge inadequate or even “lost”. The attitude of the shepherd, the housewife and the dad question our own hearts. Are we really happy to have such a God and are we ready to join the party or do we still believe that there are people who are not deserving, who need to be pushed away and even punished? How prompt are we to condemn those we see as “wrong doers” instead of looking for their redemption? It does not mean we should enable those who do evil to do evil, and we need to protect those who could be their victims, but how can we stop thinking in terms of condemnation and punishment, and instead looking for education, reparation, and in the end reconciliation. In Exodus, God changes his mind about condemning people, is it something we can do too? Maybe it’s something very tough to think about on the anniversary of 09/11.
The second way joy is described in Jesus’s stories is the joy of being together. This truly is the joy of heaven: People reconciled with God and one another. This is what we celebrate every Sunday, we celebrate communion! Communion with God and with one another. The stories show us that everyone is unique and precious in God’s sight. The shepherd looks for his one sheep even though he has ninety nine others.
To me, it also gives a whole new meaning to the”lost”. The lost are not necessarily or primarily the sinners, they are the ones who aren’t with the ones they belong to or belong with: The homeless, the foreigners and refugees, people in hospital and in prison. If they need “repentance”, they need it also in the first sense of the term: to “turn back”. They need to be back with the rest of us. They are lost not necessarily because of a fault of their own, they are lost because we have forgotten them. And so the stories Jesus told are also to encourage the righteous to be on their way to find them. Isn’t it the language of love to be able to say: “We have found each other”? This is also the deepest joy, and this is what Jesus wants for all of us.