The Gospel we have just heard is from a passage of one of the most famous, maybe the most famous, chapter in Luke’s Gospel. Indeed, Chapter 15 is sometimes considered as the “heart of Luke’s Gospel” with the retelling of three of Jesus’s most beloved parables: The story of the Lost Sheep, the story Cost coin (the passage we have just read) and the story of the Prodigal Son, that is often called today “The story of the Lost Son”. Chapter 15 in Luke is indeed about those things, animals or people that have been lost and are being found again, and we know how successful this idea has been in our our understanding of what it means to be a Christian: I once was lost, but now I am found, was blind but now I see.Many have told the story of their conversion in those terms: They were lost but now they are found. Interestingly though, we often have come to interpret this “finding” as a need for us to repent, to convert and to find our way back to God. There is a paradox though, because if we look closer at Jesus’s stories, and especially at the images he uses in our two parables today, we will quickly realize that it’s not up to the sheep to be found by the shepherd, and it’s even less up to the coin to be retrieved by the woman. Yes, Jesus makes a comparison between the joy of the shepherd at finding his sheep and the joy in heaven for the sinners who repent, but if we listen carefully we realize quickly that the two stories are not about the lost ones’ initiative, rather it’s all about the seeker’s persistence. It’s less about the sinners’ sins, than it is about God doing what God does.
So what’s going on? Well, again, as we have observed recently, we may find some important clues in Luke’s short introductions to Jesus’s teaching. In our passage, Luke clearly states that Jesus is talking to the Scribes and the Pharisees at a time where they were, again, attacking Jesus for being friendly with the tax collectors and the sinners, welcoming them and even sharing their meals. So we can gather quite quickly that the parables are not first addressed to those we would qualified as “lost”, rather Jesus is teaching to those who considered themselves as “found” or rather consider themselves as “having never strayed”. And if we listen even more carefully, we will realize that Jesus does not even attack their way of thinking, seeing themselves as holy and worthy of God’s attention, rather Jesus defends himself by making more explicit God’s anxiety and desire to gather all his children, and God’s joy when they come back to the fold. Jesus is basically saying to the Pharisees and scribes that he cannot help himself from seeking for people, even in the darkest places, like the woman sweeping her house for her coin, or even in the dangerous places, like the shepherd going down in the valley of the shadow of death – it is indeed difficult to imagine that Jesus preached the parable without having Psalm 23 “The good shepherd” on his mind.Jesus does not say it explicitly but we understand that God’s love is such that God will never resign himself to stop trying to gather his children and to call back all those who have wandered away. Jesus may not be saying that God is the shepherd or the housewife, but once again (we saw that two weeks ago as well) he invites us to “put ourselves in God’s shoes” for lack of a better expression! And he is asking: Have you ever had your dog run away or misplaced your wallet? Didn’t you look everywhere until you found that, and what relief did you feel when you finally manage to locate them? How would God be different from you? Of course you would be worried at losing and of course you would rejoice at finding.
In the end, this is actually the question that is asked to the scribes and pharisees would be well put like that: Who are they to try to steal God’s joy? And so, instead of grumbling, as Luke mentions on verse 1, shouldn’t they choose to rejoice with God, which is basically the conclusion to the Parable of the Lost Son that closes the Chapter: Then the father said to him (The older son), “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”’ (Luke 15: 31-32)
Well, first of all I would like to point out that I really like that Jesus invites us to rejoice with God, or even to participate in what makes God happy. We talked recently about the way we were taught faith when we were children, and wasn’t it the case that we were told that we shouldn’t upset God, or grieve God. I think it’s much better to think that we have also the possibility to bring joy to God or to participate in God’s joy. I also notice that, contrarily to what we may have been taught as well, in those two first parables we discover that is not on us to be found, rather we have to let ourselves be found and reunited with God. In the same way, lostness does not seem to be something that we are morally responsible for. The sheep or the coin are not responsible for their disappearance, rather it’s just something that happens because it is in animals’ nature to get disoriented, and it is in valued possession’s fate to be scattered.
And I think that it could shed some light on our first reading as well. In this passage from the book of Exodus, the Hebrews have been traveling for three months already following Moses. They have witnessed a lot of miracles, the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, God making rain bread and meat to feed them and gushing water out of rocks to quench their thirst. They also have hear God’s commandments been proclaimed to them. But now things are shifting because Moses went up the mountain to receive more instructions, and they haven’t seen him for forty days. Well, I don’t know what you think but today when someone does not return a text in an hour or so, we start to wonder. Imagine what it could be not to have heard for forty days, and you’re in the wilderness waiting for them. Anything could have happen. Moses could have tripped and fell, he could have been attacked by a wild animal, or lost his way, he could have changed his mind about the people and decided to go home on his own, his God may have killed him or gave him another mission, who know. But the result was the same: The people were, or felt, utterly lost. We often think about the episode of the golden calf as this urge the Hebrews had to find for themselves another deity, but if we look closer they were mainly looking for those who had “brought them out of the land of Egypt”…and could take them where they were supposed to go. It’s verse 1 of our chapter: When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.‘ They were confused and scared and what could they do to fix that?
Seeing it this way, I think it’s easy for us to relate as well. Of course, we can literally get lost when going places (and for some of us, like me, it happens more often than for others!). More deeply, we may also feel lost in life and we look for someone to guide us, and wise leaders do not come easily, and we look for God to comfort us and we may not have a sense of God’s presence, rather we feel we are in the middle of the wilderness where nature and people are unknown and hostile, and anything could happen. These days, we may feel like that more often than not. But what I notice about the story is that God is not angry because the Hebrews felt lost, if anything God knew they would feel lost. And they’re not morally responsible for being lost. What is condemned is that, because they felt lost, they “turned aside from the way [God] had commanded them“. God had given them the commencements, all they had to do was to keep them, but in their anxiety, they ran away trying to fix the problem by themselves and, with Aaron and the golden calf, find a God and a leader who could tell them what to do. We talked at Bible study about those times where God seems to be absent from our lives, from the world, or even, because every one seems to have an opinion about who God is or what God does, we’re confused and do not know what to think, or who we can rely on. And yet, the message for us is the same: We have heard the commandments, we still need to stand by God’s word, for us as Christians: love God and love neighbor no matter what. Dietrich Bonhoeffer who lived in Germany during the Third Reich certainly experienced this wilderness and he said: “Before God and with God, we live without God“. Which means: We may not experience God’s presence, but we still have to obey God. And this maybe be the test, or the choice: Choosing to do the right thing in spite of everything. The Hebrews were called to choose God even when they could not experience God’s through God’s miracles, or benefit from Moses’s guidance and teaching. Even in our world where we experience a lot of uncertainties, we have to choose to do the right thing.
How do we get there? Well I think that’s when it get interesting. Maybe we have to acknowledge that being lost is the state of humanity and of the world we live in, and so that it’s normal and expected that we feel lost too. Which means that instead of trying to fix problems by clinging to man made images of God and unreliable leaders as if they were the thing, maybe we need to accept to live with the doubts and the fear and the grief.But for most of us, as it was for the Hebrews, it’s just impossible to sit with these feelings of anxiety lostness brings. And yet, we are asked to believe and trust, not to know and be certain. Jesus wasn’t mad at the lost who knew they were lost, he was upset at those who wouldn’t acknowledge their own need to be found. He speaks ironically about “The 99 persons who do not need repentance“, because he knew the Scribes and Pharisees needed that too. As the Hebrews who had heard the commandments and waited for Moses to come back, we also are in this in between times where God has spoken and we wait for God to show up again. The only thing that is asked of us is to stay put, practicing the faith we have received, firm in our hope and pure in our hearts, doing the best we know how, and waiting for Him to come find us, we are not just lost, we are lost to someone and He will find us again.