The Lamb

As Luke sets the scene, Jesus is in trouble for hanging out with the wrong people. When “all the tax collectors and sinners” come and listen to him, the Pharisees and scribes grumble, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Lost and Found by Lisle Gwynn Garrity, A Sanctified Art

Hearing their grumbling, Jesus tells a parable. A shepherd leaves his flock of ninety-nine to look for a single lamb that is lost. He searches until he finds it, and when he does, he carries that one lamb home on his shoulders, invites his friends and neighbors over, and throws a party to celebrate.

The parable ends with the words, “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons.” Given those words, we generally assume that the lost lamb represents the sinners “out there.”

But the beginning of the parable reads, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine…and go after the one that is lost.”

The lost lamb belongs to the shepherd’s flock. The lost lamb is already the shepherd’s lamb.

And so, maybe Jesus’ parable isn’t about lost outsiders who are brought in, but about lost insiders. Maybe rather than being about “them,” Jesus’ parable is about you and me.

What’s that mean?

It means we get lost. Debie Thomas writes, “It’s not that we cross over once and for all from a sinful lostness to a righteous foundness. We get lost over and over again, and God finds us over and over again.”

To put that another way, both getting lost and being found are part of the life of faith.

In fact, sometimes we get so lost that the shepherd has to wander through the wilderness searching high and low to find us.

Debie Thomas writes, “Can we pause for a moment and take in how astonishing this is? That God contends with genuine stakes when it comes to our lostness? God experiences authentic, real-time loss. God searches, God persists, God lingers, and God plods. God wanders over hills and valleys looking for his lost lamb…And when at last God finds what God is looking for, God cannot contain the joy that wells up inside. So, God invites the whole neighborhood over, shares the happy news of recovery, and throws a party to end all parties.”

It's not how we generally picture God. We don’t often think of God as a foolish shepherd, leaving the ninety-nine behind to crawl through bushes and scramble over ledges in search of the one.

But maybe Jesus’ parable reminds us that God doesn’t hang out where we often assume God does.

Grace and peace,

Kimmy