“Lost Sheep” or “How the Losers beat the Winners”¹

As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Fill us with your Holy Spirit, O God, so that we might be moved in this time to heights we cannot achieve on our own. Grant unto us now the ability to go beyond our limits, so that we might experience you more fully. In the name of the Son, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.

One more parable of grace today. Last week, I preached on the Coin in the Fish’s Mouth as a parable of grace, and today I wrap up this mini-series with Matthew’s treatment of the Lost Sheep, as found in chapter 18. But, as is always the case, before we go there, lets look at a little bit of context. In the 17^th Chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples for the second time of his impending death. In the first verses of 18, the disciples inquire about who will have the seat of honor in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus mentions his coming death, and his closest friends not only dismiss it, they seem to be saying, “So you are going to die, fine. Who gets the biggest inheritance?” You know, when someone tells me they are going to die, I never have the gumption to ask, “So, am I in the will? What do I get? Lion’s share, right?” Gotta love the disciples, makes me feel less terrible about my lack of faith.

Anyway, right after that, Jesus tells this parable of grace. Hear The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in the Gospel of Matthew. Listen. Matthew 18.10-14.

¹⁰“Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven. ¹¹(For the Son of Man came to save the lost). ¹²What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? ¹³And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. ¹⁴So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.”

The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

One more thing you should know about context in this passage. When the disciples ask Jesus the questions siblings ask their parents, “Who do you love more?” Jesus places a child in their midst and says that they must become like children to inherit the kingdom. Children back then were considered second class citizens at best. It wasn’t that they were to be seen and not heard, they weren’t to be seen or heard. Only when they were adults were they given any status in the society. Children were not viewed as potential, they were viewed as nuisance.

So, when Jesus takes a child and says become like this, I think he again is showing that the work of the Messiah will be accomplished by loosing, not by winning.

Remember Jesus’ mini-parable about the salt? In Matthew 5.13, at the beginning of Matthew’s famous coverage of the Sermon on the Mount, right after the beatitudes, “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become foolish, what in the world is there that can restore saltness to it? It is good for nothing except to be thrown out and trampled on by people.” That is a literal translation, maybe not the way you remember it, but is what is there.

Salt seasons and salt preserves, but in any significant quantity, it is not of itself edible, nourishing, or pleasant. On the basis of Jesus’ comparison, therefore, we are presumably meant to understand that neither his messiahship-built-upon-loosing, nor his disciples witness to it (assuming they don’t betray it with sugary substitutes) will be all that appetizing to the world. People simply do not come in droves to anyone who insists that the only way to win is to lose. Nevertheless, Jesus teaching is exactly that salty. “The disciple is not above the teacher,” he told his followers, as we find in Matthew 10.24-25, “it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher.” He went on to spell out the meaning of that assertion in his first prediction of his death in Matthew 16; “If anyone wants to follow me, let them deny self, take up a cross and follow me. For if anyone wants to save their life, they will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”

But if the salt of the earth become foolish, if a disciple of Jesus forgets that only losing wins, or if the church forgets it, where in the wide world of winners drowning in the syrup of their own success will either the disciple of the church be able to recapture the saltiness of victory out of loss? The answer is nowhere. The sad fact is that the church has found it easier to sell, and the people have preferred to buy, the sugar of moral and spiritual achievement rather than the salt of Jesus’ passion and death. The church will preach salvation for the successfully well-behaved, redemption for the triumphantly correct in doctrine, and pie in the sky for all the winners who think they can walk into the final judgment and flash their passing report cards at Jesus. But every last bit of that is now and ever shall be pure baloney because” (1) nobody will ever have that kind of sugar to sweeten the last deal with and (b) Jesus is going to present us all to the Father in the power of His resurrection and not at all in the power of our own totally inadequate records, either good or bad.

Too often the church preaches the nutra-sweet religion of test passing, which is the only thing the world is ready to buy and which isn’t even real sugar, let alone salt. Jesus’ program, however, remains firm. He saves losers and only losers. He raises the dead and only the dead. And he rejoices more over the last, the least and the little than over all the winners in the world. That alone is what losing race of our needs to hear, even though it can’t stand the thought of it. That alone is the salt that can take our perishing foolishness and give it life and flavor forever. That alone.

Which means that by the time we arrive at the parable of the Lost Sheep we have nearly finished it before starting it.

Jesus begins the parable with the admonition to “Watch out that you don’t despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that their angels in heaven always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” Whatever he may have meant by that, given context, or inflection of voice, we can say with some certainty that Jesus is pointing out that the little, not the big, have an abiding relationship with God. Then in verse 11, “For the Son of Man came to save the lost.” Again, it is the lost, not those who view themselves as found, who have an abiding relationship with God.

Jesus says that a shepherd has 100 sheep, and one of them goes lost. Again with the lost. Jesus then rhetorically asks, “Won’t the shepherd leave the ninety-nine on the mountain and go and seek the stray?”

I don’t know from shepherding. We should ask the Crymes family after church. I don’t know if shepherds have individual relationships with each sheep. But this parable can hardly be interpreted as a helpful hint for running a successful sheep-ranching business. The most likely result of going off in pursuit of one lost sheep will be making a trade, one found sheep, and ninety-nine lost. Doesn’t seem like good stewardship, a biblical concept, much less good business. It seems clear that Jesus is sounding the horn for the saving paradox of lostness. He seems to imply that even if all one hundred sheep should get lost, it won’t be a problem for this bizarrely Good Shepherd because he is first and foremost in the business of finding the lost. Give him a world with a hundred out of every hundred souls lost – give him, in other words, the worldful of losers that is the only real world we have – and it will do just fine: lostness is just his game. Incidentally, the 99 righteous persons who need no repentance whom Jesus offers as evidence later in the parable are storytellers liscense: in reality, there are not and never have been in the history of humanity 99 such people anywhere.

The rest of the parable is about joy, which is the root of the shepherd’s will to find. Jesus says simply that the man rejoices more over the one than over the 99 who had not strayed. And then Jesus hammers the point home, “Thus it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”

Notice that Jesus does not say that the lost sheep had better learn its lesson. It better learn to stay with the pack of good sheep who now how to stay good. Nothing, except the will of God, is portrayed here as necessary to the new life in joy. God alone gives life, and gives it freely and fully on no conditions whatsoever. There is nothing about rewarding the rewardable, or correcting the correctable, or improving the improvable. There is only the gracious, saving determination of the shepherd.

Thank God. Amen.