The lost sheep

Week 31 of 52 · Book 1, Come and See About 5 minutes to read The practice runs for seven days

Jump to The gist Going deeper In the modern world The tidbit This week

The gist

This is not a story told to comfort the lost. It is told at people who are annoyed about the lost being welcomed. The audience is the grumblers, and the parable is aimed at them.

Going deeper

The three verses of setup are not optional, and cutting them changes who is being addressed. Luke says exactly what provoked this: tax collectors and sinners were coming to listen, and the Pharisees and scribes began to grumble. This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

Then: Then Jesus told them this parable. Them. The grumblers.

So what man among you is a rhetorical question put to people who are irritated. Read without the frame, the parable becomes a warm reassurance to somebody who feels far off. Read with it, it is a question fired at people who resent the search.

Now the shepherd, and one detail the English quietly softens. The Greek says he leaves the ninety-nine in the wilderness — en tē erēmō. The MSB renders it “in the pasture,” which suggests enclosure and safety. That is an interpretive choice, and the difference matters: the Greek picture is of a flock left in open country while the shepherd goes off after one.

St Cyril of Alexandria felt the force of that objection and answered it head-on: “Was it therefore because He had no regard for the many, that mercy was shown to the one only? No! not because He had no regard for them; that were impossible: but because they are in security, guarded by His Almighty hand.” Note that Cyril supplies the safety from the shepherd’s power rather than from the terrain. He is not pretending the wilderness is a paddock.

Then the searching, and the grammar carries it. The verb for going after is poreuetai — an ordinary word for travelling, not a hunting word. What makes it relentless is the clause that follows: until he finds it, with the verb in the subjunctive. The endpoint is indefinite in time and definite in outcome. He goes until. There is no other terminating condition in the sentence.

And when he finds it, he does not drive it home. He lays it on his shoulders — the Greek is plural, both shoulders, the animal across the back of his neck — and the word for rejoicing is a present participle, continuous. He is rejoicing the whole way home, carrying it.

You will sometimes hear that a shepherd would break a stray sheep’s leg so it had to be carried. No source consulted could substantiate that, and it inverts the parable: the carrying in this text is joy, not discipline. Nothing in the passage is injured.

Then the ending, which is where the parable turns and looks at its audience. More joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous ones who do not need to repent.

That last clause has an edge in it. Who exactly are the ninety-nine righteous who need no repentance? Christ is speaking to men who believe that description fits them. He does not argue with their self-assessment. He simply tells them what heaven finds more interesting.

Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew’s version of this parable rather than Luke’s, catches the disproportion: “He left the ninety and nine sheep, and went after this, and the safety of so many availed not to throw into the shade the loss of one.”

In the modern world

Everybody hearing this parable places themselves with the one sheep. Almost nobody hearing it is in the position of the original audience.

The Pharisees’ complaint was not that sinners should be damned. It was subtler and far more respectable: this man welcomes them and eats with them — the objection was to the fellowship, not to the forgiveness in principle. They would have been perfectly content for these people to repent thoroughly somewhere else and be admitted afterwards.

That instinct is alive in every congregation and every family. It rarely says stay out. It says not yet, and not at this table. And the parable’s answer is not a rebuke but a question: which of you, having lost one, would not go?

The tidbit

Cyril reads the hundred sheep as the whole rational creation and the one that strays as the family upon earth: “The sheep therefore are a hundred: and of them one has gone astray, even the family upon earth; which also the chief Shepherd of all sought.” On that reading the ninety-nine are not other people at all. They are the angels, and we are the one.

This week

The parable is not told to comfort the lost. It is told at people who are annoyed about the lost being welcomed, and their objection was never to forgiveness in principle — it was to the table. So the practice does not ask you to feel differently. It names the person whose return would genuinely irritate you and prays for them by name for seven days, without conditions, because that is the exact nerve the parable was aimed at.

On the first day, name one person whose return to church, or to God, or to your family, you would find genuinely irritating. Be honest; the parable was told to people who felt exactly this and would not have said it out loud either.

Then each day this week, pray for that person by name — not that they change first, but that they be found. Do not add conditions to the prayer. Do not add anything.

The complaint in verse 2 was about who gets to sit at the table. Seven days of praying for someone to be seated will tell you where you actually are in this story.

Fifty-one more like it

If one week changed how you read that passage, Come and See has fifty-one others, each given the same treatment.

Explore Come and See The other free weeks Print this week

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