24th Sunday: The Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Lost Son

The three parables in today’s Gospel are all stories of lost and found. Our image of God is the Father who is gathering his Creation back to himself. The story of the Creation of the World describes the God who brings creative order out of primordial chaos. Creation is not something that happened 6,000 years ago, but is a continuing creative process. There is a purpose, a telos[i], to God’s creation. The telos or purpose of life is to be found by God. Of course, we have to want to be found. In order to be found, we have to first realize that we are lost. The gospel stories today are all about lost and found. The golden thread that runs through all three stories is that of metanoia. In our English translations of the bible, the Greek word metanoia is translated “repentance.” The literal meaning of metanoia is “beyond our mind.” “ Meta” means “beyond” as in metaphysics, that is, beyond the physical world. “ Noia” comes from the word “ nous” which means mind; think knowledge. Repentance- Metanoia literally means to change how you see your own life.
 
What is a Sinner?
Jesus is criticized by the Pharisees and scribes for eating with ‘sinners.’ The first century Pharisee and scribe thought about sin differently than we do today. For them a sinner is someone who publicly disobeys the Torah. Some examples of sinners from the Gospels are:  

• King Herod and his wife Herodias who lived in a public state of adultery in violation of God’s command, “you shall not commit adultery”. Herod married his brother’s wife. Mk. 6:20; Lk. 3
•  Prostitute and harlots are public sinners. In a small town, everyone knows who is sleeping with whom. Jn.8:1-11
• A tax collector like St. Matthew was a public sinner because they colluded with the Romans. They were all accused of stealing in violation of God’s commandment, ‘thou shalt not steal.’ Mt. 9:9-13.

In the first century, they did not think of a sinner as someone who was tempted by avarice, lust or gluttony. Sin was a much more public reality.
 
Three Parables
So here are the three parables about lost and found:

Lost Sheep: Jesus is speaking to an audience that knows well the reality of shepherding. The story, 

“What man of you if he’s lost one sheep, wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine and go look for that one?”

The answer human beings give is no prudent shepherd would do that, it would be a foolish risk to abandon so many sheep for just one. Probably still a prudent answer, but it is not God’s answer. Jesus says God is like this: “Just so I tell you, there is more joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.” God cares more than you do about the lost sinner, is the upshot of this story.

Lost Coin:

“What woman, having ten silver coins, if she lost one, doesn’t light a lamp, sweep the house, and search diligently until she finds it?”

The word used is “ drachma” which is a day’s wage in the first century. I think we would all search for a lost paycheck, but would you call all your friends a throw a party? With God, it is just so: “Just so I tell you, there’s joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Lost Son: The story of the Prodigal Son is really about a Lost Son who is found. The father in the story is the real prodigal. [ii]  Jesus is leading the Pharisees and scribes to the point of “ metanoia.” It looks like this in the Lost Son:

But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.”

In the son’s repentance there is an awareness that God has been offended and that his behavior has been offensive to his father. There has been a metanoia, a change of mind. All of God’s creation is bringing order out of chaos. In the story of the Lost Son, the order sought is a proper moral order between father and son.
 
Repentance and Moral Order
The work of the Gospel is, in part, to bring a moral order into the world. The idea of a moral order has taken a beating in Western Culture over the last several hundred years. We are living at the end of a long process of questioning every custom or tradition of the past, as if that would bring about human freedom. For the philosopher David Hume (1711-76), all morality was merely one person’s preference for his rule over another’s rule. Morality as personal preference is rooted in Hume’s critique of moral order. For the philosopher Immanuel Kant, (1724-1804) moral order was rooted in rationality, actions were either right or wrong according the use of reason. Kant and his contemporaries had for more respect for reason than our contemporaries. Of course, Kant and Hume had the luxury of living in a more structured European culture than we enjoy. Kant’s critics over time have pushed back against his appeal to reason; but whose reason and which rationality?  
 
If you believe in moral order, you belive in God. Ask people who claim they don’t believe in God whether they believe that the Holocaust, 12 million executed in Nazi death camps, is a moral decision. If Hitler had won that war, would that kind of mass slaughter be defensible?

“I am afraid that we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” —  Friedrich Nietzsche , Twilight of the Idols

 Why grammar? Grammar and language are the tools we used to understand order and meaning. If I say the word “altar” it doesn’t mean anything absent our common understanding of the altar here at the center of our parish. The word ‘lost’ can only have a meaning if we see it in realtionship to 'found'. There is a relationship between those two words and the human realities they describe. Our minds are made for relationship and the moral order, of whatever sort, describes what that relationship looks like. The moral choices we make are the lived reality of our belief about God and the purpose of our lives. The oldest moral order is that of violence and domination; might makes right. Christ takes us beyond the chaos of violence and domination when he faced it 'might makes right' on the cross and triumphed. Soren Kierkegaard, the great Lutheran theologian, said that in the end it was the choice to follow Christ that mattered. “God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.” ― Soren Kierkegaard,  The Journals of Kierkegaard. God brings moral order into the chaos of human life. But first, we need to recognize that we are lost.