Jesus, the one, and the many

Text: Luke 15:1-10

As he often does in the Gospels, Jesus makes a little joke.

The Pharisees are unhappy with Jesus because he eats with the riffraff. He also eats with the Pharisees, but we don’t hear from the people who don’t think Jesus should do that. I’m sure there were some. “How come you, Jesus, a man of the people, consort with those fancy snobs?” But the voices of the tax collectors and sinners are rarely heard, in the Gospels as in real life.

I sometimes have a feeling that the Pharisees amuse Jesus. He is always getting their goat. And when they make stupid pronouncements, he embarrasses them. When they try to catch him making a mistake, they find that it was they who erred. You would think that after a while, they’d give up.

The Pharisees really don’t like it that Jesus stretches the bounds of what is permissible. There is a way you are supposed to act, and many times Jesus does not act that way. Some of their objections are social and some legal. Tax collectors were scum, working for the man, meaning Rome. Sinners were law-violators. They did what God said not to, or did not do what God said to. Neither were, in the Pharisees’ eyes, fit company for a rabbi, a teacher, like Jesus. Jesus did the wrong thing, set a bad example, and was rousing the rabble by his teachings.

To answer their complaint, Jesus, as he often does, tells a parable. A parable is a wicked little story that makes you think. He tells two. The first one is about some sheep. “Which of you,” he asks them, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”

Would you leave ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness? All you who would leave those ninety-nine sheep to fend for themselves, those good and faithful and wise sheep who did not wander off recklessly, to search for that idiot sheep who seems clueless and endangers all the rest, all you who would do that, raise your hands.

The answer to Jesus’ question is: no one. It makes no sense. That’s the joke. No one would. To risk the many for the sake of one. It goes against the theory of the greater good. Which says that better for one to suffer so that the many might not. It it the reason behind much of the way societies work, from things as diverse as torture and triage and scapegoating.

It is the way we work, but it is not the way Jesus works. Jesus seems much more concerned—and it gets him into trouble all the time—more concerned about the particular than the general. The theory of the greater good compares the actual, present, and particular suffering with a hypothetical, future, and general good. An individual suffers now for some predicted suffering of many. Jesus seems to care more for the person who is really suffering now than he cares for the potential or even likely future.

The Pharisees are rightly worried about the rule of law and the stability of culture. So when Jesus does what he does—heals on the Sabbath in the face of a law against it, or lets his disciples glean food then, or touches and cures the hemorrhaging woman, or hangs around with the illegals—he acts in favor of persons over principles. And also, he seems to see the particular person and his or her particular situation instead of what that person represents. Some real person that you can sit down and share a meal with, not a drunk or an illegal or an alien or a tax collector or a sinner. So in the parable, the shepherd seeks to find the one sheep that at the moment is actually lost at the risk of a possible, but not actual, danger to the many others.

What makes things lost is that someone misses them. People can feel lost emotionally, of course, but what makes the lost sheep and, in the second parable, the lost coin be lost is that someone wants to find them. Even when people say that they feel lost, they mean that they are searching for some other version of themselves that they once knew or hope to know. The shepherd wants to know: where is my sheep? The woman wants to know: where is my coin? What makes the single coin and the single sheep special is that they are desired, wanted, sought out.

The Pharisees grumble that Jesus welcomes the sinners, the reading says. But the word the Pharisees use really means to seek out. To go looking for. The action is on the part of Jesus, not the sinners. The action in the parables is on the part of the seeker, not the sheep or coin that is sought. God looks for each of us. We are looked for by God. God comes and gets us.

Sometimes we say we lose our faith. When people say that, they mean that they have lost the conviction that they have been found. That is, that they are like the sheep and the coin, apart from God and apart from any center in which their souls may take rest. But worse, it also means that they have lost the conviction that anyone is even searching for them. They feel not only separated but abandoned, which is a whole other thing. They feel like people who have suddenly fallen out of love, or children who are estranged from their parents or someone who has lost another to death. Not even missing, because they feel that no one even seeks them.

The Pharisees complain that Jesus eats with sinners. These people are not lost to the Pharisees, who are not seeking them but rather wish they were gone. How much better, they think, if the people who annoy or threaten us were just to disappear. But the sinners no doubt see things very differently. Jesus makes them appear. He seeks them out, making them not invisible but missing. That is, they are longed for.

Jesus writes that there is more joy when a sinner repents than when ninety-nine righteous persons do. But this is the second joke Jesus tells in this passage. For it would be hard to find even one sinless person much less ninety-nine in a crowd of one hundred. As Lutherans are taught, we are all saints and sinners. We are all in this sense separate from the source of our being and life. We are all missing; God is seeking out each one of us. We are not the ninety-nine virtuous souls who never wander. It is good for us that God is unreasonably looking for us.

When the Pharisees are unable or refuse or are too timid to see the sufferings of flesh-and-blood individual people, when they are willing to sacrifice them for the vague and the general, when they wish to wish them away—when the Pharisees do that, they turn their backs on the pleasure of a divine grace. They deny themselves the joy that concludes both these parables of Jesus. For these parables are less about repentance and more about joy. That is the direction in which their plots move. The high point of these stories is the joy of the finder. A joy even angels in heaven share, says Jesus. These stories do not call us sinners to repent. They invite those of us who think we are righteous to join the sinners, who are also us.

The Pharisees evidently think that they are favorites of God and that the sinners are not. And the sinners—well, we don’t know what they think. Some probably agree with the Pharisees and others think the opposite.

All have hopes and fears. Jesus says that ninety-nine were left. We like to imagine—it suits us to imagine—that they are a bunch of well-organized, well-balanced, good sheep. But Jesus does not say that.

It is more likely that all one hundred sheep are wandering around. It is a big mess. No one knows what’s going on. Some feel secure and some feel condemned. But each one is lost. The most arrogant Pharisee and the most humble sinner are all lost. Each one is frightened and clueless. And walking in our wilderness, there is Jesus, the shepherd. Missing every one of us, wanting each one of us, seeking us out.