Image: The Parable of the Lost Coin, Dominico Fetti (1589-1624)
About ten years ago, I met with a man who needed some help with his electric bill. This was a common occurrence, so it was a budgeted item. This person was a little reticent about meeting me at the church, but he did. When we met, he said, sort of tongue-in-cheek, “I haven’t been in a church so long, I thought the walls would fall in on me!”
Now, I knew he was joking, but I think there was a part of him that wasn’t. My first thought wasn’t very pastoral: “Wow, you’re that important! You, of all people, are such a miserable sinner that your presence in this place would provoke God’s destructive wrath!” But my second thought was sober. What makes someone despair of God’s grace? What kind of sin must be committed or suffered to make someone believe there’s no hope for them?
Perhaps the tax collectors and sinners in today’s Gospel may have thought this. But let’s not entertain any romantic notions about these folks. The Pharisees and scribes had good cause to be upset. Tax collectors, we know, worked at Rome’s behest. Rome would open bidding for the chief positions to wealthy and powerful residents. These settlers were usually non-native. In turn, he would divide his region into districts, each headed up by a regional tax collector, who in turn would employ locals to do the dirty work. A premium over the actual tax owed was collected in lieu of wages. Money flowed upward.[1] It was a classic pyramid scheme. As you might expect, tax collectors, particularly local ones, were despised. They were working for the enemy.
As for sinners, this is more of a catch-all term, but it doesn’t refer to penny-ante, trivial sinfulness. These people would have been public, unrepentant offenders against the Torah. Their sins would have threatened the cohesion of the community, whether through bad business deals, sexual immorality, withholding wages, violent behaviors, or any number of things. Sinners and tax collectors would have made a conscious choice—under duress, perhaps, but a choice nonetheless—to put their own desires over the good of the wider community.
Which is why it is so shocking to the Pharisees and scribes that Jesus is eating with these folks. Table fellowship implied full acceptance of the other person, including their actions. To them, it appears that Jesus has no moral compass, no sense of community, no sense of responsibility to Torah.
But Jesus reveals a God who will stop at nothing to bring even the worst sinners to repentance. With God, no one is beyond hope.
Notice in the parables that the sheep doesn’t do anything except get itself lost! The coin is just an inanimate coin. Neither has an ability to choose something different. The whole idea of a sheep or a coin having the freedom to make a different choice is ridiculous, of course! They get lost and they stay lost unless someone finds them.
The shepherd and the woman, for their part, are the most irresponsible people you can imagine! The loss of one sheep out of one hundred, while upsetting, wouldn’t be disastrous. To go on a wild sheep chase while exposing the ninety-nine to danger is foolish. No sane person would do this! The response to finding the sheep and the coin is even more perplexing. The shepherd invites the neighbors for a extravagant party for one meager sheep! Big deal, you found a sheep! Good thing the other sheep didn’t get ravaged by a wolf or something! The woman probably spends more money in throwing her party than she gained in finding the coin! The extravagance, the prodigality, the lack of sense can make us scratch our heads.
But that’s the point. God our Father is not bound by our sense of responsibility, prudence, or propriety. For him, saving even one lost sinner is worth it. For one sinner—for one such as you and me—God took human flesh. He became a zygote, a fetus within his mother’s womb. He was born as all human children are. He suffered the same limitations we human beings are subject to—bound to one place at one time, subject to bodily needs, driven by our own hormones and chemicals. The man Jesus, born in humiliation to an unwed mother as a child of questionable parentage, also died in humiliation on a Roman cross. Such a life and shameful death, on the surface, may have merited no more than a footnote in the history books.
But in that life, death, and resurrection, Jesus the Son searches for us and finds us. No matter who we are, no matter what we have done, we are worth it to Jesus—all of it. Luther makes the point in an even more striking way in a letter to his co-worker Philipp Melanchthon: “No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.”[2] On top of that, Jesus searches for all who are lost—even and especially for people we don’t think deserve it!
So, who are we to condemn or write off anyone else? Who are we to pass sentence on anyone? The Pharisees, scribes, and good church people like you and me are just as in desperate need of God’s grace as anyone else. Will we assume the place of judge, jury, and executioner? There are already too many of those in this fallen, sin-sick world. We only need to hear the apostle Paul’s testimony, who though he was on the right side of the law, found himself on the wrong side of God. Though he thought he had never strayed, he was the most miserable, lost person of all. And yet, God in Christ found him, showing him radical grace and mercy. Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus finds Levi, a notorious tax collector and collaborator with the regime, rescuing him from such a life to a new one built on that same radical grace and mercy. And God shows that radical grace and mercy to you and to me today, here at this table, where we receive the body and blood of our Lord. Our sins are forgiven here, but we are also freed to live a new life—a life based on the radical grace and mercy we have received. This world and we are still fallen. But we are not doomed because of it. Because Jesus our Lord has found us. And in him, we are all worth it. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Fred B. Craddock, Luke: Intepretation: A Biblical Commentary for Preaching and Teaching.
[2] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 48: Letters I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 48 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 282.