...and even eats with them!
These are the surprised and disgusted words the teachers grumbled among themselves, recorded in the book of Luke, chapter 15, verse 1-2. These words of anger, that a supposedly wise and righteous teacher would commit such a sacred act--eating--with the most notorious outcasts inspired Jesus to tell the Parable of the Lost Sheep:
"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? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. [Luke 15: 4-7, New Revised Standard Version]
This story shows glimpses of a Jesus that I didn't know existed. The Jesus I thought I knew was a serene Anglo face in old paintings who didn't match the irritated and sarcastic man I saw in scriptures. For a long time Jesus was someone I couldn't know. Even though I was always told that he was my mediator with God, I never felt comfortable with this entity. I was sure if I met him in real life he would yell at me for getting it all wrong. I did not want to know this Jesus.
But this Jesus...he's something entirely different. The passage above is telling us something essential about who Jesus is by telling us what he's about.
If you're like me, if you've been raised in church, know the top 30 Baptist hymns by heart, consider Wednesday nights almost as sacred as Sunday, and secretly dread communion Sunday because it means that church lasts 15 minutes longer, then this parable is familiar, probably carelessly familiar. It's been made into paintings and musicals (which the children's choir performed at Winfree many years ago...one of the Marshall boys was Jesus and either Aubrey or Ryan was the lost sheep. I remember wearing flappy black ears and something big and white, which isn't a terribly theological takeaway) and reads like a Hallmark card, with images of a fluffy lamb with a shinny bell in a big open field.
A pretty, fluffy lamb makes for a pretty, fluffy story. Jesus is not fluffy. Compassionate, merciful, enduring, but definitely not fluffy.
Let's take off our church-goer glasses and squint out the real story.
Have you ever looked for a lost sheep? I just stayed at a friend's sheep farm in the mountains. There is so little usable land that each spring the sheep are released on their own recognizance to wander the hills and fatten up on whatever they can find. And did I say hills? Because what I meant was this:
Sheep have no problem climbing that. It's what they were made to do, and sheep are very motivated by their stomachs.
They also have no problem getting here, where the temperature is usually in the 20s and the one-lane gravel road is so often blocked with snow that our host had never driven to the top before:
In autumn
when it comes time to harvest the sheep, the farmer has to walk up steep cliffs with no roads and mountain tops with mounds of snow to find his sheep. They will be dirty and smelly and probably won't want to come with him, because the top of the mountain has the tastiest grass.
And the farmer has gone through all of this work, even though there are cleaner, more docile sheep in the pen:
He does this twice a year. It takes over a week to walk through his land by foot and he does it until he has collected every single sheep.
So what does this tell us about Jesus? We know that Jesus was deliberate with his language. Even those who do not believe in his divinity will agree that he was an unparalleled wordsmith. He would not have used the image of sheep and shepherd simply as a matter of convenience, because he was talking to country-folk. In fact, the next two parables tell the same story of lost-and-found, but with lost money and a lost son. Jesus could have gone without this story entirely, but he told it anyway.
Other than being a Jewish storyteller who like telling stories in threes, I think Jesus' choice of a lost sheep, knowing all that a lost sheep entails, tells us something very important about his nature:
Jesus will walk for days through tough, inhospitable territory to collect a dumb, smelly creature that doesn't think it needs any help. Even as the creature wants to stay, Jesus will embrace is, carry it home, even though it wandered away. Jesus does this knowing that the creature is still not worth anything until he puts even more work into it, just like a farmer has to wash and harvest the wool, which is another long and tiresome process. And if this wasn't already enough work on behalf of a not very clever creature, Jesus will even throw a party for it!
I was never expecting this Jesus. A Jesus who doesn't level mountains, but will climb them with his own human feet is three-deminsional, a real flesh and blood person, with real passion for us, even in the midst of our smelly stupidness. I want to get to know this Jesus.
But first I have to finish this delicious patch of grass.
