16/09/07 (Trinity 15)
Luke 15:1-10
The Israelites whom Moses led out of Egypt were a wayward bunch! Moses had disappeared for forty days; but rather than asking God what to do, or asking Aaron what to do, they decided to make their own ‘gods’ in direct disobedience to the commandments they had received. (Exodus 20:4.) They had been scared witless by the voice of God when the commandments were given (Exodus 20:18-21, Deuteronomy 5:23-27). Perhaps they felt man-made gods were much easier to cope with. (Perhaps we feel the same.) Certainly they showed that they were not a suitable group to be God’s chosen people. The history of the Exodus shows that they rebelled against God again and again, culminating in their refusal to enter the promised land.
That is the point. God loves the lost – not because they are lost, but so that they may be found and brought home. His threats spoken to Moses in our first reading were not, I believe, issued in the expectation that Moses would accept them – after all, what guarantee would there be that Moses’ descendants would be any better than Abraham’s descendants? When Moses ‘persuaded’ God to ‘change his mind’, Moses was acting as God hoped, and God honoured him for it. (There are similar dynamics in all intercessory prayer.) God wanted the Israelites to enter the promised land, even though they were such a rebellious group.
That was the message of Jesus to the Pharisees. The lost sheep and the lost coin do not represent only the poor unfortunates who through no fault of their own have gone astray. They represent the tax collectors and “sinners” – the irreligious and stubborn people of the day, the outcasts from respectable society. The parables show that God loves them, and will go to incredible lengths to bring them back to where they belong. And Jesus knew exactly what those lengths meant in reality. And just how much joy it gives when people respond.
Questions:
1) Who are the ‘lost’ today? Are they the sort of people we want in our church family?
2) In the parables it took an effort to find the lost. What does that teach us?