Luke 15

. . . The story of LOST THINGS (spot the father of two small girls - gratuitous Tinkerbell reference!).

I'm going to confess something here - I have heard conflicting stories about these parables of Jesus. I have a fairly good level of knowledge about the New Testament context, but the trouble is that both ideas make some level of sense. The best thing I can do is summarise both.

The first idea - let's call it the conventional view - is that Jesus is being quite literal. In the Good Shepherd story, he's describing what his Jewish listeners would expect of a shepherd (if an idealised one who genuinely cares for the sheep rather than a hired man who's just doing a fairly unpleasant job!). The story of the coin is relating to the tradition (still seen in parts of the Middle East today) of giving a woman the gift of several gold coins as a wedding present, making each one valuable beyond its appearance; naturally she'd be willing to turn the house upside down if one was missing. And of course, we see the Prodigal Son story in this way too. It's literally what people would say an ideal father should do.

The alternative view is interesting in that it kind of turns these parables on their heads. I'm unsure of whether or not it's true, but it deserves some thought.

This view, which we'll call the radical view, proposes that Jesus is actually being a little ironic. When He says "Suppose one of you had a hundred sheep and lost one. Wouldn't you leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the lost one until you found it?", the answer a real shepherd would give is "No. You don't leave the Ninety-nine and seek one. That's illogical." Similarly, a woman wouldn't waste too much time seeking one silver coin; and she certainly wouldn't call her friends together to celebrate! As for the Prodigal son, remember that the Son had effectively informed his father that as far as the son was concerned, the father may as well be dead; you can't return from that. It's burning the bridges, then digging up and dynamiting the foundations.

Is this radical view correct? Really, I'm not sure. But it intrigues me because it makes a separate and very pertinent point - that God's love is amazingly and mind-blowingly beyond anything a human could ever imagine or give. No mere human love can fully explain it.

One thing I have noticed in the past is the difference between the three lost things.

The sheep wandered away. There's no bad feelings (a sheep isn't really bright enough to harbour malice), but there is action on the part of the sheep. So too, sometimes we walk astray from God. The point of the parable is that when we wander, God will come and get us.

The coin just got lost. It was not through the coin's action (a coin HAS no action!), just the result of circumstances. So too, when the thing separating us from God is just the random stuff that happens, God can and will find us.

What about the Prodigal son then? He was lost, not by random circumstances and not by carelessness; he was lost because with intelligent consideration and malice aforethought, he would go where he wanted, regardless of the will of his father. Similarly, when we rebel against God, He is still willing and able to forgive.

One last, personal thing - Philip Yancey believes that we all need to realise that we can relate to all three roles in the Parable of the Prodigal son. We too can be like the prodigal (in fact, it's a matter of basic doctrine that we are). But we can also be like the Older brother (which, come to think of it, is the person I tend to see this parable through), and we run the risk of resenting new brothers and sisters as they come to Christ (and sometimes loading them up with burdens we can't carry ourselves). Similarly, we can also relate to the father, welcoming his son home. In the same way, we need to avoid the mistakes of the older brother, and one way we can avoid that is to put ourselves in a place where we are enthusiastically welcoming our prodigals home.