The Parable of the Lost Sheep
In Luke 15, we have three parables of Jesus, one after the other, each dealing with a different kind of “lostness”—the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son. The appropriate length of a blog (which you may have noticed, I typically exceed) means we can’t deal with all three of them in one go, so we’ll focus here on the first one.
Before we look at the parable, it’s important to note the setting, that Luke explains in verses 1-2 preceding it:
Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering round to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them.’
The presence of these two audiences (the religious leaders, as we’ll call them, and the so-called “sinners”—as the Pharisees and the teachers of the law disdainfully characterized the ordinary people) “frames” what we are about to hear and how we should understand what Jesus was saying to each group through these parables. It’s easy to miss this opening detail that Luke offers us, but it’s by no means incidental.
Already we sense that an openness and eagerness on the part of the ordinary people “gathering round to hear Jesus” is being contrasted with the critical attitude of the religious leaders “muttering” against Jesus.
Luke explicitly mentions the presence of some tax collectors amongst those “sinners,” who, everyone would have agreed, were the “worst of the worst”: Jewish collaborators who worked for the Romans and hid behind their protected status to extort extra money for their improper personal gain. In those two opening verses that are easy to gloss over, Luke is setting the stage for Jesus’ message to each audience (which will not be the same).
Then Jesus told them this parable: ‘Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbours together and says, “Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.” I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who do not need to repent.’
Whenever we look at a parable we need to remind ourselves that the surface ingredients in a story are never the teaching of the story. I can hardly stress that enough. The Parable of the Sower is not teaching us anything about agriculture. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus is not teaching us anything about somewhere called hell. The parable of the Lost Sheep is not telling us that it is good husbandry to leave ninety-nine sheep at the mercy of predators to go find one lost one. No, the teaching of a parable is always a meaning hidden below the surface. Usually, that’s not immediately apparent (it’s only our modern familiarity with certain parables, such as the Good Samaritan, that leads us to assume that a meaning is “obvious”). Jesus’ original audiences, familiar with parables as a teaching genre (which we are not) would have expected to sit with others afterwards and debate a parable’s possible meaning—what it was “saying.” But the key point is that it’s never the surface ingredients; these are simply the frame for the picture being painted inside it. So, don’t interpret the frame! Don’t let your attention be diverted!
The parable begins with Jesus saying, “‘Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?” Stop right there! I’m not at all sure that anyone listening would leave the ninety-nine like that! “Surely, Jesus, the answer to your question is that he does not!” The whole point of shepherds being out in the fields with their sheep (including overnight, for days or even weeks on end) was precisely to stay with them, to protect them from predators (see e.g., Luke 2:8, in the Christmas story).
Given that Jesus’ opening statement is unusual and unexpected, that would be the first debating point—people looking at one another and thinking, “Why would any shepherd do that? That doesn’t make any sense!”
Please don’t think I’m questioning the veracity of the Word of God here (especially when it’s the words of Jesus); that is missing the point. With parables, always listen out for the unexpected and the incongruous, because it’s quite likely to be key to its meaning.
So what kind of shepherd would leave ninety-nine sheep at risk for the sake of finding one lost sheep? A very reckless one is the obvious answer. One who has the wrong priorities; who can’t see that common sense says to focus on the ninety-nine.
Because we already know this parable—and because it’s Jesus telling it—we’re inclined to assume that going after the lost sheep is the “obviously” right thing. But for the original audience, it probably would not have been coming across that way. Compare, for example, Jesus’ condemnation of hired shepherds who abandon their sheep (in John 10), leaving them at the mercy of predators (in that passage, God is the “owner” of the sheep, and the hired men are the religious leaders!).
The absolute passion of the shepherd in this parable is his lost sheep. To a point where, in the context of the story—remember it’s a story with an underlying theological point, it’s not offering normative biblical teaching on animal husbandry—the shepherd prioritizes it over the ninety-nine. It’s exaggerated behaviour, to emphasise a point.
We then see the great rejoicing when the lost sheep is found: “He joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbours together and says, “Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.” The rejoicing event that the parable has in mind is not a thanksgiving worship service, it’s a feast—a party for the community. Rather like the one we see at the end of the parable of the Prodigal Son later in Luke 15.
And this leads to the next unusual and unexpected feature. To host a celebration party to which the whole community is invited, a sheep would have to be the centrepiece of the meal (perhaps more than one). The shepherd has just gone out of his way to rescue that one lost sheep; but now another one will be on the menu! The celebration seems disproportionate to the event that’s being celebrated! But again, that unexpected and unusual feature (that exaggerated feature) is key to what the parable is teaching.
We always need to be careful about over-interpreting a parable’s surface features: why would it make sense to kill a sheep to celebrate having saved a lost sheep from death? Answer, it wouldn’t! But that’s not the point. The theological point is God’s passionate love for every metaphorical lost sheep—so, when even just one is found and brought home, it’s cause for a “disproportionately” massive celebration in heaven. The parable is about God as a Shepherd going way beyond anything reasonable, reflecting his astonishing love and compassion for every single one of us.
Typically, Jesus did not explain his parables (or at least, not immediately); he left open the meaning of the teaching, for his listeners to debate. In the case of this short parable, though, he does explain it—or at least gives us clues to work from, following the phrase, “in the same way.”
So, who do the characters represent in the story? The easy one is the shepherd—clearly, picturing God. The debating point for the audience would be who the other characters are and how they relate to them, the listeners.
My take is that the lost sheep represents the ordinary people. The Pharisees and teachers of the law most certainly did not see themselves as lost—they were the ninety-nine. The shocking thing in the story, from their perspective, is that the shepherd does not prioritize them and their interests as the righteous ones. They had assumed (as religious people tend to) that from God’s point of view, it was mostly “all about them.”
Talking of shocks, remember that Luke makes a point of telling us at the start that the “sinners” part of the audience includes tax collectors. A tax collector would have been the very last lost person that anyone would expect God to go after. All Israel would have thought “good riddance”—one less tax collector for the Romans is no bad thing.
Ironically, the Pharisees’ complaint about Jesus’ involvement with tax collectors (verse 2) centres on not just “welcoming” them (when they came to him, as it were) but all the more that Jesus was eating with them (that he went to them). Accepting hospitality in someone’s home was a highly visible sign of welcome and acceptance of the host—highly controversial in this instance. Whereas in contrast, the Pharisees’ approach was to shun and distance themselves from such people (effectively causing them to be “lost”). Jesus portrays God as a shepherd who goes looking even for tax collectors, to find them and carry them home—which is precisely what Jesus was doing, metaphorically, when he went to them to eat with them.
The religious leaders focused on what they saw as (other people’s) sinfulness, as religious people often tend to do. Jesus, instead, focuses on lostness. The sheep analogy that Jesus chooses as the setting for this teaching is no accident: sheep do not wander off and get lost because they are bad sheep. A shepherd does not blame a sheep for getting lost—he doesn’t see it as a “sin issue.”
Jesus seems to be saying to the religious leaders, “You may see these people as making wrong life choices wilfully, placing them under God’s judgement for sin—but my heavenly Father doesn’t frame things that way. Fundamentally, these are ‘lost’ people, not ‘bad’ people. They are people who need finding not condemning.”
Of course, sin matters, but sin is not at the centre of the story (any more than it’s at the centre of the gospel). The nature and character of God is at the centre. The parable is about the unexpectedly disproportionate grace, mercy, and kindness of God towards people notwithstanding sin.
Jesus calls us to be shepherds who reflect him (Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:2). The parable of the Lost Sheep shows us what that looks like.
As in the parable, it starts from seeing people through the eyes of lostness rather than sinfulness. I emphasize this does not mean that sin does not matter (Jesus is the one who told this parable—he could hardly be accused of failing to take sin seriously). Of course it matters. But grace matters more. It’s about what is primary and what is secondary. It’s where we start from. As Paul reminds us in Romans 2:4, it’s the kindness of God that leads to repentance, not the other way around.