Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, Lost Son

You are welcome to begin with the parables. There you have the lost sheep, hunted up again by the Lord and carried home on his shoulders. Let the very paintings on your cups come forward and show whether even there the figure of that sheep is aimed at a Christian sinner or a pagan one when it comes to bringing him back. [a]

For we enter an objection here, drawn from what nature teaches, from the plain law of ear and tongue, from ordinary soundness of mind: the answer given is always the answer the question called for — an answer, that is, to whatever prompted it. And what prompted this one, as I understand it, was that the Pharisees were muttering in indignation because the Lord let pagan tax collectors and sinners into his company and ate with them. When the Lord replied to that by picturing the recovery of the lost sheep, who else can we believe he was picturing but the lost pagan, since that was the matter then in hand — and not a Christian, who at that point did not yet exist? Otherwise what are we to make of him? That the Lord answered like a man dodging the question, dropped the subject in front of him that it was his business to refute, and spent his effort on something still in the future?

“But a ‘sheep’ properly means a Christian, and the Lord’s ‘flock’ is the people of the church, and the ‘good shepherd’ is Christ. So in the ‘sheep’ we are to understand a Christian who has strayed from the church’s flock.”

In that case you have the Lord giving no answer at all to the Pharisees’ muttering — only to your assumption. And even then you would have to defend that assumption by denying that the things you take to fit Christians can apply to a pagan at all. Tell me: is not the whole human race one flock of God’s? Is not the same God both Lord and Shepherd of all the nations alike? Who is more “lost” to God than the pagan, as long as he goes on straying? Who is more “hunted up” by God than the pagan, when Christ calls him back? In fact this whole sequence happens first among pagans, since Christians are made out of pagans in no other way than by being lost first, then hunted up by God, then carried home by Christ. And the same order ought to be kept in reading the parable, so that we take any such figure of the people in whom it happens first. But you, I suppose, would have liked him to make the sheep lost not out of a flock but out of a chest or a strongbox! In the same way, although he calls the remaining number of the pagans “righteous,” it does not follow that he is showing them to be Christians. He is dealing with Jews, and refuting them at that very moment, because they were indignant at the hope held out to pagans. To set his own grace and goodwill toward even one pagan against the Pharisees’ envy, he ranked the salvation of one sinner by repentance above their own by righteousness. Or were the Jews not “righteous,” not people who “have no need of repentance,” when they had the Law and the Prophets to steer their discipline and to hold them in fear? So he put them into the parable — if not as they actually were, then as they ought to have been — so that they would blush all the harder at hearing that repentance was needed by other people and not by them.

In the same way we take the parable of the drachma to be about a pagan too, since it was called out by the same subject matter. Never mind that the coin was “lost” in a house, as though in the church, and “found” by the help of a “lamp,” as though by the help of God’s word. No — this whole world is the one house everybody shares, and in it the one whom the grace of God lights up is the pagan, who is found in the dark, rather than the Christian, who stands in God’s light already. And notice, finally, that only one straying is credited to the sheep and to the coin; which tells in my favor. If the parables had been framed with a Christian sinner in view, a man who has lost his faith, then a second loss and a second recovery would have had to be recorded.

Now I will give up this position for a little while, so that by giving it up I may commend it all the more, once I have refuted the other side’s assumption on their own ground as well. I grant that the sinner drawn in each parable is a man who is already a Christian. It still does not follow that he must therefore be called a man who can be restored by repentance after the crime of adultery and sexual immorality. For even if he is said to “have been lost,” we still have to ask what kind of loss is meant. The sheep was lost not by dying but by wandering off, and the coin not by being destroyed but by lying out of sight. In that sense a thing can be called lost while it is perfectly safe.

So a believer too is “lost” when he slips away into a public show — the frenzy of the racecourse, the blood of the gladiators, the filth of the stage, the vanity of the athletes; or when he has lent some special skill of his to the games, to the dinners of a pagan festival, to the demands of public office, to the service of somebody else’s idolatry; or when he has impaled himself on a word of ambiguous denial, or of blasphemy. For some such reason he has been driven out of the flock — or he may have broken away on his own, through anger, through pride, through jealousy, or, as in fact often happens, through refusing to take correction. That man ought to be hunted up and called back. What can be got back has not been lost, unless it insists on staying outside. You will read the parable rightly if you call back a sinner while he is still alive.

But the adulterer, and the man guilty of sexual immorality — who has not pronounced him dead the moment the crime was committed? With what face will you bring a dead man back into the flock, on the authority of a parable that calls back a sheep which is not dead?

Finally, if you remember the prophets scolding the shepherds, there is a passage — Ezekiel’s, I think: “Shepherds, look: you devour the milk and clothe yourselves with the fleeces. The strong you have slaughtered; the weak you have not tended; the broken you have not bound up; what was driven off you have not brought back; what was lost you have not hunted up.” Now does he anywhere reproach them about what is dead, that they took no trouble to restore that to the flock as well? What he does add to the charge is that they let the sheep be lost and eaten by the wild animals of the countryside — and sheep cannot be lost past recovery, or eaten up, while they are still there in the fold.

“Granted that sheep lost past recovery and eaten up are beyond restoring — may there not still be, on the model of the coin, which was lost and found again inside God’s own house, the church, certain sins of a middling sort, in proportion to the small size and weight of a drachma? Sins that lie hidden in that same church, are presently discovered in it, and are there and then finished off with the joy of amendment?”

But for adultery and sexual immorality the measure is not a drachma; it is a talent. And to hunt those out you need no lamp with its little javelin of light — you need the whole sun with its spear of a ray. The moment such a man comes to light he is expelled from the church. He does not stay in it. He does not bring the church that discovers him joy, but grief. He does not call in her neighbors to congratulate her; he brings the communities around her into the sorrow with her.

Set our reading beside theirs, then, even on these terms, and the arguments from both the sheep and the coin will point to the pagan all the more surely, because they cannot possibly fit the Christian guilty of the very sin for whose sake the other side wrench them into fitting a Christian.

Still, most interpreters of the parables are tripped up by the very thing that trips people up so often when they work purple into a garment. You think you have judged the proportions of the shades well and have blended them skillfully into something vivid; then, when each mass of color and each highlight comes out in full, the mismatch is caught and shows up the whole mistake. It is in exactly that kind of dimness that they handle the parable of the two sons. A few of its details match the color of the present situation, and those details lead them off the path of the true light thrown by the parable’s own subject matter. [o]

For they set down two peoples in the two sons: the elder the Jewish people, the younger the Christian. They have no other way of arranging, further on, for the Christian sinner to be pardoned in the person of the younger son, unless they first draw the Jew in the person of the elder. Now if I succeed in showing that the Jewish people does not suit the comparison of the elder son, it follows of course that the Christian cannot be let in under the matching figure of the younger.

Grant that the Jew is called a “son,” and an “elder” one, since he had the adoption first. Grant too that he envies the Christian his reconciliation with God the Father — the point the other side snatches at most eagerly. Still these will never be a Jew’s words to the Father: “Look how many years I have been serving you, and I have never once broken a command of yours.” For when has the Jew not been a breaker of the law — hearing with the ear and not hearing, hating the man who corrects at the gate, holding holy speech in contempt?

And these will never be the Father’s words to the Jew either: “You are always with me, and everything of mine is yours.” For the Jews are pronounced “sons who deserted him, sons he fathered and raised up high, who did not understand the Lord, who abandoned the Lord altogether and provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger.” That everything was granted to the Jew we will admit readily enough; but every choicer mouthful has also been torn out of his throat, to say nothing of the very land his fathers were promised. And so the Jew today, no less than the younger son, has squandered God’s property and begs in a foreign country, serving its rulers to this day — the rulers of this age.

Let the Christians look for some other brother, then; the parable will not have the Jew. They would have matched things far better by putting the Christian in the elder son and the Jew in the younger, “according to the proportion of faith,” if the order of the two peoples, announced already from Rebecca’s womb, allowed the reversal. Except that the closing scene would then be against them: a Christian ought to be glad at Israel’s restoration, not grieved, since it is true that the whole of our hope hangs together with what is still expected for Israel.

So even if some features of the parable are in their favor, others mean the opposite and wreck any thorough working out of the comparison. And suppose every point could be made to match like a reflection in a mirror: there is still one chief danger in interpreting, which is that we aim our happy comparisons at some target other than the one the subject matter of that particular parable told us to aim at. We remember watching actors, after all, who fitted figurative gestures to their songs and brought out meanings far removed from the plot in front of them, and the scene, and the character — and did it with perfect neatness. But away with that kind of extraordinary cleverness; it has nothing to do with our subject.

Heretics work the same way. They apply these very parables wherever they please and rule them out elsewhere — never where they ought to — and always with perfect aptness. Why so perfectly apt? Because from the very beginning they molded the substance of their teachings to whatever the parables happened to offer. Being loose from the restraints of the rule of truth, they naturally had all the leisure they needed to hunt out and fit together the things the parables seem to stand for.