The Shepherd Who Counted Wrong on Purpose

Martha's kitchen was many miles behind him now, and Jesus was still on the road to Jerusalem, teaching in one town after another. Wherever he stopped, the same sort of crowd squeezed in close to hear him: tax collectors, and people the whole town called sinners.

(Tax collectors gathered money for the Romans, and plenty of them took extra for themselves. No one saved them a seat at a wedding.)

At the back stood the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, arms folded.

"Look at him," one muttered. "He welcomes sinners."

"He even eats with them!" said another.

Jesus heard. So he told them a story.

A shepherd has a hundred sheep. (A hundred sheep make a great deal of noise, and to most people they all look alike. A good shepherd knows every face.) One evening, out on the hills, he counts them before leading them home. Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine. He frowns and counts again. Ninety-nine.

"Wouldn't he leave the ninety-nine in the open country," Jesus asked, "and go after the lost one until he finds it?"

(Anyone good at sums would call that bad counting: ninety-nine sheep left on their own to look for one. The shepherd goes anyway.)

Up the hill he climbs, past the rocks, into the thorn bushes, calling and calling. At last he hears it. "Baaa!" There is his sheep, wool snagged on a bramble, legs muddy to the knees. He does not scold it. He swings it up across his shoulders. Home he goes, grinning all the way, with four hooves bouncing against his chest.

He bangs on his neighbours' doors. "Come and be glad with me! I've found my lost sheep!"

Jesus looked at the men with folded arms. "I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine good people who don't need to repent."

To repent means to turn around and come back to God. The tax collectors at the front were listening hard.

"Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins," Jesus said, "and she loses one."

(One of those coins was about a day's pay. Houses then had tiny windows, so even at noon the corners were dark.) She lights a lamp. She sweeps under the sleeping mats and behind the water jars. She shakes out every basket. Swish, swish, swish. Then, clink! Something rolls out of the dust and glints in the lamplight.

Out the door she runs. "Be glad with me! I've found the coin I lost!" (Her neighbours had listened to the sweeping all morning. Now they got the shouting.)

"In the same way," said Jesus, "there is joy in front of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

The teachers of the law still stood at the back with their arms folded. A shepherd scrambling through thorn bushes after one muddy sheep was not how they pictured God.

Those teachers knew God's promise through the prophet Ezekiel by heart: "I will look for the lost, and I will bring back the ones who wandered away." They were waiting for God to keep it. It never crossed their minds that God was keeping it right in front of them, at a table full of tax collectors.

Jesus was doing the searching himself, town after town and table after table. He knew the faces in that crowd the way the shepherd knew his flock. And his road led to Jerusalem, where bringing the lost home would mean dying on a cross.

And every time one more of them turned around, heaven was glad all over again, and Jesus went on looking.