Luke 15:1–10
The parables of Luke 15 are some of the most famous in the Bible. We have the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. Each parable shows an inefficient God who doesn’t look at the big picture. The big picture is that 99 of 100 is a great success rate; nine out of ten is fantastic. Why would the lady spend all that time for one coin?
Earlier this week, my children lost our Apple TV remote in the couch. I spent twenty minutes trying to shake it out or find it some way. No luck. I gave up and moved on with my life. The coin, though, didn’t get lost on its own. The lone sheep, in fact, did.
There are a number of questions we could ask about the sheep. What if that lost sheep deserved it? What if they wanted to be lost. What if they were trying to run away? What if they were just a bad sheep and if we kept him in the flock, he would just make other sheep turn bad? If we rescue the sheep, isn’t that what economists call moral hazard? Wouldn’t the sheep just go out and get lost again in order to get more attention from the shepherd?
The parables are framed around the grumbling of Jesus’ opponents as they see sinners come close to Jesus. They make the ever ancient/ever new claim about who deserves the attention of Jesus and who does not. They imply that because Jesus spends time with sinners, he must be a sinner. And yet the parables cut through this wicked logic of separating humanity between the deserving and the undeserving.
This separation of deserving and undeserving is at the heart of the continuance of criminal justice and the prison industrial complex. There are those who deserve to be punished and those who don’t. It is a logic completely at odds with the Good News of Jesus Christ. It is a logic at odds with the teaching of Jesus Christ. When churches acquiesce to this cruel logic of separation, we let go of Good News for the sake of expediency and efficiency.
There is another hope found in these parables. The church that has turned away from the Good News of Jesus to embrace the carceral state is lost and Jesus is coming to bring us home.
Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.