The parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. The lost and found parables. There’s a tendency when reading Luke 15 to split these three parables up, to read the third one separate from the first two. After all, they all make the same point, and who wants to read a passage that’s 31 verses long? But when we split up these three parables, we risk only getting a simpler, surface reading of the scripture, and miss out on the point Jesus was trying to make. In order to truly understand what Jesus is saying here, we need to look at the three of them together. So let’s give it a shot.
Luke 15 starts off with a brief introduction, explaining why Jesus told these parables. He’s been spending his time with the “sinners” of his day, eating with them, teaching them, welcoming them as disciples. And some of the local religious leaders are upset about this. So he starts of telling a parable: the parable of the lost sheep. In the parable a shepherd has 100 sheep, and loses one. He goes off searching for his one lost sheep, leaving the other 99 behind. When he finds it, he brings it home and invites his friends to come rejoice with him that he has found his lost sheep. Jesus concludes with this statement: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” The moral of the story: rejoice that these “sinners” want to come and learn from Jesus. The religious leaders have already found God, they shouldn’t begrudge the time Jesus spends with people who are still in need of forgiveness and grace. They should be happy that the shepherd has brought the lost sheep back. And on the flip side, the story reminds the “sinners” that God is rejoicing over them. I imagine it was a bit humiliating for them to hear the religious leaders grumbling and saying Jesus shouldn’t be spending time with them. The parable serves as a reminder that they too are loved and wanted by God.
But Jesus doesn’t stop with just that parable. Now he tells one about a woman with 10 silver coins who loses one and searches her house carefully for it. Like the shepherd, when she finds the one she has lost, she invites her friends to come rejoice with her. This one goes into more detail about the effort the woman goes to in order to find her coin. She carefully sweeps her house. She lights her lamps and searches in all the dark corners and under the furniture. If it were today she might look under the couch and pull the fridge and stove out of their places. She leaves no stone unturned in search of her precious coin, a reminder to the people listening of how far God will go in search of us.
But then we have a third parable, and this one goes very differently. There’s a man with two sons, and the younger asks for his inheritance, something that was not uncommon. The older son would get the property and continue the family business. The younger son needed to go off and make his own way in the world. But instead of doing so, the younger son wastes all that he has partying, until he is left destitute. He returns to his father, ready to beg for forgiveness and work as a servant in his father’s house. But instead his father embraces him, dresses him in the finest clothes, and prepares a feast to celebrate his return. “This son of mine was dead and is alive again;” the father says, “he was lost and is found!” Well now the parable is starting to look familiar we think. The younger son is like the lost sheep and the lost coin. He’s the repentant sinner that the angels in heaven will be rejoicing over.
But the parable isn’t over yet. Jesus still has more to say. Because remember, the man had two sons. But in his excitement over the younger son coming home, the man has forgotten his older son. The older son comes in from working in the fields to find the party in full swing. He has to ask a servant what’s going on, and when he finds out that his brother is home, he refuses to go inside. He’s angry with his father for the way he welcomed the younger son back so easily. And maybe he’s a little angry too about being forgotten. Finally, his father comes out looking for him. Now wait a second, that sounds familiar. The father goes out to look for the older son. He didn’t go looking for the younger son. That son made it home on his own. But the father has to go find the older son, just like the shepherd went out to find the sheep, and woman searched her whole house for the coin. Maybe Jesus is going in a different direction with this parable than we thought.
So the father finds the older son and begs him to come inside. The older son argues, listing all of the things his brother did wrong, grumbling about how his father was so quick to welcome him. The father pleads with him saying, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” And that’s…the end of the parable. Jesus doesn’t tell us what happens, if the older son accepted his father’s invitation. He leaves us hanging at the end of the parable, and that’s because he’s waiting for his audience to fill in the ending.
The first two parables were about who we expect them to be about. The lost sheep and the lost coin represent the so-called sinners that Jesus is eating with. The parables remind everyone listening that God loves and rejoices over these people. And when we read the parable of the lost son, or the prodigal son as many call it, we tend to focus on the younger son. After all, the father says plainly, he was lost and now is found. But the parable doesn’t end with the younger son being found. Instead we have the father, who stayed at home waiting for the younger son, who didn’t go searching for him like the shepherd searched for his sheep or the woman searched for the coin, and he goes out searching for the older son. And if we’re following the pattern of the first two parables, we realize, the lost son in this parable is not the younger son, it’s the older son.
The older son didn’t run away and get himself physically lost, but he is lost in a different way. He’s sitting out in the field, angry with his father for welcoming his younger brother home, for eating with him, for forgiving him. But wait, that sounds really familiar. If we remember way back to the beginning of the chapter, there were some other people angry about who was being welcomed and forgiven: the religious leaders. Jesus has done something very clever here. He’s flipped the story around. By making the older son the lost son, he’s saying to the religious leaders, you’re lost too. I’m sure they didn’t consider themselves lost. After all they were faithful people who worshipped God and followed the commandments. But I’m sure the older son wouldn’t have considered himself lost either. After all, he had stayed with his father the whole time and played the perfect son, doing everything he was supposed to. But because he refused to welcome his brother home, because he refused to forgive and rejoice, he was just as lost as the sheep or the coin. The religious leaders were lost because they couldn’t rejoice when people they considered sinners came to Jesus. And so Jesus ends the parable on a cliff hanger because he’s inviting the religious leaders in to the party. He’s saying, rejoice with me, because these people were lost and now are found. Sit down and eat with us. Jesus leaves it up to the religious leaders to decide how the parable ends. Does the lost older son let go of his anger and join his father and brother? Or does he stay out in the field and remain lost?
I want to go back to that cartoon for a moment. I spend a lot of time with people like the sheep Jesus is carrying, people who aren’t lost because they’re sinners who wandered away from God, but who were rejected by the church and sent out into the wilderness to fend for themselves. In fact, I’ve been that person myself. But the irony is that the flock of sheep that kicked the one out, don’t realize how lost they themselves are. A community that judges people for their sexuality or gender identity, a community kicks us out for refusing to repent of who we are, of who God made us to be, that community is just as lost as the older brother. They can’t rejoice that we are living authentically in the identities God gave us. They can’t rejoice that we are doing so while loving God with all our hearts, minds, and souls. They see us, and they see Christ welcoming us, and they get angry and resentful and because they think we don’t belong here. And so every time they send us out into the wilderness on our own, they become more lost. But the parable of the lost son reminds us that just as Christ is welcoming and rejoicing over us, he is also inviting the lost churches to set aside their judgment and anger and join the party. But until they do so, they will remain lost, even if they don’t realize it.
I love the lost and found parables, for so many reasons. But I’d like to leave you with this last one. Whether we are lost because we wandered away from God on our own, or because we were kicked out by churches that wouldn’t accept us for who we are, Christ never stops looking for us. When we’ve been rejected by non-affirming churches, when we’re wandering the wilderness struggling with our faith, wondering how to make sense of all the pain we’ve been through, that’s where Christ finds us. He shows up in the most scary, dangerous, lonely places, and picks us up and carries us to a new flock, one that welcomes and affirms us and rejoices that we have been found. So many churches want us to believe that we are the “sinners”, the lost ones who need to repent of our identities before we can be welcomed back. But Christ says differently. Christ says we are beloved and welcomed and wanted. And every time Jesus finds another one of us wandering the wilderness after being rejected by non-affirming churches, every time we choose to follow Christ home to a fully affirming community in spite of all the pain we’ve been through, there is rejoicing in heaven.