CHRISTIANITY lays great weight upon repentance (in Greek, metanoia, “change of mind”). It is a tricky term. Its meaning is almost exclusively religious. So it is not a word that many people are exposed to in the course of their everyday lives.
This is not because Britain is no longer a Christian country. It is because Christian wrong — and Christian sorrow for wrong — are distinctive: a particular stage in our growth towards moral maturity. Christian sin is not a matter of offending social rules and conventions, but, rather, a straying from the path of righteousness. Christian repentance is not a matter of wishing you had not done something, but, rather, of being sorry for having done something because you recognise that it was wrong.
In ordinary life, we talk about things that we do wrong, and about being sorry for them. In church, we talk about sin and repentance. The gap between those two attitudes is infinite, because what fills the gap between one kind of sorry and another is God.
The parable of the lost sheep makes this point perfectly. The sheep was not wicked because it strayed from the flock; nor is the flock morally superior because it stayed where it was. Even more than the sheep, the coin — being inanimate (so taking Jesus’s point about repentance a stage further) — could not have had an intention of any sort. This puts all the focus back on the ones who do the searching: the shepherd and the housewife. Luke 15 is principally a lesson about God and his mercy: a challenge to our besetting fear that, by doing wrong, we may put ourselves beyond forgiveness.
Like the parable that follows them, these two parables are unique to Luke. What spurred Jesus into delivering them was the attitude towards wrongdoing shown by the scribes and Pharisees. Again uniquely, their misguided attitude is so harmful that it requires three parables, one after another, to vanquish it completely. If we gauge the importance that Jesus placed on any precept by the amount of time that he devoted to teaching it, then what he is telling us in Luke 15 is his most important teaching of all.
Jesus is doing more here than calling out the scribes and Pharisees for their judgmentalism. They were, we are told, “grumbling” — an insidious form of joy-killing human behaviour. Luke highlights this by using a very distinctive verb, diagonguzein. This is what, in the AV, is called the “murmuring” of the Israelites (in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), and Luke seems to have pinched it from there to characterise the offenders in his Gospel.
Because the word is so unusual (it is used in exactly the same way for the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19.7), it sticks out of the text, demanding to be noticed. In Luke, then, Jesus is making a strongly critical statement: to grumble at him for consorting with “sinners” is akin to grumbling at God and resisting his will for his people, standing between them and the promised land. No wonder the scribes and Pharisees were ready to hand him over to the Romans on whatever charge they could think of to get rid of him.
This is where I must stray a little from the clearly marked path of the lectionary, and hope that readers are in a forgiving frame of mind; for the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin do not stand alone: they need to be read together with the third and greatest parable of the three — perhaps the greatest parable of all, and surely the longest: the Prodigal Son.
We can try to re-label it; for it really is, as a thoughtful preacher will sometimes remind us, the parable of a father and his sons. But it will always be best known by its traditional name. Although we never hear all three parables together in a Sunday eucharist, whenever the Gospel is Luke 15.1-10, we should always be prepared to listen for the voices of the prodigal, and his forgiving father, and his jealous brother. By the time that Jesus turns from lost sheep and coins, and takes human beings as his example, this comforting lesson should have been taken firmly to heart: we are not judged on how strenuously we strive to be good, but on how honestly we repent of our wrongdoing.
