By Elsa Day
I was just having a think this week, and my mind drifted to the three “Lost” stories in the Bible: the Lost Coin, the Lost Sheep, and the Lost Son (Luke 15).
I have heard so many sermons preached on all three, but it struck me that one of the things they all have in common, quite apart from the word “lost”, is that each character involved is in some way an outsider.
The main figure in the first story is a woman. I added up how many women are recorded as having some kind of association with Jesus and I think it was eleven or twelve that are actually named, or a story is written about the incident in which they were the central figure.
Women had such a lowly position yet this woman when she finds her lost coin calls her neighbours to a party… unusual, I would have thought: a woman, an “outsider”, throwing a party.
Then I thought of the story of the lost sheep, and who is the star of this episode?
It is a shepherd. Now, no-one cared for shepherds as they lived with sheep. They had few opportunities to wash and clean up and so were ritually unclean men, outsiders of society, and yet Jesus points out the man’s care for his flock. A man with a heart, braving all kinds of difficulties for the sake of a sheep. A responsible man, yet one that no law-abiding Jew would sit down with at a table and share a meal.
Then I thought of the lost son. What a disgrace he was to his family, his father in particular, and to his people, as a Jewish son. What good Jewish son would treat his father so: in effect telling him he could not wait for him to die? Deservedly an outcast.
Yet maybe it is the father who would be deemed disgraceful as he, on his son’s return, loses all decorum and runs to greet him. He hugs this filthy young man who has been mixing with pigs! Demanding the finest robe to be put on his back and sandals for his blackened feet… demanding nothing in return for his son’s disgraceful behaviour. This man must be a lunatic and, as such, an outsider too.
Then I thought how Jesus not only welcomed outsiders … tax-gatherers and swindlers, prostitutes and lepers, madmen, people maimed in some way, aliens (that is, foreigners) but depicted Himself as a Shepherd on many occasions, an Outsider. An Other.
He calls us to be like Him. So, who would you consider to be outsiders today?
What is our response to them?
(Image by Pexels from Pixabay)
