Parables of the lost sheep and lost coin

Tax collectors and sinners are gathering to hear Jesus, and the Pharisees and teachers of the law mutter: this man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

Both halves of that complaint need explaining.

Tax collectors here are mostly the men who collected tolls and customs duties under contract, having bid for the right, and who made their living from whatever they could extract above the contracted sum. The system invited extortion and generally received it. They were also collaborators, taking money for a foreign power, and they were barred from serving as witnesses in Jewish courts. Sinners covers people whose trade or life put them outside observance.

Eating with someone in that world was not a neutral act. A shared table meant acceptance, and rules about who might be at it, and about the purity of what was served, were taken seriously. The complaint is not that he talks to such people; it is that he sits down with them.

The first story is about a man with a hundred sheep who loses one. He leaves the ninety-nine in the open country and goes after the lost one until he finds it. Leaving the flock unattended is a real risk, and the arithmetic looks poor until you consider that a hundred sheep was a modest holding and the loss of one mattered.

When he finds it he puts it on his shoulders and comes home, and calls his friends and neighbours together to celebrate. Carrying a full-grown sheep several kilometres across broken ground is heavy work, and the detail is not decorative.

The second story shortens the odds and raises the stakes. A woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Each was a drachma, roughly a day's wage, so one tenth of what she has is gone. She lights a lamp, sweeps the house and searches carefully until she finds it. A village house had few windows and a floor of beaten earth or rough stone, so lighting a lamp in daylight and sweeping to hear the coin move is exactly what a woman would do.

Some have suggested the ten coins were a headdress of linked coins forming part of a married woman's identity, which would explain the intensity of the search. The evidence for that custom in the period is thin.

She too calls her friends and neighbours together.

Each ends the same way, and the repetition is the point: there is rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents. The parties in the stories are not incidental decoration. They are the answer to the muttering that started the conversation.

The three stories told in this conversation form a single answer, and they escalate. One sheep in a hundred, one coin in ten, and then one son of two. The proportion lost rises each time and so does the value of what is lost, until the last of them is a person rather than property.

Each also has a searcher: a shepherd who goes out, a woman who turns the house over, and a father who watches the road. In the first two, someone looks until the thing is found. In the third, the son comes home on his own, and the father is already running.