Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Sheep That Was Lost
Luke 15:1-7
1 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming close to him to hear him. · WEB
Criticized for the company he keeps, he answers with three parables — and the first is about a man who goes looking.
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming close to him to hear him. The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, "This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them" Luke 15:1–2.
The two verses are the door into the whole chapter. Three parables follow and all three answer the same complaint, so none of them can be read apart from it. The charge is precise and it is accurate — he does welcome them, and he does eat with them, and eating meant acceptance.
The word for the complaint is murmured, which is what Israel did in the wilderness Exodus 16:2. It is grumbling in the presence of provision.
"Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them, wouldn't leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that was lost, until he found it?" Luke 15:4.
The parable is treated in Matthew's account Matthew 18:12–14, where it is addressed to the disciples as a rule about not despising the small. Here the audience is different, and so is the edge: it is aimed at men who thought the shepherd's behavior was the problem.
And it opens which of you, which is an appeal to their own practice. Nobody in that crowd would have written off an animal.
Until he found it is the phrase that carries the parable. Not until dark, not until it became unreasonable.
"When he has found it, he carries it on his shoulders, rejoicing" Luke 15:5. This account's own detail, and it changes the picture. The animal does not walk back. A grown sheep across the shoulders is a heavy carry over rough ground, and the man doing it is described as glad — the cost and the joy are in the same sentence.
"Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!" Luke 15:6. The finding ends in a party, which is the point of all three parables and the exact thing being objected to. The critics are watching a celebration and calling it bad company.
"There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance" Luke 15:7.
The last clause is quietly ironic. There are no such people, and the men listening believed themselves to be them. The comparison is granted on their own terms, and even on their own terms they come off worse — nobody throws a party for the ninety-nine.
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