3rd Sunday after Pentecost 17.6.07 Lost sheep
This parable of the lost sheep goes against our normal worldly thinking.
99 out of 100 is not bad. Any bishop would be glad to have 99% of his diocese working as it should,
but this parable is telling us, No, you cannot be happy if even one of your number is out in the cold.
This makes sense if we think of the Church in the same light as a family.
Suppose a family of say two parents and six children had to make a sudden exit because flood waters were coming.
You would not be happy if one of the children could not be found. Nobody would say: well, I have five out of six children in the car. Five out of six is not bad.
Of course, you would be frantically looking for the lost child.
We realize that the value of a person is not mathematical. There is something irreplaceable about each person.
We cannot simply interchange one person for another.
In practice, though, we do this all the time (when we do not know people very well). We talk of victims and survivors of an accident, but it is just numbers to us if we don’t know who the people are. We can manage to raise some sympathy for those suffering, but we do not feel the devastating loss that others closer to the scene would feel.
We care about only those we know. Well, by that logic, God knows everyone of His children, and therefore cares about each one.
This is why Our Lord could give this teaching. To Him every person is important. Just as (or more so) your children are important to you, or your best friends etc.
He knows and loves each person passionately. It is therefore imperative that He as Good Shepherd would set off in search of a lost sheep.
To the rest of us it is one out of a hundred, so who cares? To Him it is like one of your children missing from the car.
He wants to convey to us a sense of the importance of each person.
We have this in the pro-life movement. Society does not care about abortions because they are just faceless numbers.
God, who created the soul of each baby at conception has a very different view.
We can be pro-life, but still very impersonal in the way we can classify people, taking them in general, not allowing for particular exceptions.
This is especially important with regard to evildoers, to sinners.
We can dismiss people so easily, but the Good Shepherd is not so quick to write people off.
OK it is very hard to love some people, when they have caused so much harm, but we have to remember their unique identity.
God did not create them that way and He is trying to rescue them from whatever ditch they have fallen into.
He is trying to free them from Satan’s clutches.
We naturally want people to be saved from physical harm; we should want it all the more from spiritual harm.
In any case, once the lost sheep comes home, he will change and become likeable.
When St Paul was still Saul, the average Christian would not have liked him much, but afterwards they came to love him. So for any lost sheep of today.
So we need to love more, to have the Heart of Christ in us, the Sacred Heart that burns with love for each and every person, writing no one off, wanting to find and bring home.
If we do not want that much, or don’t care much, our hearts have become hard. We are lost sheep ourselves to that extent. We need forgiving for our hardness of heart, and an infusion of divine love to make us search out the lost. Who cares? Anyone who has the heart of Christ within.
This parable of the lost sheep goes against our normal worldly thinking.
99 out of 100 is not bad. Any bishop would be glad to have 99% of his diocese working as it should,
but this parable is telling us, No, you cannot be happy if even one of your number is out in the cold.
This makes sense if we think of the Church in the same light as a family.
Suppose a family of say two parents and six children had to make a sudden exit because flood waters were coming.
You would not be happy if one of the children could not be found. Nobody would say: well, I have five out of six children in the car. Five out of six is not bad.
Of course, you would be frantically looking for the lost child.
We realize that the value of a person is not mathematical. There is something irreplaceable about each person.
We cannot simply interchange one person for another.
In practice, though, we do this all the time (when we do not know people very well). We talk of victims and survivors of an accident, but it is just numbers to us if we don’t know who the people are. We can manage to raise some sympathy for those suffering, but we do not feel the devastating loss that others closer to the scene would feel.
We care about only those we know. Well, by that logic, God knows everyone of His children, and therefore cares about each one.
This is why Our Lord could give this teaching. To Him every person is important. Just as (or more so) your children are important to you, or your best friends etc.
He knows and loves each person passionately. It is therefore imperative that He as Good Shepherd would set off in search of a lost sheep.
To the rest of us it is one out of a hundred, so who cares? To Him it is like one of your children missing from the car.
He wants to convey to us a sense of the importance of each person.
We have this in the pro-life movement. Society does not care about abortions because they are just faceless numbers.
God, who created the soul of each baby at conception has a very different view.
We can be pro-life, but still very impersonal in the way we can classify people, taking them in general, not allowing for particular exceptions.
This is especially important with regard to evildoers, to sinners.
We can dismiss people so easily, but the Good Shepherd is not so quick to write people off.
OK it is very hard to love some people, when they have caused so much harm, but we have to remember their unique identity.
God did not create them that way and He is trying to rescue them from whatever ditch they have fallen into.
He is trying to free them from Satan’s clutches.
We naturally want people to be saved from physical harm; we should want it all the more from spiritual harm.
In any case, once the lost sheep comes home, he will change and become likeable.
When St Paul was still Saul, the average Christian would not have liked him much, but afterwards they came to love him. So for any lost sheep of today.
So we need to love more, to have the Heart of Christ in us, the Sacred Heart that burns with love for each and every person, writing no one off, wanting to find and bring home.
If we do not want that much, or don’t care much, our hearts have become hard. We are lost sheep ourselves to that extent. We need forgiving for our hardness of heart, and an infusion of divine love to make us search out the lost. Who cares? Anyone who has the heart of Christ within.
