Our Lord’s parable of the lost sheep appears twice in the gospels with slight variations. Jesus sometimes repeated sayings and stories in different contexts with different audiences. This parable concerns a man who has a hundred sheep, one of which has gone astray. Our Lord then asks rhetorically, “Does he not leave the ninety-nine and go in search of the one that went astray?” The expected answer is “Of course he does.”
That bothers modern readers. Why, they wonder, would anyone leave ninety-nine sheep “on the mountains”, as Matthew has it, or “in the open country”, as we have it in Luke? From our perspective, both situations seem precarious for the remaining ninety-nine.
Does this man care about one straying sheep more than the sheep that behaved themselves?
What Are We Missing?
I am cautious about reading too much into parables. I’ve seen it done way too often, and it almost always ends in absurdity or theological perplexity. I have come to believe our Lord never intended most of his imagery to be parsed down to the granular level in order to find a spiritual analogy for every detail in every story. The parables have a main point, and that’s what we’re supposed to take away. In this case, that point is the joy of the man who recovers what others might have written off, which is spiritually analogous to the joy of the Father when a sinner repents, trusts Christ and receives eternal life. Lose sight of that, and we’ve lost the plot.
Still, when I was much younger, I too wondered about the ninety-nine sheep. It seems like this particular parable would have read a lot more comfortably if the ninety-nine sheep were left in the fold, where we could all heave a sigh of relief at the image of woolly masses curled up in their comfy beds after a long day nibbling grass or whatever sheep do. But rewriting the parable out of concern for the ninety-nine would make us both nobler and smarter than the person who told the parable in the first place. Since he happened to be almighty God, that’s beyond highly unlikely. So what are we missing?
If a Man…
Well, we’re missing the obvious, which shouldn’t surprise us because few of us have ever seen a flock of sheep or have the slightest understanding of how they were managed thousands of years ago in the Near East. We encounter sheep mostly these days in the pages of scripture. But even if all we had was the word of God to guide us, this phrase should suffice: “If a man has a hundred sheep …”
No man who owned a hundred sheep ever cared for them himself on a day-to-day basis. You won’t find a single example in the Bible. It wouldn’t have been economical. A man who could buy a hundred sheep had much more profitable things to do with his time. Shepherding was the equivalent of today’s minimum wage job, as our own IC once noted in this Christmas post. Shepherds were far from high-status in every eastern culture, and some societies actively despised them. They slept in the field when required. They risked injury and death. A man who could afford to buy a hundred sheep hired people to take care of them, as Laban hired Jacob to pasture his flocks, or sent his least consequential relative out with them, as Jesse did his youngest son David.
Risk / Reward
With a hundred sheep, this man had hired at least one shepherd, probably more. In any case, the scripture accounts imply shepherds tended to congregate. Remember scripture’s most famous shepherds — plural — out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night? Why weren’t those sheep at home in the fold? Because the shepherds were doing what shepherds did: leading the sheep to where the pastures were. The owners of those sheep were home in bed. Smart men. That’s probably why we find the word “shepherds” [plural] in scripture almost as often as “shepherd” [singular]. So long as there was enough pasture for all, it made sense for shepherds to work in groups rather than leading their own sheep off in different directions. The advantage of sticking together is obvious: more men to defend the flock when the predators show up.
Given what they were paid and the conditions in which they worked, shepherds in the Near East were not always men of wonderful character. Scripture speaks of both good shepherds and bad, of those who would defend the flock as if it was their own, and those who would abandon it when things got rough. But good character or not, no shepherd who could count would ever leave his master’s flock in the open country unattended and run off looking for a single lost lamb. He was personally responsible for the safety of the owner’s sheep. If that owner was anything like Laban, the cost of each lost sheep came right out of the shepherd’s pocket. The ratio of risk to reward was far too great. Better to bear the cost of one lost sheep than return from seeking it only to find that you had lost half your master’s flock to wolves.
We can relax. Those ninety-nine sheep left in the open country in the parable did just fine. Their shepherd stayed right where he was. Our Lord’s audience would have expected that of him. We can be sure the original listeners never gave the safety of the ninety-nine a second thought.
The Beauty of the Parable
No, the beauty of the parable in both Matthew and Luke is this: the owner seeks out the lost sheep, not just some underling with an exceptional sense of responsibility. Do you think that owner had better things to do with his time? Of course he did. Yet this man does not calculate the potential loss as a trivial percentage of his flock. He does not say to himself, “Well, the ewes will bear again in spring anyway.” Rather, he goes after the one sheep that is lost, and when he finds it, he lays it on his shoulders and comes home rejoicing.
What a perfect picture of our God, who himself took on flesh to seek and to save that which was lost.
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