Matthew 18.10-14.
This particular story is often called the Lost Sheep Story, which makes it really easy to mix up with
But too often when people tell the story, they skip
It misses the whole point of the parable. What is the point of the parable? Duh, the context. Jesus told this story for a reason, and if you ditch his reason because you’ve got your own reasons for telling this story, you’re not preaching his gospel; you’re preaching your own.
So I’m gonna share this story, in context, so you can see for yourself what Jesus means by it. Beginning, not at verse 12 like they preach it, but verse 10.
Matthew 18.10-14 KWL 10 “See to it you² don’t dismiss- even one of these little ones.
- For I tell you² their heavenly angels
- see the face of my heavenly Father
- all the time.
11 {For the Son of Man comes- to save those who are being destroyed.}
12 “What do you² think?- When a certain person comes to have 100 sheep,
- and one of them might wander off,
- won’t he leave the 99 in the hills,
- and go seek the wanderer?
13 And when he happens to find it,- amen!—I promise you, he rejoices over it
- more than the 99 who didn’t wander off.
14 Likewise it’s not the will of your² heavenly Father- that one of these little ones be destroyed.”
Brackets around verse 11 are to remind you
The Luke parallel to this story isn’t about little ones—by which Jesus means children—being dismissed, overlooked, corrupted, or destroyed. It’s about how
Typical shepherd behavior.
Preachers like to talk about ancient shepherd leaving behind the 99 to rescue one sheep—one little, insignificant sheep—as if shepherds didn’t do this sort of thing. Jesus’s language in both Matthew and Luke indicates to his listeners that shepherds regularly left the flock behind to chase stragglers and lost sheep. That was, after all, their job. When you bring the sheep back to the sheepfold, you’d better have the same number of animals as you took out!
Exactly like a schoolteacher who turns their children loose for recess. If there are any kids absent after the bell rings, they’re not gonna shrug and say, “Oh well, the occasional loss is just part of life.” Heck no. Other staff members get called in to help find the child. Sometimes administrators. Sometimes police and
To the ancients, wealth often wasn’t measured in gold, but real estate and animals. And 100 sheep meant you were relatively comfortable. Not rich, but definitely not poor. That’s a lot of animals!—and a lot of wool and milk, and when they were fertile they’d produce a lot of babies. It’s also a lot of animals to watch over, and you’d often need help managing a flock that size.
So in this story, Jesus talks about losing one of 100 sheep. While someone with 100 sheep might be able to afford to lose one sheep, it’d be irresponsible management to not go look for it, and find out what happened to it. Maybe it wasn’t killed by accident or by a predator. So you put the other sheep in a safe place—in the hills, as Jesus describes it in Matthew—and go find that straggler. Preachers like to imagine this was a great risk, or hardship, or something a shepherd couldn’t be arsed to do, but God loves us so much he eagerly would. And that’s false. What shepherd, Jesus says, wouldn’t do this? An irresponsible shepherd. A dumb shepherd. Any shepherd would.
Jesus uses this example to point out it’s simply commonsense for God to want to track down any of his wayward children. He loves us. He loves us way more than a shepherd does sheep. He doesn’t want us destroyed.
Now, back to the little ones.
From time to time people claim the ancient Israelis didn’t care about their children; that they dismissed the little rugrats until they reached a level of maturity,
Of course any human culture which actually acts this way, is gonna see a really high rate of child mortality. The reality is very few cultures act this way. And the Israelis were not one of them. Children are a gift from the L
Well… as you know, some people today don’t love their children. Not all of us are cut out to be parents. Some of us weren’t raised right, weren’t given any good examples of loving, benevolent parenting, and follow the impatience of James Dobson instead of the grace of God. Some children were driven away from God because their Christian parents thought their job was to break their children’s will, not impress God’s commands upon their hearts like he instructs.
That’s hardly a new practice. Every generation has had crappy control-freak parents. Jesus’s generation too. That’s why Jesus teaches his followers to not lead their own children astray, to not place millstone-sized burdens upon them. To instead train them up in the way they should go
Jesus’s warning is to those of us who might be tempted to adopt that mindset—who might think “I’m the parent” covers a multitude of sins. It does not. God cares about our children. Their angels, Jesus says, are in regular contact with his Father.
