Now, obviously Jesus, by many people's minds, was thought to be a perfect candidate to be the promised Messiah who would fulfill God's will for Israel and do all sorts of wonderful things in the world. People like the scribes and the pharisees didn't think that Jesus was much of a Messiah candidate if he could associate with tax collectors and sinners. Tax collectors were mostly crooks in those days, and sinners meant what it means now. Everyone's favorite sin is something sexual, and the sinners most likely were prostitutes. Jesus spent a lot of time welcoming those people, eating with them, talking with them, visiting them, and otherwise consorting with them, so they didn't like this. It's apropos of this remark: "This fellow eats with sinners and welcomes them!", that Jesus tells the parables of lostness.

"I want you to imagine that you have one hundred sheep," he says to the pharisees and the scribes around him. "I want you to imagine that you have one hundred sheep and that you lose one of them. Now, wouldn't you, therefore, go out after the lost one until you find it?" Well, what's the real answer to that question? The real answer to that question is "of course not." Nobody in his right mind who's in the sheep business has one hundred sheep, loses one, leaves the ninety-nine to the wolves and the coyotes, and goes chasing off after one. You cut your losses, forget about the lost sheep, and go on with the ninety-nine. So Jesus' question is perverse. It's odd. It's ironic. Who among you would do this? Who among you wouldn't go out and do this? Everybody wouldn't! They wouldn't go out and do this sort of thing. And, therefore, then he says, "And when you find that, what would you do with the sheep if you'd actually done this?" You would put the sheep on your shoulder, and then notice what Jesus says. He doesn't say, "Then he goes back to the ninety-nine and gives this little sheep back to his mother sheep," or something else. What Jesus says is that he puts the lost sheep on his shoulders and goes to his house. He goes home.

In this parable, Jesus never goes back to the ninety-nine sheep. The ninety-nine sheep are a set-up. Jesus has divided the flock into one sheep and ninety-nine sheep, and he's not trying to make two different groups. You know, ninety-nine who don't get lost, and one who does. I think the real meaning of the one and the ninety-nine is that the one lost sheep is the whole human race as it really is. And the ninety-nine "found" sheep who never get lost are the whole human race as we think we are. And the ninety-nine; therefore, are not a real piece of business in this. The one lost sheep stands for all of us, and this says that the only thing the shepherd—God, the God character—is interested in, is going after the lost, and, if necessary, the shepherd will go out of the sheep ranching business to find the lost, and God, therefore, will go out of the God business, of the business of being the kind of God we turn God into the God who's a bookkeeper, the God who's the divine infinite "watch-bird" who's keeping records on everybody, and if you don't do it right, he's not going to bother with you anymore. That's the business that God goes out of when he goes after the lost because he only wants to come and find sinners. He doesn't want anything else. And then Jesus asks the last question in this one, and he says, "I say to you that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance." The proof of this is, of course, did you ever meet any of those ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance? No, you didn't. There isn't one in the whole world. So this proves the set-up that Jesus is only interested in finding the lost; that God, in Christ, is only interested in finding the lost.

Now, he follows this parable up with the parable of the lost coin, and Jesus changes the image. The God character in this parable is not a shepherd. It's a woman. It's a very strange woman. As the shepherd is sort of crazy to go chase one sheep and leave ninety-nine to the wolves, so this woman is even crazier. It says this woman has ten coins, and I like to think, just to bring it up to date, that what this woman has is ten Susan B. Anthony dollars in a nice wooden case with red velvet lining and little recessed partitions for each of the ten Susan B. Anthony dollars. And every morning she gets up, and she looks in there and pats them and polishes them and puts them back down again. She gets up one morning, and one of her precious Susan B. Anthony dollars is missing so what does this woman do? She is as crazy as the shepherd, if not crazier, because she stops her entire life. She stops anything she had to do that day. She stops whatever housework she was going to do, and she lights a light, and goes into all the dark corners. She sweeps, and sweeps, and sweeps, and looks under everything for the whole day until she finds this coin. And what does she do when she finds it? Interestingly enough, like the shepherd Jesus never says she puts it back in the box. It says she gets on the phone to her friends and her neighbors and says, "Come on over, I'm going to have a party. I found my lost coin."

And now I'm sure that these friends and neighbors say, "Gertrude, you found a coin, right? And we're supposed to come?"

She says, "Yes. I have cream soda, and I have ring dings, and you're going to come over, and we're going to celebrate my lost coin."

Certainly they'd say, "Yes, Gertrude, we'll come." But they are not that enthusiastic. But the point is, she is. And this woman proves something. In the lost sheep, you can develop some pity for the poor, little lost sheep. You can feel bad, you know, that it’s injured or hurt or fearful and all that. But you can't work up any pity for a lost coin. A lost coin never knows it's lost. One place is as good as another. The point is that what these two parables put together say is that what governs God's behavior to us is not our sins. It's not our problems. It's his need to find us. These parables go by the need of the finder to find, not about the need of the lost to be found. That's obvious. We always knew that. We could have gone to our graves knowing that. The great thing is that the universe is driven by the need of the finder to find all of us in our lostness. And that, of course, is the beginning.

And the last of the three parables in this chapter is the lost son, which commonly goes by the name of the prodigal son because we misname these parables. Interestingly enough, obviously this parable should be called the parable of the forgiving father. Now, what I want to do is set-up the parable a little bit, and tell it to you quickly. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, just because I hope it's familiar. But a man has two sons, and the youngest son comes to him and says, "Father—Dad—put your will into effect and split up the entire inheritance right now between me and my brother." You know what that is in so many words? That's: "Drop dead, Father." He's suggesting that the father put his will into effect. And the father does it. He gives all the cash that's loose to the younger son. He gives the entire property, like South Fork, in "Dallas,"—some big spread—to the elder brother, and the father sits on the porch for the rest of the parable, at least for a little bit of it, and retires from things.

The younger son takes the money and goes to a far country. He has wine, women, and song; blows all his money, ends up feeding pigs, and sits there and says one day, "Oh, as I think of my father's servants, they eat better than I do. I'm going to go home, and say, 'Father, I've sinned against heaven and against you. I'm not worthy to be your son. Make me a hired servant.'" Now, that is not a sinner who was repentant, yet. Because what he's said: "Father, I'm a no-good son," and "Father, I've sinned against heaven and before you," is true. That's fine. That's pretty good for repentance. But "Make me a hired servant" is not a repentance. That's a plan for life. That's a plan to con his father into accepting him back instead of coming back as a no-good son. So he comes home. He comes down the road and when he's a half mile off, his father sees him. He runs down the road, falls on his neck and kisses him, and after the forgiveness and the father's kiss, the son makes his confession. He says, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I'm not worthy to be your son." And he leaves off the hired servant business. The father then goes immediately to the thing that ended the other parables. He goes to the party. He calls for the rings on his fingers, the shoes on his feet, and says: "Kill the fatted calf, and let us eat and be merry. My son was dead, and he's alive, was lost, he's found." And they have a party, and there's music and dancing and everything else. Then Jesus brings in the other lost son. He's the ninety-nine. He's the nine other coins in the box. He thinks he's found. He comes in, and he's whining.

He says, "All these years I have been such a good boy, and done your will and done all these wonderful things, and you never even gave me a goat to have a party with my friends. But when this son of yours who has wasted his substance with whores comes home, then you give him the fatted calf." And he won't go in. What this son has done—though he thinks he's a found character and he's a wonderful bookkeeper and has got everything else right—what he has done, is come into the courtyard of the house, with a party inside, and he has brought hell with him. He is the hell of his own bookkeeping, the hell of his own complaining. He has brought hell with him.

What does the father do? The father's the God character. What does the father do? The father goes out into the courtyard once again, like the shepherd, like the woman, to seek the lost. The need of the finder to find. He goes out there, and he talks to his son, and he says, "Look, son, Arthur, everything I have belongs to you. You could have had fatted calf three nights a week if you wanted. All you had to do was build the stalls. You have the money. You have no imagination, Arthur. You know what I would like you to do, Arthur? I would like you to shut up, go inside, kiss your brother, and have a drink." And the wonderful thing about this parable is that Jesus, genius of a storyteller that he is, has ended it so that it doesn't end.

At the end of the parable—suppose you saw it in a film—you have the music and the sounds of the feasting and the laughter inside the house. You have the father and the elder brother standing in the courtyard, and the way the film ends is, it ends with a freeze frame: father, elder brother, joyful music over in the back. And for two thousand years this has been read in the church, every year people have read it in the Bible endlessly, endlessly. For two thousand years, that's where the story has ended. It has never ended. The father always seeks the lost son, and the lost son is not just the prodigal, it is at the end, the prodigal's already found now, he's home free, but the other one is not, because he won't come into the party. Consequently, the other thing you could say about this, it's not only for two thousand years that that parable has stood with that freeze frame, it will stand there forever because God will forever stand. We say Jesus, between when he died and when he arose, descended into hell. He descended to the lost. This is the last truth of the parable of the prodigal son, that for all eternity God still seeks those in hell. If I go down into hell, Thou art there with me. We cannot get away from the love that will not let us go because God, who in all these parables represented by the shepherd, and the woman, and the father, never ceases to seek and to find the lost.

Thank you, very much.

Floyd Brown: If you notice me smiling, it's because you're a marvelous speaker and you left us all with a great deal of humor and a marvelous message. You're obviously a student of the parables. If you were to create a parable today, could you do one for the politicians?

Robert Farrar Capon: Well, I would never even try. I've heard people make up parables, and they're always disasters because they end up being cutesy. Jesus never told a story about something you already knew. He didn't give it a lesson that would illustrate a truth you already knew. He gave you a lesson that would tell you a truth, even if you never knew, or if you didn't even want to know. Like this: that God goes after the lost. He's not interested in associating with found types. Junk the ninety-nine nice people and good people, all my friends. He would go chase after somebody who's worthless. This was his cup of tea. Now who wants to hear that? Nobody. You know, who among you wouldn't do this? Nobody would do this.

Brown: We almost accept it as the proper thing to do and figuring that is the way we're going. It's a different concept, and I enjoyed it.

Capon: But the parables are outrageous. That's the best thing about them. They really are. They're just absolutely incredible, and what pays off is this: pay attention to what the words actually say.

Brown: You've got us thinking, and we thank you very much. Thank you for being with us. We look forward to you coming back again.