Until She Finds It

The second story is the one people skip.

It’s two verses long, it sits between a shepherd and a runaway son, and it’s about a woman who lost some money in her own house.

Or what woman who has ten silver coins and loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep her house, and search carefully until she finds it?

That’s all of it, nearly. She lights a lamp, because the houses were dark and the floors were dirt and a small coin could lie anywhere. She sweeps. She looks carefully, corner by corner, and she keeps looking until she finds it.

Then she does the same thing the shepherd did. She calls together her friends and neighbors to say, ’Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost coin.’

Three things are true about that coin, and the story doesn’t have to say any of them out loud.

It never left the house. The sheep wandered off into open country. The son took his money to a far country on purpose. The coin was lost right there, under the same roof as everything else, in the room where people ate and slept. Nobody could see it, but it hadn’t gone anywhere.

It didn’t know it was lost. A coin can’t wander and can’t decide to come home. It can’t even call out, the way a sheep might. It just lies wherever it rolled until someone who cares about it comes with a light.

And it never stopped being silver. Lost didn’t make it worth less. It was worth exactly as much in the dust behind the jar as it was in her hand. That’s why she swept. You don’t light a lamp and move the furniture for something that doesn’t matter.

So there are three stories, and they were told together, in a row, to the same people, about the same complaint.

A sheep that wandered off and was carried home. A coin that was lost inside the house and was swept for. A son who left on purpose and walked back, and was run to.

Three different ways to be lost. Out in the open, inside the house, and far away by your own choice. And three different searchers: a shepherd, a woman with a broom, a father who couldn’t keep still. Jesus seems to have wanted his listeners to understand that God could look like any of them, including a woman on her knees with a lamp, looking under things.

The one thing that doesn’t change from story to story is the ending. Each one finishes at a party.

This book has been sixteen people and the places he found them.

A spring in the wilderness. A house in a town whose name may mean no pasture. The tombs. Somewhere outside, the afternoon he was put out. The edge of a village on the border. The middle of a crowd. The side of the highway. A sycamore tree. A hole in somebody’s roof. A porch full of people waiting on water. Not far from a soldier’s house. The gate of a small town. A house near Tyre where he’d gone to be hidden. The next cross over. The dark, and then a garden. A road out of Jerusalem, going the wrong way.

Some of those people were hiding. Some had been put out. Some were loud and some were silent and one argued. A few never found out his name. None of them had to get themselves somewhere respectable first.

You may be the sheep, out in the open and too tired to walk. You may be the coin, still inside the house, lost in a room full of people and not sure anyone would notice. You may be the son, already on your way back with a speech in your pocket. The first book was for that one.

It doesn’t matter much which. The searching is the same.

The three stories were an answer, and it’s worth remembering what they answered.

This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

It was said as a complaint. It was true. And after the sheep and the coin and the son, nobody on either side of that argument could say it was anything but the point.

It’s still true. He still welcomes them. He still eats with them. He still goes after the one that’s lost, out where it is, and doesn’t stop until.