Of Gods and Sheep

Sunday 11th September 2016
Year C, The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
Luke 15.1-10

I'm a pedant. So I bristle when I hear a news item which says: "An MP complained about dangerous dogs in the House of Commons" when what it should have said was: "An MP complained in the House of Commons about dangerous dogs" unless, of course, he was characterising some of the Honourable Members as "dangerous dogs" which, no doubt, some of them are. But the point at issue here is that I know precisely what the reporter meant but my obsession stops me thinking about the issue of dangerous dogs. In other words, I let the syntax get in the way of the message. True, there are occasions when putting phrases in the wrong order in a sentence leads to genuine ambiguity but it is quite difficult to construct a sentence so badly that people don't know what it means.

Now I say all this because for a long time my Biblical pedantry came into play in my reading of today's Gospel. What struck me was how different the two stories are: it's highly unlikely that anybody in Jesus' audience knew anybody who owned 100 sheep, never mind owning that number himself; the nearest a hireling shepherd would have got would have been to the owner's bailiff and, the price of sheep being what it was, there wouldn't have been a party for finding one. The story of the lost coin on the other hand, probably a dowry coin sewn into a head-dress, is altogether more realistic for finding a piece of money, a tenth of her whole wealth, would have been important and it might even have been the occasion for a little female hospitality.

But it doesn't matter or, rather, it matters in a different way from the literal and this explains why the first story comes first: it is, literally, incredible, while the second is a sober under-pinning, a story of the back to normal. No shepherd in his right mind would leave his flock of 99 to go after some scrawny absconder; the mortality rate among sheep in that part of the world with that scarcity of grass would have been high enough to write down a few sheep. Losing ten would have been excessive and probably led to a sacking but everybody knew that one or two was perfectly reasonable.

But the point about this story - which we all think we know - is that everyone counts; there isn't one of us that does not count. We were all made by God and we are all loved by God. That is the point of the story.

Well, not quite. As usual, it rather depends who we think we are. Our passage opens with Jesus being condemned by the Pharisees and Scribes for consorting with tax collectors and sinners, so which are we? There is that lovely, superficial argument that says we're all sinners, so that makes it all right; but we don't mean we're all sinners when we say we're all sinners. Like the pigs in Animal Farm who believe that there are gradations in worth, so we believe there are gradations of sinner; all sinners are equal; but some sinners are more equal than others. And because we make these kind of distinctions we are part Pharisee, the people who specialise in fine distinctions both of behaviour and of rank. So we need to be a bit careful, not least because one of the greatest temptations we face is thinking that we can somehow moralise and elbow our way into heaven because of how worthy we are.

The key to this Gospel, then, is that it's the errant, easily tempted, daft lamb that is going to be scooped up by the completely uncalculating shepherd who just sees that the lamb needs to be saved and goes and saves it, surely a microcosm of the whole salvation enterprise of the Incarnate God.

Which presents us with the age old dilemma of salvation's relationship to human behaviour. Should the woman who lost the coin have simply sat down and not bothered about the loss on the ground that nothing matters in human affairs because what we do is not connected with how we will fare in the after-life? Clearly, there's a common sense answer that we should do our best because it's to our own advantage and might be to the mutual advantage of society for us to do our best, that the wicked might prosper but that their prosperity is short lived, that, we say to ourselves with some relish, the rich are unhappy, that money can't buy you love. But, as I have hinted earlier, Christianity isn't a religion of common sense, of leaving the wandering sheep to its own devices and caring for the remaining 99. It's a wildly optimistic, joyful, uncalculating religion belied by the sobriety of our proceedings here where it's sometimes difficult to raise a smile.

But the fundamental answer to this apparent dilemma of behaviour and salvation might best be summed up in the image of the Cross, the ultimate Christian icon, which is formed by the intersection of the vertical, our relationship with God, and the horizontal, our relationship with each other, the perfect intersection of the two great commandments to love God and to love each other. We cannot do one and not the other; there is no choice; the two behaviours are part of the same Cross.

So we behave well in veneration of the Cross but also in imitation of our saviour dying on it; but this obligation calls into question our very nature as flawed creatures and this, finally, brings me back to the shepherd and the sheep because there's nothing more difficult for us than genuinely recognising, rather than giving lip service to the idea, that we are sheep; that is the measure of our foolishness and of our vulnerability to worldly harm; we are more distant in nature from God than even the sheep is from the shepherd with which, incidentally, it shares more than 99% of its genes. And it's that distance that is hard to absorb; it is not that our moral decisions are insignificant in themselves - in our own terms they may even be heroic - but that their significance alongside the saving act of Jesus is incalculably tiny. Better, for all kinds of reasons, to stick to our humble existence as sheep; it is when we aspire to be gods that we get into real trouble.