If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone
astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and
goeth Into the mountains, and seeketh that which is
gone astray!--MATT. xviii. 12.
We find this simple parable, or germ of a parable, in a somewhat more
expanded form, as the first of the incomparable three in the fifteenth
chapter of Luke's Gospel. Perhaps our Lord repeated the parable more
than once. It is an unveiling of His inmost heart, and therein a
revelation of the very heart of God. It touches the deepest things in
His relation to men, and sets forth thoughts of Him, such as man never
dared to dream. It does all this by the homeliest image and by an
appeal to the simplest instincts. The most prosaic shepherd looks for
lost sheep, and everybody has peculiar joy over lost things found.
They may not be nearly so valuable as things that were not lost. The
unstrayed may be many, and the strayed be but one. Still there is a
keener joy in the recovery of the one than in the unbroken possession
of the ninety-and-nine. That feeling in a man may be only selfishness,
but homely as it is--when the loser is God, and the lost are men, it
becomes the means of uttering and illustrating that truth concerning
God which no religion but that of the Cross has ever been bold enough
to proclaim, that He cares most for the wanderers, and rejoices over the
return of the one that went astray more than over the ninety-and-nine
who never wandered.
There are some significant differences between this edition of the
parable and the form which it assumes in the Gospel according to
Luke. There it is spoken in vindication of Christ's consorting with
publicans and sinners; here it is spoken in order to point the
lesson of not despising the least and most insignificant of the sons
of men. There the seeking Shepherd is obviously Christ; here the
seeking Shepherd is rather the Divine Father; as appears by the
words of the next verse: 'For it is not the will of your Father
which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.'
There the sheep is lost; here the sheep goes astray. There the
Shepherd seeks till He find, here the Shepherd, perhaps, fails to
find; for our Lord says, '_If so be_ that he find it.'
But I am not about to venture on all the thoughts which this parable
suggests, nor even to deal with the main lesson which it teaches. I
wish merely to look at the two figures--the wanderer and the seeker.