_LOST AND FOUND._
LUKE xv.
In this chapter we see how the waves of influence, moving outward from
their Divine centre, touch the outermost fringe of humanity, sending the
pulsations of new excitements and new hopes through classes Religion and
Society both had banned. "Now all the publicans and sinners were drawing
near unto Him, for to hear Him." It was evidently a movement widespread
and deep. The hostility of Pharisees and scribes would naturally give to
these outcasts a certain bias in His favour, causing their hearts to
lean towards him, while His words of hope fell upon their lives like the
breaking of a new dawn. Nor did Jesus forbid their approach. Instead of
looking upon it as an intrusion, an impertinence, the attraction was
mutual. Instead of receiving them with a cold and scant courtesy, He
welcomed them, receiving them gladly, as the verb of the Pharisees'
murmur implies. He even mingled with them in social intercourse, with an
acceptance, if not an interchange, of hospitality. To the Pharisaic
mind, however, this was a flagrant lapse, a breach of the proprieties
which was unpardonable and half criminal, and they gave vent to their
disapprobation and disgust in the loud and scornful murmur, "This man
receiveth sinners, and eateth with them." It is from this hard sentence
of withering contempt, as from a prickly and bitter calyx, we have the
trifoliate parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Man,
the last of which is perhaps the crown and flower of all the parables.
With minor differences, the three parables are really one, emphasizing,
as they reiterate, the one truth how Heaven seeks after the lost of
earth, and how it rejoices when the lost is found.
The first parable is pastoral: "What man of you," asks Jesus, using the
_Tu quoque_ retort, "having a hundred sheep, and having lost one of
them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after
that which is lost, until he find it?" It is one of those questions
which only need to be asked to be answered, an interrogative which is
axiomatic and self-evident. Jesus tries to set his detractors in His
place, that they may think His thoughts, feel His feelings, as they look
out on the world from His standpoint; but since they cannot follow Him
to these redemptive heights, He comes down to the lower level of their
vision. "Suppose you have a hundred sheep, and one of them, getting
separated from the rest, goes astray, what do you do? Dismissing it from
your thought, do you leave it to its fate, the certain slaughter that
awaits it from the wild beasts? or do you seek to minimize your loss,
working it out by the rule of proportion as you ask, 'What is one to
ninety-nine?' then writing off the lost one, not as a unit, but as a
common fraction? No; such a supposition is incredible and impossible.
You would go in search of the lost directly. Turning your back upon the
ninety and nine, and turning your thoughts from them too, you would
leave them in their mountain pasture,[4] as you sought the lost one.
Calling it by its name, you would climb the terraced hills, and awake
the echoes of the wadies, until the flinty heart of the mountain had
felt the sympathy of your sorrow, repeating with you the lost wanderer's
name. And when at last you found it you would not chide or punish it;
you would not even force it to retrace its steps across the weary
distance, but taking compassion on its weakness, you would lift it upon
your shoulders and bear it rejoicing home. Then forgetful of your own
weariness, fatigue and anxiety swallowed up in the new-found joy, you
would go round to your neighbours, to break the good news to them, and
so all would rejoice together."
[4] The word rendered "wilderness" means any land unenclosed.
Such is the picture, warm in colour and instinct with life, Jesus
sketches in a few well-chosen words. He delicately conceals all
reference to Himself; but even the chromatic vision of the Pharisees
would plainly perceive how complete was its justification of His own
conduct, in mingling thus with the erring and the lost; while to us the
parable is but a veil of words, through which we discern the form and
features of the "Good Shepherd," who gave even His life for the sheep,
seeking that He might save that which was lost.
The second, which is a twin parable, is from domestic life. As in the
parables of the kingdom, Jesus sets beside the man with the mustard-seed
the woman with her leaven, so here He makes the same distinction,
clothing the Truth both in a masculine and a feminine dress. He asks
again, "Or what woman" (He does not say "of you," for if women were
present amongst His hearers they would be in the background) "having
ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a lamp, and
sweep the house, and seek diligently until she find it? And when she
hath found it, she calleth together her friends and neighbours, saying,
Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I had lost." Much
objection has been taken to this parable for its supposed want of
naturalness and reality. "Is it likely," our objectors say, "that the
loss of a small coin like a drachma, whose value was about
sevenpence-halfpenny, could be the occasion of so much concern, and that
its recovery should be enough to call forth the congratulations of all
the village matrons? Surely that is not parable, but hyperbole." But
things have a real as well as an intrinsic value, and what to others
would be common and cheap, to its possessor might be a treasure beyond
reckoning, with all the added values of association and sentiment. So
the ten drachmas of the woman might have a history; they might have been
a family heirloom, moving quietly down the generations, with whole
poems, ay, and even tragedies, hidden within them. Or we can conceive of
a poverty so dire and strait that even one small coin in the emergent
circumstance might grow into a value far beyond its intrinsic worth. But
the parable does not need all these suppositions to steady it and keep
it from falling to the ground. When rightly understood it becomes
singularly natural, the truth of truth, if such an essence can be
distilled in human speech. The probable interpretation is that the ten
drachmas were the ten coins worn as a frontlet by the women of the east.
This frontlet was given by the bridegroom to the bride at the time of
marriage, and like the ring of western life, it was invested with a kind
of sanctity. It must be worn on all public occasions, and guarded with
a jealous, sacred care; for should one of its pieces be lost, it would
be regarded as an indication that the possessor had not only been
careless, but also that she had been unfaithful to her marriage vow.
Throwing, then, this light of eastern custom upon the parable, how vivid
and lifelike it becomes! With what intense eagerness would she seek for
the missing coin! Lighting her lamp--for the house would be but dimly
lighted with its open door and its small unglazed window--how carefully
and almost tremblingly she would peer along its shelves, and sweep out
the corners of her few rooms! and how great would be her joy as she saw
it glistening in the dust! Her whole soul would go out after it, as if
it were a living, sentient thing. She would clasp it in her hand, and
even press it to her lips; for has it not taken a heavy care and sorrow
from her heart? That one coin rising from the dust has been to her like
the rising of another sun, filling her home with light and her life with
melody; and what wonder that she hastens to communicate her joy, as,
standing by her door, after the eastern wont, she holds up the missing
treasure, and calls on her neighbours and friends (the substantives are
feminine now) to rejoice with her.
The third parable carries the thought still higher, forming the crown of
the ascending series. Not only is there a mathematical progression, as
the lost fraction increases from one-hundredth to one-tenth, and then to
one-half of the whole, but the intrinsic value of the loss rises in a
corresponding series. In the first it was a lost sheep, a loss which
might soon be replaced, and which would soon be forgotten; in the second
it was a lost coin, which, as we have seen, meant the loss of what was
more valuable than gold, even honour and character; while in the third
it is a lost child. We call it the parable of the Prodigal Son; it might
with equal propriety be called the Parable of the Bereaved Father, for
the whole story crystallizes about that name, repeating it, in one form
or another, no less than twelve times.
"A certain man," so begins this parabolic _Paternoster_, "had two sons."
Tired of the restraints of home and the surveillance of the father's
eye, the younger of them determined to see the world for himself, in
order, as the sequel shows, that he might have a free hand, and give
loose reins to his passions. With a cold, impertinent bluntness, he says
to the father, whose death he thus anticipates, "Father, give me the
portion of thy substance that falleth to me," a command whose sharp,
imperative tone shows but too plainly the proud, masterful spirit of the
youth. He respects neither age nor law; for though the paternal estate
could be divided during the father's life, no son, much less the
younger, had any right to demand it. The father grants the request,
dividing "unto them," as it reads, "his living;" for the same line which
marks off the portion of the younger marks out too that of the elder
son, though he holds his portion as yet only in promise. Not many days
after--for having found its wings, the foolish bird is in haste to
fly--the youth gathers all together, and then takes his journey into a
far country. The down grades of life are generally steep and short, and
so one sentence is enough to describe this _descensus Averni_, down
which the youth plunges so insanely: "He wasted his substance with
riotous living," scattering it, as the verb means, throwing it away
after low, illicit pleasures. "And when he had spent all"--the "all" he
had scrambled for and gathered a short while before--"there arose a
mighty famine in that country; and he began to be in want;" and so great
were his straits, so remorseless the pangs of hunger, that he was glad
to attach himself to a citizen of that country as swineherd, living out
in the fields with his drove, like the swineherds of Gadara. But such
was the pressure of the famine that his mere pittance could not cope
with famine prices, and again and again he hungered to have his fill of
the carob-pods, which were dealt out statedly and sparingly to the
swine. But no man gave even these to him; he was forgotten, as one
already dead.
Such is the picture Jesus draws of the lost man, a picture of abject
misery and degradation. When the sheep wandered it strayed unwittingly,
blindly, getting farther from its fellows and its fold even when
bleating vainly for them. When the drachma was lost it did not lose
itself, nor had it any consciousness that it had dropped out of its
proper environment. But in the case of the lost man it was altogether
different. Here it is a wilful perversity, which breaks through the
restraints of home, tramples upon its endearments, and throws up a
blighted life, scarred and pealed amid the husks and swine of a far
country. And it is this element of perversity, self-will, which
explains, as indeed it necessitates, another marked difference in the
parables. When the sheep and the drachma were lost there was an eager
search, as the shepherd followed the wanderer over the mountain gullies,
and the woman with broom and lamp went after the lost coin. But when the
youth is lost, flinging himself away, the father does not follow him,
except in thought, and love, and prayer. He sits "still in the house,"
nursing a bitter grief, and the work on the farm goes on just as usual,
for the service of the younger brother would probably be not much
missed. And why does not the father summon his servants, bidding them go
after the lost child, bringing him home, if necessary, by force? Simply
because such a finding would be no finding. They might indeed carry the
wanderer home, setting down his feet by the familiar door; but of what
use is that if his heart is still wayward and his will rebellious? Home
would not be home to him; and with his heart in the far country, he
would walk even in his father's fields and in his father's house as an
alien, a foreigner. And so all embassies, all messages would be in vain;
and even a father's love can do no more than wait, patiently and
prayerfully, in hopes that a better spirit may yet come over him, and
that some rebound of feeling may bring him home, a humbled penitent. The
change comes at length, and the slow morning dawns.
When the photographer wishes to develop the picture that is hidden in
the film of the sensitive plate he carries it to a darkened room, and
bathed in the developing solution the latent image gradually appears,
even to the minutest details. It was so here; for when in his extremest
need, with the pinch of a fearful hunger upon him, and the felt darkness
of a painful isolation surrounding him, there came into the prodigal's
soul a sweet picture of the far-away home, the home which might still
have been his but for his wantonness, but which is his now only in
memory. It is true his first thoughts of that home were not very lofty;
they only crouched with the dogs under the father's table, or hovered
around the plentiful board of the servants, attracted by the "bread
enough and to spare." But such is the natural association of ideas; the
carob-pods of the swine naturally suggest the bread of the servants,
while this in turn opens up all the chambers of the father's house,
reviving its half-faded images of happiness and love, and awaking all
the sweet memories that sin had stifled and silenced. That it was so
here, the lower leading up to the higher thought, is evident from the
young man's soliloquy: "I will arise and go to my father, and will say
unto him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven and in thy sight: I am no
more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants."
The hunger for the servants' bread is all forgotten now, swallowed up in
the hunger of the soul, as it pines for the father's presence and for
the father's smile, longing for the lost Eden. The very name "father"
strikes with a strange music upon his awakened and penitent soul, making
him for the time half-oblivious to his present wretchedness; and as
Memory recalls a bright but vanished past, Hope peoples the dark sky
with a heavenly host, who sing a new Advent, the dawn of a heavenly day.
An Advent? Perhaps it was an Easter rather, with a "resurrection from
earth to things above," an Easter whose anthem, in songs without end,
was, "I will arise and go to my father," that _Resurgam_ of a new and
holier life.
No sooner is the "I will" spoken than there is a reversing of all the
wheels. The hands follow whither the heart has gone; the feet shake off
the dust of the far country, retracing the steps they measured so
foolishly and lightly before; while the eyes, washed by their bitter
tears--
"Not backward are their glances bent,
But onward to the Father's house."
"And he arose and came to his father." He came to himself first; and
having found that better self, he became conscious of the void he had
not felt before. For the first time he realizes how much the father is
to him, and how terrible the bereavement and loss he inflicted upon
himself when he put between that father and himself the desert of an
awful distance. And as the bright memories of other days flash up within
his soul, like the converging rays of a borealis, they all turn towards
and centre in the father. Servants, home, and loaves of bread alike
speak of him whose very shadow is brightness to the self-orphaned child.
He yearns for the father's presence with a strange and intense yearning;
and could that presence be his again, even if he were nothing more than
a servant, with but casual interviews, hearing his voice but in its
commanding tones, he would be content and happy.
And so he comes and seeks the father; will the father relent and receive
him? Can he overlook and forgive the waywardness and wantonness which
have embittered his old age? Can he receive him back even as a servant,
a child who has scorned his authority, slighted his love, and squandered
his substance in riotous living? Does the father say, "He has made his
own bed, and he must lie upon it; he has had his portion, even to the
swept-up crumbs, and there is nothing left for him now"? No, for there
is something left, a treasure which he might scorn, indeed, but which he
could not throw away, even a heritage of love. And what a picture the
parable draws of the love that hopeth and endureth all things! "But
while he was yet afar off, his father saw him, and was moved with
compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." As the moon
in her revolutions lifts up the tides, drawing the deep oceans to
herself, so do the unsounded depths of the father's heart turn towards
the prodigal whose life has set, dropping out of sight behind
wildernesses of darkness. Thought, prayer, pity, compassion, love flow
out towards the attraction they can no longer see. Nay, it seems as if
the father's vision were transfixed riveted to the spot where the form
of his erring lad vanished out of sight; for no sooner has the youth
come within sight of the home, than the father's eyes, made telescopic
with love, discern him, and as if by intuition, recognize him, even
though his attire be mean and tattered, and his step has no longer the
lightness of innocence nor the firmness of integrity. It is, it is his
child, the erring but now repenting child, and the pent-up emotions of
the father's soul rush out as in a tumultuous freshet to meet him. He
even "ran" to meet him, all forgetful of the dignity of years, and
throwing himself upon his neck, he kissed him, not either with the cold
kiss of courtesy, but with the warm, fervent kiss of love, as the
intensive prefix of the verb implies.
So far this scene of reconciliation has been as a dumb show. The storm
of emotion so interrupted the electric flow of quiet thought and speech
that no word was spoken in the mutual embrace. When, however, the power
of speech returns the youth is the first to break the silence. "Father,"
he said, repeating the words of his mental resolve when in the far
country, "I have sinned against Heaven, and in thy sight: I am no more
worthy to be called thy son." It is no longer the sense of physical
need, but the deeper sense of guilt, that now presses upon his soul. The
moral nature, which by the anodynes of sin had been thrown into a state
of coma, awakes to a vivid consciousness, and in the new awakening, in
the broadening light of the new dawn, he sees one thing only, and that
is his sin, a sin which has thrown its blackness over the wasted years,
which has embittered a father's heart, and which cast its shadow even
into heaven itself. Nor is it the conviction of sin only; there is a
full and frank confession of it, with no attempt at palliation or
excuse. He does not seek to gloss it over, but smiting his breast with
bitter reproaches, he confesses his sin with "a humble, lowly, penitent,
and obedient heart," hoping for the mercy and forgiveness he is
conscious he does not deserve. Nor does he hope in vain. Even before the
confession is completed, the absolution is spoken, virtually at least;
for without allowing the youth to finish his sentence, in which he
offers to renounce his sonship and to accept a menial position, the
father calls to the servants, "Bring forth quickly the best robe, and
put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: and
bring the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat and make merry." In
this peal of imperatives we detect the rapid beating of the father's
heart, the loving, eager haste to wipe out all the sad marks that sin
has left. In the luminous atmosphere of the father's love the youth is
no more the prodigal; he is as one transfigured; and now that the
chrysalis has left the mire, and crept up into the sunlight, it must
have a dress befitting its new summer life, wings of gauze, and robes of
rainbow hues. The best, or "the first robe" as it is in the Greek, must
be brought out for him; a signet-ring, the pledge of authority, must be
put upon his hand; shoes, the badge of freedom, must be found for the
tired and bared feet; while for the merry-making which is extemporized,
the domestic _festa_ which is the crown of these rejoicings, the fatted
calf, which was in reserve for some high festival, must be killed. And
all this is spoken in a breath, in a sort of bewilderment, the ecstasy
of an excessive joy; and forgetting that the simple command is enough
for servants, the master must needs tell out his joy to them: "For this
my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."
If the three parables were all through coincident, the parable of the
Prodigal Son should close at this point, the curtain dropping over the
festive scene, where songs, and music, and the rhythm of the dance are
the outward and weak expressions of the father's joy over the son who
comes back from the far country, as one alive from the dead. But Jesus
has another purpose; He must not only plead the cause of the outcast and
the low, setting open for them the door of mercy and of hope; He must
also rebuke and silence the unreasoning murmur of the Pharisees and
scribes--which He does in the picture of the Elder Brother. Coming from
the field, the heir is surprised to find the whole house given up to an
impromptu feast. He hears the sounds of merriment and music, but its
strains fall strange and harsh upon his ear. What can it mean? Why was
_he_ not consulted? Why should his father thus take occasion of his
absence in the fields to invite his friends and neighbours? The proud
spirit chafes under the slight, and calling one of the servants, he asks
what it all means. The answer is not reassuring, for it only perplexes
and pains him the more: "Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed
the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound"--an answer
which does but deepen his displeasure, turning his sullenness to anger.
"And would not go in." They may end the feast, as they began it,
without him. The festive joy is something foreign to his nature; it
awakes but feelings of repulsion, and all its music is to him a grating
discord, a _Miserere_.
But let us not be too severe upon the elder brother. He was not perfect,
by any means, but in any appraisement of his character there are certain
veinings of worth and nobleness that must not be omitted. We have
already seen how, in the division of the father's goods, when he divided
unto them his living, while the younger took away his portion, and
swiftly scattered it in riotous living, the elder brother took no
advantage of the deed of gift. He did not dispossess the father,
securing for himself the paternal estate. He put it back into his
father's hands, content with the filial relation of dependence and
obedience. The father's word was still his law. He was the dutiful son;
and when he said, "These many years do I serve thee, and I never
transgressed a commandment of thine," the boast was no exaggeration but
the statement of a simple truth. Compared with the life of the prodigal,
the life of the elder brother had been consistent, conscientious, and
moral. Where, then, was his failure, his lack? It was just here, in the
lack of heart, the absence of affection. He bore the name of a son, but
he carried the heart of a servant. His nature was servile, rather than
filial; and while his hands offered a service unremitting and precise,
it was the cold service of an impassive mechanism. Instead of love
passing out in living heart-throbs, suffusing all the life with its
warmth, and clothing it in its own iridescent colouring, it was only a
metallic mainspring called "duty." The father's presence is not the
delight to him; he does not once mention that tender name in which the
repenting one finds such a heaven; and when he draws the picture of his
highest happiness, the feast of his earthly Walhalla, "my friends" are
there, though the father is excluded. And so between the father and the
elder brother, with all this seeming nearness, there was a distance of
reserve, and where the voices of affection and of constant communion
should have been heard there was too often a vacancy of silence. It
takes a heart to read a heart; and since this was wanting in the elder
brother, he could not know the heart of the father; he could not
understand his wild joy. He had no patience with his younger brother;
and had he received him back at all, it would have been with a haughty
stiffness, and with a lowering in his looks, which should have been at
once a rebuke for the past and a warning for the future. The father
looked on his son's repentance; the elder brother did not regard the
repentance at all; perhaps he had not heard of it, or perhaps he could
not understand it; it was something that lay out of the plane of his
consciousness. He saw the sin only, how the younger son had devoured his
living with harlots; and so he was severe, exacting, bitter. He would
have brought out the sackcloth, but nothing more; while as to the music
and the fatted calf, they would appear to his loveless soul as an absurd
anachronism.
But far removed as he is from the father's spirit, he is still his son;
and though the father rejoices more over the younger than over the
elder, as was but natural, he loves them both with an equal love. He
cannot bear that there should be any estrangement now; and he even
leaves the festive throng, and the son he has welcomed and robed, and
going out, he begs, he entreats the elder brother to pass in, and to
throw himself into the general joy. And when the elder son complains
that, with all his years of obedient, dutiful service, he has never had
even a kid, much less a fatted calf, on which to feast his friends, the
father says, lovingly, but chidingly, "Son"--or "Child," rather, for it
is a term of greater endearment than the "son" he had just used
before--"thou art ever with me, and all that is mine is thine. But it
was meet to make merry and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and
is alive again; and was lost, and is found." He plays upon the "child"
as upon a harp, that he may drive away the evil spirits of jealousy and
anger, and that even within the servant-heart he may awake some chords,
if only the far-off echoes of a lost childhood. He reminds him how
vastly different their two positions are. For him there has been no
break in their intercourse; the father's house has been his home; he has
had the free range of all: to the younger that home has been nothing but
a distant memory, with a waste of dreary years between. He has been heir
and lord of all; and so completely have father and son been identified,
their separate personalities merged the one in the other, that the
possessive pronouns, the "mine" and the "thine," are used
interchangeably. The younger returns penniless, disinherited by his own
misdeed. Nay, he has been as one dead; for what was the far country but
a vault of slimy things, the sepulchre of a dead soul? "And should we
not make merry and be glad, when thy brother" (it is the antithesis to
"thy son" of ver. 30, a mutual "thy") "comes back to us as one raised
from the dead?"
Whether the father's pleading prevailed, or not, we are not told. We can
but hope it did, and that the elder brother, with his asperities all
dissolved, and his jealousies removed, did pass within to share the
general joy, and to embrace a lost brother. Then he too would know the
sweetness of forgiveness, and taught by the erring but now forgiven one,
he too would learn to spell out more correctly that deep word "father,"
the word he had stammered at, and perhaps misspelt before, as the
fatherhood and the brotherhood became to him not ideas merely, but
bright realities.
Gathering up now the lessons of the parables, they show us (1) the
Divine grief over sin. In the first two this is the prominent thought,
the sorrow of the loser. God is represented as losing that which is of
worth to Him, something serviceable, and therefore valuable. In the
third parable the same idea is suggested rather than stated; but the
thought is carried farther, for now it is more than a loss, it is a
bereavement the father suffers. The retreating form of the wanderer
throws back its shadow across the father's home and heart, a shadow that
congeals and stays, and that is darker than the shadow of Death itself.
It is the Divine Grief, whose depths we cannot sound, and from whose
mystery we must stand back, not one stone's cast, but many.
The parables show (2) the sad state of the sinner. In the case of the
Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin we see his perfect helplessness to recover
himself, and that he must remain lost, unless One higher than himself
undertakes his cause, and "help is laid upon One that is mighty." It is
the third parable, however, which especially emphasizes the downward
course of sin and the deepening wretchedness of the sinner. The flowery
path leads on to a valley of desolation. The way of transgressors is
ever a downward path; and let an evil spirit possess a soul, it hurries
him directly down the steep place, where, unless the flight be checked,
a certain destruction awaits him. Sin degrades and isolates. Want,
sorrow, penury, and pain are but a part of its viperous brood, and he
who plays with sin, calling it freedom, will find his rod blossom with
bitter fruit, or he will see it grow into a serpent with poison in its
fangs.
The parables show (3) God's willingness and eagerness to save. The long
and eager search after the lost sheep and the lost coin show, though but
imperfectly, the supreme efforts God makes for man's salvation. He is
not left to wander unrebuked and unsought. There is no forbidden path
along which men insanely rush, but some bright angel stands beside it,
warning back the sinner, it may be with a drawn sword, some "terror of
the Lord," or it may be with a cross, the sacrifice of an infinite love.
Though He could send His armies to destroy, He sends His messengers to
win us back to obedience and to love--Conscience, Memory, Reason, the
Word, the Spirit, and even the well-beloved Son. Nor is the great search
discontinued, until it has proved to be in vain.
The parables show (4) the eager interest Heaven takes in man's
salvation, and the deep joy there is among the angels over his
repentance and recovery. And so the three parables close with a
_Jubilate_. The shepherd rejoices over his recovered sheep more than
over the ninety and nine which went not astray; the woman rejoices over
the one coin found more than over the nine which were not lost. And this
is perfectly natural. The joy of acquisition is more than the joy of
possession; and as the crest of the waves is thrown up above the mean
sea-level by the alternate depths of depression, so the very sorrow and
grief over the loss and bereavement, now that the lost is found and the
dead is alive, throw up the emotions beyond their mean level, up to the
summits of an exuberant joy. And whether Jesus meant, by the ninety and
nine just persons who needed no repentance the unfallen intelligences of
heaven, or whether, as Godet thinks, He referred to those who under the
Old Covenant were sincere doers of the Law, and who found their
righteousness therein (Deut. vi. 25), it is still true, and a truth
stamped with a Divine "Verily," that more than the joy of Heaven over
these is its joy over the sinner that repented, the dead who now was
alive, and the lost who now was found!