Cloister Thoughts...
What would you say of a woman who turned her house upside down looking for a shiny dime she had misplaced? If you’re like me, you’ve lost things before, too, and lost money is a great motivator for overdue cleaning.
Or, what would you say of a sheep rancher who stranded his big flock out on the range without so much as a border collie to herd them while he goes hightailing it after some knuckle-headed, nappy-coated stray that wandered off and got itself lost?
Both of these are set-ups for stories of Jesus which Fred Craddock would probably say are about as interesting as an okra sandwich. They’re surprising, and a little bit hard to handle. As Jesus went on telling them, these parables get even more “interesting.”
Take, for example, the outcome of the search for the knuckle-headed stray. The sheep rancher finds it, slings it over his shoulders, and so far as we can tell doesn’t even check in on the ninety-nine sheep he left “in the wilder- ness,” as Luke says. Instead, he goes back to town and starts whooping it up with his buddies, ‘cause like a Royal Canadian Mountie, he brought one back alive!
Or, for another ‘for instance,’ take the woman who up-ended the sofa and found that shiny dime. We’d all feel a sense of some accomplishment over recovering a coin, but she ‘busted her girdle’ over it! She hit the phone like a speed dialer, called up her neighborhood bridge club, and threw a wing-ding that evening that cost a whole chunk of change more than that shiny dime was ever worth. What got into her? For that matter, what got into him?
Jesus said God got into them, that’s who! If they seem a little ‘over the top,’ Jesus assures us they are way over the top. If they act a bit giddy about revering something lost, Jesus eggs them on, implying that we really haven’t seen anything yet! Just wait ‘til God shows up with a lost sinner, now found!
You see, joy like that over finding a lost sheep and finding a lost coin is a God thing: “There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” Security, no risk behavior, stationary righteousness, and cash-in-the-bank can’t measure up in God’s eyes to one wandering soul who finally sees the lights of home and heads for them.
Sober-sided pillars of the church like us need a dose of theological chiropracty once in a while. We need to be popped back into the place of joy, like we were when Christianity was as fresh and dear to us as a new puppy. Why is it that, like Father Joseph Pintauro once said, we seem to be like children who grow up older and older and older, and finally die forever? Whoever said that Chris tians should have faces so long that they look about to lick grits out of the bottom of a churn? I join St. Teresa of Avila in her lament to her nuns: “Lord, save us from silly devotionals and sour-faced saints!”
A magazine put out a picture of Jesus laughing that scandalized the pious from coast-to-coast. There he stood, hand palm-down on his chest, eyes crinkled with crow’s feet, head thrown back and every tooth showing, breaking out in a soul-saving laugh.
If you want to know how the Savior of the world looked when Zacchaeus the tax collector and Mary Magdalene joined up with him, it was like this: Jesus turned to the critics who scorned Zacchaeus and Mary as sinners and he laughed out loud! Holy smokes, this is divine! Once lost but now found! Let’s journey in redemption...
In Christ's Love, Rick
