The Economy of Mercy

Luke 15:1-10
Gospel Reading for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year C) 

In my mind, Luke 15 has always started with verse 11. The beautiful final chapter of Jesus' "Lost" trilogy challenges even as it paints a vivid picture of God's grace. A lost sheep and a lost coin? Neither can hold a candle to a parent abandoning all dignity as they sprint to welcome a wayward child. I've never given the sheep and coin their due.

The first two stories are about material possessions. I admit that, if we're going with the popular interpretation that the lost change and wandering wooly is a stand-in for us prodigals, the idea of people as possessions is a bit of a sticky wicket. Laying that aside for the time being, these are stories of treasured items. This is about economics. Sheep were valuable property. The lost coin was worth about a day's wages.

Through this lens, the story of the lost coin makes a little bit more sense. The woman would have been ecstatic to find a missing day's wages. Maybe not throw-a-huge-party excited, but excited nonetheless. The shepherd leaving ninety-nine sheep behind for a missing fluffy animal veers into the realm of fuzzy math. Risking 99% of one's assets may be taken or wander off for a single sheep is typically bad business. 

So in spite of this fairly sensible, albeit exuberant, middle part of the trilogy, God's economic sense seems to be somewhat askew. Mercy and grace seems to work in a way the world that the world would find bewildering. By the time we get to the third story--with its father giving away a fortune to only be squandered and throwing a lavish party for a financial blackhole of a son--we learn that grace works on some strange yet beautiful logic.

We learn that God rejoices over that which is found regardless of whether the world views it as fairly valuable (the coin), minimally valuable (one sheep out of one hundred), or of hardly any value at all (the son). No matter what is lost, the result is the same: pure unbridled joy. That does not make sense to us. Yet I am grateful that God's economy of mercy works in such mysterious ways.