“Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them. So he told them this parable: ‘Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he finds it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me for I have found my lost sheep.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” – Luke 15:1-7
Imagine that you and I are sitting among these people gathered to hear Jesus’s storytelling.
Would we be among the sinners, the ones Jesus welcomed into intimacy, bloody and broken as we are? Or would we be among the Pharisees and scribes, the cleaned-up ones who were deeply offended that Jesus was taking the name of God and disrespectfully trampling it? Or perhaps we’d be among the disciples, those often confused and irritated ones, who just wanted God to make it all make sense so they could get down to the business of throwing Rome out of their homeland and establishing God’s reign on earth? More likely, you and I might find ourselves in all three groups depending on the circumstance.
After Jesus finishes casting the vision of God’s urgent love for the lost sheep, He goes on to share more parables about lostness and foundness. He draws us into the drama of a woman who is desperate to find her valuable lost coin and of a father who anxiously awaits his disrespectful, ungrateful, and unloving son’s return so that he can lavish the unearned love on him that he’s been storing up and longing to share.
Now imagine, when Jesus finishes his last parable on lostness and God’s urgent desire to find and restore His treasures to Himself, that Jesus turns to you and me with a smile on His face and an outstretched hand and says: “Do you wanna come with me to get that lost one?”
Would we jump up and go, eager to be on an adventurous mission with Jesus? Or would we hesitate, recognizing the danger in the invitation – that we’d have to leave the comfort and safety of the ninety-nine to go deeper into the wilderness for one person who probably doesn’t want to be found anyway? Would we try to talk Jesus out of this fool’s errand? Would we plead with him to see how much better it would be to stay and build a place of holiness and righteousness that the rebellious one could easily come back to if only they’d be willing to repent (Greek metanoia) and begin submitting to God’s ways rather than living according to their own? Would we go around to the other ninety-nine and try to persuade them into coming along so that, at the very least, we’d have safety in numbers out in the wild? Would we harden our hearts toward the lost one, becoming angry and bitter that they were causing so much trouble and – worst of all, if we’re being honest – so much inner discomfort for us?
The first time Jesus invited me to go out into the wild with Him, for the purpose of rescuing someone who was lost, I jumped at the chance.
I was the ripe age of nineteen, had one year of tumultuous marriage under my size 0 belt, and believed I had the ability to rescue the whole world if need be. My naivety, my ego, and I followed Jesus into the wilderness to look for these lost ones and get them back to the fold so we could begin their rehabilitation project immediately.
What I learned on this first rescue mission is that people don’t wander off for no good reason. Sometimes they’ve experienced a lifetime of trauma and abuse, and they literally can’t trust another human – as in, their brains won’t allow them to do so. Since God most often works goodness and healing through human-to-human contact, that presents a problem. It wouldn’t be as simple as dragging them back to the fold of “righteousness.” This rescue mission was going to take time (perhaps even a lifetime), it would require patience, demand a level of loyalty and love I didn’t know if I could muster, and it would keep me in perpetual discomfort as Jesus, the lost ones, and I waited for trust, healing, and transformation to happen.
The next time Jesus invited me to help Him find a lost treasure, I was a little older and wiser.
I fancied myself a do-gooder and felt quite equipped to go out in the wilderness again. I figured, this time, the discomfort wouldn’t be so bad because I’d experienced it before. Once again, I was surprised. As it turned out, the one who was lost was actually me. Much like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), I was blind to what lurked within my own heart that needed tending to. In helping Jesus to rescue this lost one, I became rescued myself. I learned that this is the paradoxical way of Jesus – yes, we are invited into an incredible healing and restoring work in this world, but we can be sure that we’ll be healed and restored – again and again – along the way.
Please understand that this might all sound quite beautiful when written on the page, but the process of going after the lost is a perilous, excruciating journey most of the time.
Eventually, after being invited on many more rescue missions that required time, energy, patience, and love I felt I didn’t have to give, and which required me to continually face my own outstanding lostness and all the ways I was resisting God’s rescue myself, I grew tired and a little jaded. Why did this have to be so hard and so damn relentless? I asked Jesus why He took so long in restoring us and why it so often felt like two steps forward and three steps backward on these missions? In fact, His patience and faithfulness began to annoy me.
At one point I prayed something like this: “Look, you’re God and I’m not. You have access to places within others – and even within me – that I don’t. If you’re not going to do a Road-to-Damascus (Acts 9) style miracle here, then what do you want from me?”
And here’s what I’ve come to realize: all Jesus wants is for me to be with Him on the adventure. This series of parables in Luke 15 underscores the irrefutable, and hard-to-believe, fact that God simply wants to be with us all. When God invites us to go out and find the lost ones, it’s because God is willing to do anything and sacrifice everything to have us back in God’s arms. The ninety-nine aren’t superior to the lost one. The Older Brother wasn’t better than the Prodigal Son. Not in God’s eyes.
One of the most foundational ways my faith has been re-formed is through going on rescue missions with God because I’ve experienced first-hand God’s mind-boggling patience and faithfulness with our lostness. I’ve learned that, even after all this time, there’s still lostness within me that needs the miracle of foundness again. I’ve learned that God’s priorities for what needs urgent attention and mine are often quite unaligned.
And this is what it comes down to: I want to be aligned with God’s priorities. I want to be where Jesus is and Jesus is always, ALWAYS, happily and contentedly, with the lost.
We’ve all heard the argument: Yes, but God doesn’t let you stay lost. God loves you too much to leave you in your sin!
I couldn’t agree more. These parables in Matthew 18 highlight just that truth. Yet, I fear that statement is often an excuse to miss the point entirely.
My dear friend, Dr. Lang Charters, pointed out to me recently that the usual translation of the Greek word metanoia as “repent” isn’t quite as robust as it should be.
“The English word ‘repent’ has a moralizing overtone, suggesting a change in behavior or action. Whereas Jesus’s term seems to be hinting at a change at a far more fundamental level of one’s being. Jesus urges his listeners to change their way of knowing, their way of perceiving and grasping reality, their perspective, their mode of seeing. What Jesus implies is this: a new state of affairs has arrived, the divine and human have met, but the way you customarily see is going to blind you to this novelty. Minds, eyes, ears, senses, perceptions – all have to be opened up, turned around, revitalized. Metanoia, soul transformation, is Jesus’s first recommendation.”[1]
It is between each soul and their Creator what constitutes lostness and foundness and how that metanoia process plays out. Yes, the goal is to get the lost back home; but that is a journey unique to every one of us. Jesus is the Rescuer, the Healer, the Miracle Worker. We are the Rescued, the Healed, and the Miracle Receivers. We don’t get to control our own transformational process, much less the process that others must go through, because we simply don’t have the ability to plumb the depths of human minds, bodies, and souls.
It's high time we adopted some humility about that, don’t you think?
Yet it’s almost impossible to have humility when you aren’t experiencing the humiliation of lostness, when you are camped up with the self-satisfied ninety-nine (at least we had the good sense not to get lost), or barking self-righteous orders to the servants in your Father’s household (put away that fattened calf and golden ring – this rebellious person still stinks of the slop they’ve been eating!).
It's a humiliating experience to stand with the lost, who are lost for a reason. As much as we’d like to believe they’re out there having wild orgies, drunken frivolities, and all the fun in the world while mocking God in the process, that’s just not true. The ninety-nine tell themselves those kinds of stories because it enables them to scapegoat others, freeing them from the guilt of their apathy. The truth is that Jesus suffered humiliation and misunderstanding for sharing intimacy with the lost and He tried in every way He could to help us see that we are all lost in our own ways. But many didn’t want to see that then, and they don’t want to see it now.
The thing is, I can’t unsee it anymore.
I can’t sit with the self-congratulating because I have shared proximity with those on the outside of the fold for so long that I’ve grown to truly love them and, more importantly, I’ve come to identify with them. I see myself as in need of rescue too, and I pray to my Loving God that this never changes.
I’ve come to understand that the backlash against this message of Divine love, faithfulness, and patience is rooted in the fact that we often just don’t see people as worth it.
Queer folks? Criminals? The mentally ill? The person who abused me? The caustic and aggressive ones? Our political enemies? The drug addicted? Those who break all the rules? The perverse? The racist? The difficult ones?
Or, me, in my darkest and most shameful moments?
Not. Worth. It.
A few months ago, one of the Lost Treasures in my life sent me a message.
Her story is still being written and, as of right now, she and I and Jesus are still sitting in the wilderness together waiting for that metanoia process to heal her deep wounds. Some of her wounds have been self-inflicted, but the deepest ones were done to her by others. And the wounds often resist healing, though I see the progress when I look closely with eyes of love. And then there are my own wounds that still need tending. The paradoxical miracle is that being out here in the wilderness with her, I become more aware of my own wounds and more willing to allow God to tend to them. Then there are the wounds of Jesus, the ones He bears for us. Those are hard to look at because they leaves us feeling raw and exposed and embarrassingly loved, like the Prodigal Son who knows he didn’t earn the party and the ring and the honorable robes.
Yes, sometimes being deeply, truly loved hurts before it heals.
The message she sent me was this: Thank you for loving me when I didn’t feel lovable.
And I suppose I did get my Road-to-Damascus style healing after all because, in that moment, I realized the scales had been removed from my eyes. Loving her has become natural for me since I see her as supremely lovable, just as she is. And, miracle of miracles, I see myself that way too.
Metanoia. How we see matters.
What my mind, body, and soul know now, because of my interactive life with God, is that somehow, we are truly worth it to Jesus. When venturing out into the wilderness to face the lostness of ourselves and others, we can come to feel alone, cast-out, and so discombobulated that we question if we’re even doing the right thing. But that’s when we take comfort from the company of Christ and the fact that, as hard and scary as the journey toward foundness may be for us, God is experiencing joy in this process. It looks gloomy and feels awful to us sometimes, but God is rejoicing over our incremental progress toward home. And we’re invited to share in that joy too.
This is the final installment in the series about how my faith has been re-formed. I hope it sheds light on how I interpret scripture, view the world, understand my purpose, and what fuels my passion. Most importantly, I pray it might help you think about your own faith and perhaps tap into some courage to embrace the deep knowing you have within you that you were created good, made in the image of Divinity, imbued with unalterable and incorruptible worth, and that nothing can ever separate you from the love of God in Christ. And I hope it emboldens you to accept that this is true of everyone else who has lived, and ever will live too. I pray this knowledge will enable you and I to stand with the ones that cause others to clutch their pearls, and to feel the joy and approval of Jesus as we do.
xoxo,
AHJ
[1] Robert Barron, And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation
Metanoia!
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Thank you for sharing the heart of your journey with us, friend! For vulnerably exposing the depths of you, and your story! And, I'm honored you referenced me. 🥰 It really stood out to me how you wrote, "somehow, we are truly worth it to Jesus." What flipped the switch for me was realizing, and more importantly embodying, that: God doesn't love us/me in spite of anything. Love isn't like that. Love just loves who/what is, always and forever, period. That's simply its nature. And the Divine loves each and every one of us always and forever. This is the key unlocks my chains and frees me into Christlikeness on the daily. Thank you, dear friend! 🫶🏽