Canter Bridge

Rational calculation, as we know it, is of limited value in assessing life’s larger moves.

Take Jesus’ parables about people, animals, and things that have gone missing. He intends to speak, of course, about his Father’s love. Such stories are not permeated by the sentimental, but neither do they hew to the mathematics of evaluation.

There is this persistent longing to recover the thing that has disappeared and is out there somewhere by itself: unknown, unseen, unloved, in peril.

What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 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 15:4–7 ESV)

In an adjacent parable, the thing gone missing is not a sheep but one coin among many. There is no peace in the house until the coin’s owner has upended all symbols of normal life and found the damned thing.

Why?, we ask. She’s got nine other coins. The shepherd has ninety-nine perfectly good sheep practically at arm’s length. His bottom line will not be much affected by this 1% diminution of his stock.

It makes much more sense—according to a logic that serves us well in other spheres—just to get on with the sheep-tending or the house-holding or the …

Jesus teaches that we are in danger of missing some of life’s Main Things if we carelessly carry the sturdy logic of one sphere over to the stewardship of another, where it simply doesn’t work.

Ninety-nine righteous persons seems like quite a haul for heaven’s accounts. Yet something is amiss, joy is constrained, even heaven’s life cannot proceed on its way until the one sinner is rescued and retrieved.

He probably doesn’t value his own life as much as heaven’s Watchers do.

Yet we can say, with a certain logical precision, that his worth is infinite.

Heaven knows this, even if we do not.