The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin (Luke 15:1-10) mean the same, in the style of Hebrew repetition found especially in the Psalter with couplets like: “Praise the Lord, all nations! / Extol him, all peoples!” (Psalm 117:1). The shepherd who loses one of his hundred sheep and the woman who has ten drachma and loses one (approximately a laborer’s daily wage) are the same, and what they are is God.
The Pharisees and scribes have murmured of Christ: “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” The pompous prigs would have imputed sin to Jesus on the barest suspicion of it, but they had none. His most vicious enemies never could find baseness in the Sacred Heart. Their frustration sounds like the political columnist who is so bitterly obsessed with Mother Teresa that he now rants incoherently at the prospect of her canonization. To the proud, innocence is more offensive than guilt. Some psycho-biographers have smirked at Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone’s endeavors to reclaim fallen women in London, because they were a complicated couple with a lot of mental nooks for neuroses to nest in. In contrast, Dr. Johnson at least once rescued an unfortunate woman and nursed her at home, and no one smirked because Johnson, for all his boisterousness, was guileless. No Pharisee could smirk at the motives of Jesus. That may have been the engine of their ultimate rage. They felt so double-crossed by his purity that they sought a solution in the Cross itself.
The sinless Man “received sinners” because His purity was a magnet to those who normally were drawn to their own kind. If the sinners in Galilee had gone to the experts in the Law, they would have left with a lecture on self-improvement ringing in their ears. Jesus simply “received” them. That actually is what happens when we receive Him in Holy Communion. Christ’s consorting with sinners who repent is God’s side of the Eucharist.
What would be neurotic perfectionism in the imperfect is divine nature in Christ: The least remnant is more important than all the rest. In his retreat for Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Van Thuan said that just as Christ “has no memory” because He forgave the Magdalene and the Thief, so He has no mathematics, because in His equation 1 = 99. And one coin = nine coins. We should not expect the I AM, the Alpha and Omega, to have a memory or imagination as we have it, for He sees all at once. Nor should we expect the Three in One to work by our kind of calculus. As the Holy Trinity is perfect, all external quantities are gratuitous, for God needs nothing and creates for delight rather than to satisfy a need. This is why the “scandal of particularity,” which is the problem we have in believing that God who is greater than the universe cares for “every hair,” should be the clearest article of faith, not the hardest. But we are procreators and not the Creator, so we tend to impose the limited logic of our equations on Him.
St. Maximus the Confessor says that Christ’s sinlessness did not make Him less human than us, because “sin was not part of the original human condition anyway.” Out the window go the pessimistic heresies of human depravity, and the economy of redemption remains; but man is fallen, and in that state his scheme of values is defective. Our Lord speaks of our best moments, but if they are the best, there are other moments. A priest at an Australian sheep station asked a shepherd’s little boy what his own father would do if one of a hundred sheep were lost on a cold night, and the boy replied, “He’d let the little blighter go.” And most women would probably not stay up all night looking for a coin. So when Jesus asks, “What man of you…?” and “What woman…?” he may expect that the people will squirm a little and think to themselves, “Let’s not object.” Once again He is gently correcting consciences, and the difference between Jesus humbling others and the Pharisees humiliating others becomes, after a lifetime, the difference between heaven and hell.
The tears of a good confessor hearing a really contrite penitent are the joy of the shepherd who finds that one sheep and the wife who finds that one coin. This is real “joy in Heaven,” a mystery more resplendent than satisfaction at finding a lost object or vindication for time spent looking for it. It is the culmination of a mysterious mathematics. St. Josemaria Escriva said that all of us are zeros, but when Christ is placed in front of all those zeros, what a great number they become.