Who Is the Lost Sheep Really?
20th Sunday of the Year
N.b.: This homily is based on the text for the September Catholic 301 course, Catholicism by Henri de Lubac. Register here.
I’d like to begin this homily with a small exercise. Recall the Parable of the Lost Sheep of Luke’s Gospel. Jesus asks, “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on its shoulders, rejoicing” (Lk. 15:4-5). I ask you: who does the lost sheep represent for you? Think about it for a moment. If we were to go around the church and share, we would have different answers: some would say ourselves; others would tell of a family member of dear friend; a few might describe a great and notorious sinner most in need of God’s mercy. Exercises like these can be useful in identifying our biases, bringing our latent prejudices up to the surface for us to see; and to be sure, there is a bias present in the sheep in our mind. The bias is this: that all of you, I would wager, in thinking of the lost sheep thought of an individual, someone in particular, who is in need of being found and saved.
You may ask: well, what we supposed to think? Don’t our most beloved hymns sing of how amazing grace saved a wretch like me and that on his shoulders gently laid and home rejoicing [he] brought me? It may surprise you that, though this is a very common interpretation of the parable, it is not, in fact, the way the early Church read Jesus’ image. The 20th Century Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac points out that many of the Church Fathers thought “the lost sheep of the Gospel that the Good Shepherd brings back to the fold is no other than the whole of human nature; its sorry state so moves the Word of God that he leaves the great flock of the angels, as it were to their own devices, in order to go to its help” (Catholicism, 25-26). The Church Fathers saw the lost sheep not as any one, particular person, but as standing for the one and complete human race.
It's no stretch in the slightest to say that we moderns are biased toward the individual, toward ourselves. But people in the ancient and medieval world thought more collectively and communally. I think about my salvation; they thought about our salvation. I work to bring myself to heaven; they worked to bring each other. That is, of course, a generalization, but I make this observation because it’s clear, at least to me, that we’re missing something they seemed to have had: a concern for the unity of the human family and its common destiny in Christ.
Diving more deeply into our problem, it’s not that we are only concerned about getting ourselves to heaven and no one else. We’d all like to have some friends there with us. It’s that we are only concerned about the salvation of the people we like or with whom we agree. The world today is deeply entrenched in ideology and divided across party lines than run as deep as chasms. Sometimes it’s accurate to say one side is right and the other is wrong; but far more often both sides are sort of mixed bag. And even those who are clearly in the wrong are still part of that lost sheep that the Good Shepherd has left heaven to find, and their salvation, by extension, must also be our concern.
What the Gospels throughout the summer, including today’s, categorically forbid is the outright dismissal of any part of the human family from the life of the Church and the offer of salvation. The seat of judgement is reserved for God alone. On the last day, he will separate sheep from goats, wheat from chaff, and good fish from bad, but until then they ought to be indistinguishable to us. Today we heard the prophet Isaiah tell of the “foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, ministering to him, loving the name of the LORD, and becoming his servants.” Foreigners were those who did not belong to the Lord, for they did not belong to the people Israel; and it is precisely these who the prophet proclaims the Lord “will bring to my holy mountain and make joyful in my house of prayer.” Saint Paul, a devoted son of Israel, calls himself “the apostle to the Gentiles”—that is, to the people other than Israel. Christ encounters the Canaanite woman, whom his disciples see as unworthy to ask the Lord of Israel for anything and grants her request on account of her faith—faith greater than he has found among his own people.
I hope the point is clear enough. I suggest we all hold onto it as we go into the fall, particularly into the synod that will be meeting in Rome this October. By all accounts, it proves to be a grand stage for ideology, not only for the bishops who will be present, but for the throes of commentators who will watch and analyze from all over. Things will be said of what the Gospel does and does not mean: some will be very good and true, some will be very bad and wrong, and some will be ambiguous and interpreted a thousand different ways. How we react to what happens at the synod will reveal our biases: do I think of my party winning out over my opponent’s? Do I aim to see a vindication of my positions to the condemnation of others’? Am I holding out hope for a ‘smack down’ of the people and opinions I don’t like? I want to be clear: there is objective right and wrong, and we can know the difference. But it seems to me that, through the readings this summer, the Lord has been trying to give us a certain mind to bring to these dialogues and debates that resists boxing anyone into a corner. So too, it should dial back the tone of our rhetoric and spare us from making presumptuous condemnations that are not ours to make.
Everything about our attitudes toward others changes when we see them in the lost sheep in which we see ourselves. We are all the wayward humanity the Word left heaven to find. We who have been found and brought into his Church by baptism bear a responsibility to assist him in his mission to draw those parts of us—parts of the one, single, indivisible human family—still on the fringes back to the fold. You don’t need to care about the Church politics that happens 40,000 feet in the air to put this into practice. Simply love the person across the street, or even the one right next to you. Be concerned about their salvation as much as you are about yours. If we took the Gospel that seriously, how different a place the world would be and, in the mercy of God, how different also would heaven be too.
Homily preached August 19, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen