I love and hate the good parables. The really good ones. The ones that have so many ways in. The ones that give you so many things to say. Like the one from Sunday. I still dwell on them for days afterward. I have trouble moving on.

Maybe I haven’t been preaching long enough to get pessimistic about going through the lectionary for the 3rd or 15th time. I’m just finishing my second time through. But I can’t help but feel like the good ones, the really good ones need this kind of repetition.

I also find that I can’t leave them alone. Maybe that’s why I have written so often about this trio of parables: the ones about the things that are lost and found. I’ve written two other things about them that will go online tomorrow. It is a well that keeps refilling itself.

This time I heard something new. Something I hadn’t dealt with before. Something about the context.

These Lost parables take up chapter 15 of Luke. This is Jesus on the way to Jerusalem. He has already stopped for dinner at the houses of different Pharisees, and given a particularly confrontational stand on the Sabbath. Then in chapter 14, he turns to the massive crowd of people that are following Him and acts the bearer of bad news. He tells them that true followers of His hate their family and live a hard life. It is an off-putting suggestion, and one that I don’t think we take seriously enough.

Then chapter 15 opens with these lines:

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:

“Now all the tax collectors and sinners” came near. Rather than drive people away with His call to a hard life of discipleship, these people came nearer.

Notice also who is off-put by Jesus’s conviction. The Pharisees and scribes. Perhaps less off-put by His words than His actions. You know, eating…with those people.

These parables of the lost and the found are told in light of the fact that Jesus’s conviction isn’t scaring people away, but His radical approach is making the leaders angry. That these people who are clearly supposed to be the 99 sheep or the brother who stays behind, are missing what GOD is offering.

But there’s something powerful in this image to me, coming right before my favorite parables, right after such tough teaching that was so likely to thin the flock, but instead draws them closer. Something about truth-telling bringing more in, rather than less. Something about the fear of truth driving the Pharisees and scribes away. Something provocative about what proclaiming the Good News really says about us. About who we are. Where we stand in proximity to it…to GOD.

I can’t help but think that if the Good News hurts it is because your assumptions need adjustment. And if it is affirming, it is because you are being redeemed.

This image, these people, flocking to Jesus at the moment he has been so confrontational, so against the status quo, so deeply disconcerting to the establishment and to the leadership, so challenging to people obsessed with being comforted, is very now. So for us. I can’t shake it.

He spoke the truth. They didn’t leave Him. They came closer.