Seeking the Lost

14^th Sunday after Pentecost (9/14/25): (Lk 15:1-10)   

I hope my insistence over the last three weeks on reading Luke 14:1-25 whole hasn’t confused lectionary followers. This week I return to comment briefly on the RCL gospel text for the 14^th Sunday (Lk 15:1-10)—or least put it in narrative context. (Unless you are following the alternative readings for “Holy Cross” Sunday.) 

In the wake of the challenging teachings of chapter 14, Luke’s story resets, with Jesus’s audience increasingly polarized between “tax collectors and sinners coming near to listen” and “Pharisees and scribes grumbling” (15:1–2).  My friend Jo Bailey Wells wonders about the sequence of four parables that now are told in continuous sequence (15:3–16:8): “We hear a story of a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son and then . . . a dishonest manager. The connections between the first three seem pretty natural: they are all cases of ‘lost and found.’ Are we to view the fourth under the same heading?”

It is an important question, and shapes how we read them all. The first three parables are typically read through the pietist lens of penitent souls restored (as per the refrain in 15:7, 10). Yet like the fourth, they too are also about economics. The first two portray ancient village life, where a community rejoices when lost precious assets are found, since every animal and coin are crucial to a peasant’s survival. Moreover, the lost sheep story likely also alludes to Nathan’s searing parable, which indicted King David to a powerful leader who exploits his poor subjects (2 Sam 12).

The parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke’s most popular, which appeared on the 4th Sunday in Lent) repeats the “lost/found, dead/alive” motif (15:24, 32). But its story-world is even more explicitly about wealth and poverty. The wayward youngest dissipates his inheritance and thus experiences the bitterness of deprivation, while the other two characters embody contrasting ethoses of reciprocity: “balanced” (the jealous firstborn) and “generalized” (the generous father; for a reminder of these concepts, see here). This story thus illustrates opposite archetypal responses of the insular to the outcast: resentment vs. restoration. Moreover, this conflict also lies behind the two following parables: the defect-ive manager (16:1-13) and Lazarus and Dives (16:19-31).

In the fourth story of the sequence, the manager has tantalizing connections to the Prodigal. Both are accused of “squandering” or “scattering” (Gk diaskorpizō, 15:13, 16:1), both hope for rescue from exile through the household love economy. But the manager’s plight is more complicated, and his story illustrates a different meaning of repentance: improvising ways to “turn around” in a system that both privileges and victimizes him, which we’ll look at next week. That parable is decoded with by Jesus’ sharp distinction between the divine economy and that of the Mammon system (16:13), a cosmology that is underlined by the story of Lazarus.

Note:  These blogs are an effort to popularize and summarize my more detailed study of these texts in HARP. Let me know if this is helpful to you (chedmyers@bcm-net.org). We hope you will buy and engage the book—and we need your partnership in getting word about it into “seminaries, sanctuaries and streets.” The publishing industry has been structurally adjusted such that corporate profits take precedence over promoting books, so it is now up to authors and their readership to spread the word about volumes that matter. Though none of us are professional vendors, together we can build capacity to heal Affluenza and resist Plutocracy.  Thanks, Ched