Sermon Tone Analysis

Turn back in your Bible to Luke 15.

Three Stories

Luke 15 contains three parables by Jesus: the stories of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Wayward Son.

Luke 15:1-2

Let me read you the first two stories.

THE LOST SHEEP

Read Luke 15:1–10

THE LOST COIN

The Parable of the Lost Coin

WHAT THE POINT?

The first story is about a shepherd who loves his sheep.

The literal Greek reads, “Which of you, being a shepherd of a hundred sheep and loses one of them …?” the story begins.

Which would be an immediate trigger to Jesus’ original audience because in Middle-Eastern cultures, saving face is so important, that the answer to the question, “which of you, as a shepherd loses one of your sheep” has to be, “None of us!

None of us would ever lose a sheep!”

“A sheep might wander off, but we would never be so careless as to lose one.”

This is a story about a shepherd like none they’ve ever imagined.

The shepherd has one hundred sheep.

He leaves the other ninety-nine in the open country.

He doesn’t bring them back to the city and corral them for the night.

He leaves them in potential danger to go and find the one that’s lost.

When he finds the sheep, he puts it on his shoulders, brings it home, and throws a party.

“Rejoice with me,” he says to his friends.

“I found what I lost.”

The second story starts with the same hypothetical, “Suppose one of you ...?” The literal translation would be “What woman among you, having ten coins and loses one of them?”

Again, to save face, the answer has to be “None of us!”

No woman in a Middle-Eastern village would EVER lose a coin.

They were too rare and valuable in agrarian cultures.

Most exchanges were done with barter whenever possible.

Cash was only used for emergencies and to make purchases that could be made in no other way.

The woman has ten coins.

Scholars believe that this may have represented her dowry.

A normal village woman would make jewelry out of them, wearing them around her neck for safe keeping.

The lost coin is so precious that she scours the house until she finds it.

When she does find it, she calls her friends to party.

“Rejoice with me,” she says.

“I found what I lost.”

No woman among them would lose a coin; no woman among them would admit it if she did.

And what does this woman do when she finds it?

She throws a party.

This woman Jesus is describing is like no woman they had previously known.

Jesus then tells his third story.

Instead of reading through the story, I’ll Want us to walk through it.

This is the story of “The Prodigal Son.”

THE LOST CHILD

As the story progresses you’ll see that it’s really the story of a father.

A father who is like no Middle-Eastern father before or after him.

The story begins in verse 11 with: There was a man who had two sons.

You know the story:

The prodigal son asks his father to divide the inheritance.

The son takes his share of the estate and moves to a foreign country where he squanders his wealth in wild living.

He returns home and is welcomed back into the family in a surprising way.

That’s the way we hear it with western ears.

Let me show it to you through Middle-Eastern eyes.

The story opens with, “Divide your inheritance, so that I can have my share of the estate.”

To everyone’s amazement, the father does!

It is important for you to know that what the son did was never done and tantamount to him saying to his father, “I wish you were dead.”

The next words are,

Notice that he didn’t leave immediately.

He left “not long after that.”

Why?

Because he had to liquidate his inheritance.

He had to find a buyer for each item in his inheritance—his portion of the family jewels, his portion of the family livestock, his portion of the family lands, and so forth.

And the only people he could sell to were other people in the village.

So, as Jesus is telling this story, his listeners were imagining this brash young man, going from door to door, trying to convince people who knew his father to buy a piece of the family property.

When every person behind every door knew this boy had insulted his father, and shamed his family, by wishing that the patriarch was dead.

He’s drawn disgrace on their village, and now he was doing the unthinkable: selling off property and possessions that had been in the family for generations.

As the scorn mounts, the son feels more and more pressure to get out of town.

He leaves as soon as he has sold the last of his possessions.

By now, the villagers are openly antagonistic toward him.

There’s been talk about shunning him or publicly shaming him—doing something to put this insolent upstart in his place.

As soon as all the transactions were completed, the son heads for a far-away country.

It’s in the far-away country, that this wayward son gradually descends into his own personal hell.

The text says, “He squandered his wealth in wild living” (Luke 15:13 ).

He wasted it, in plain sight of the citizens of this far-away country, who, themselves are Middle Easterners.

They, too, are unimpressed with this frivolous young man who is now out of money.

The polite way a Middle Easterner gets rid of unwanted “hangers-on” isn’t to come right out and tell them to go home.

It’s to assign them a task they’ll refuse.

So, when the son asks for a job, one of the citizens offers to make him become his pig-herder.

It’s a job he cannot accept.

Pigs are unclean animals according to the Law of Moses.

And they have to be fed seven days a week, which meant he couldn’t keep the Sabbath.

To everyone’s surprise, the son accepts the job.

But it’s a terrible job, and doesn’t pay well enough to stave off hunger.

In this hole of self-pity, he begins to think honestly about himself.

He knows there is no life for him in this foreign land, yet he can’t go home to his father, because he’s insulted and shamed him.

He is a failure.

He has nothing to offer his father.

Middle-Eastern sons are supposed to provide for their fathers in their old age, not live off of them.

But now he begins to think creatively.

He realizes that he can’t go back home and ask to live in the family house as a son.

But maybe he could go home and ask for a job as a hired servant.

He devises a plan: “I’ll go home, admit I was a fool, and instead of asking to be reinstated as a son, I’ll ask to be hired as a servant!”

The two problems with the plan are:

1 - Will his father really accept him back after he has publicly humiliated, insulted, and shamed him?

2 - And what about the feeling of the villagers?

How will they receive him?

Remember how the villagers felt about him when he left?

He had disgraced them all by his shameful behavior.

Add to that the fact that he lost all his money to despised Gentiles, and the prodigal has no solution for placating the villagers when he gets home.

He will simply have to endure their shaming as he walks through the town on the way to his father’s house.