Matthew 18:11-13

B. THE GOOD SHEPHERD CAME TO SEEK THE LOST LITTLE ONES. (18:11-13)

Matthew 18:11 is omitted in the better manuscripts, because Matthew probably did not write it. The owner of a manuscript copy rightly saw in Luke 19:10 an edifying parallel thought: For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost, and so wrote it onto the margin of his copy of Matthew. Then, it was undoubtedly inserted into the text by mistake by some scribe who mistook the excellent marginal note for a textual correction. But to purify Matthew's text by removing it once more does not rob us of its beauty and connection, as its words may best be summarized in Matthew 18:12-13 anyway.

Matthew 18:12-13 This is the second reason we should never despise one of these little ones. (Matthew 18:10) Compare Jesus-' use of this same story in another context where Pharisees and scribes sneered at the sinners Jesus associated with. (Luke 15:1-7) His sub-parable of the proud elder brother is devastating. (Luke 15:25 ff) Some blame Matthew for inserting this parable here without regard for its original context, and then when they get to Luke they blame him too. But if Jesus can repeat Matthew 5:29 f in Matthew 18:8 f, cannot He repeat the lost sheep story in different situations with equal appropriateness? After all, the proud, self-seeking Apostles were in serious danger of the same insensitiveness and arrogance toward inferiors as were the Pharisean theologians in the other context.

How think ye? With this attention-getting question, Jesus hooks into the moral judgment of His listeners and turns on their emotions as they become absorbed in this story which is really a low-key rebuke of their callous disregard for the weak and straying. The basic mechanism is to push them to commit themselves to a value-judgment: how would a shepherd feel about the loss and recovery of just one of his lambs that had strayed?

If any man have a hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray. So often, when our brother sins against us, we are tempted to think of him as a ferocious beast ready to rip and tear us. This is why Jesus must give us another perspective, His, to be ready to envision our erring brother, not as a wolf, bear or lion, but as a lost, wandering sheep that belongs to God. From the point of view of the shepherd and from that of the potential damage a given lost sheep can do to the flock, he is relatively innocuous, so that we may see that any real damage we have suffered by our brother's offense is so very slight, compared to the sheep's loss to the Shepherd, hence his value to the Lord, (= Matthew 18:23-35!) Barclay (Matthew, II, 191) notes

Sheep are proverbially foolish creatures. The sheep had no one but itself to blame for the danger it had got itself into, Men are apt to have so little patience with the foolish ones. When they get into trouble, we are apt to say, It's their own fault; they brought it on themselves; don-'t waste sympathy on a fool.. Men may be fools, but God in His love loves even the foolish man who has no one to blame but himself for his sin and his sorrow.

Sometimes sheep go astray by following false shepherds. (Jeremiah 50:6; Matthew 15:14; 2 Peter 2:1 f) But their choice of shepherds and pastures is free and for which they are responsible. (James 1:13 ff; 2 Timothy 4:3 f) Nevertheless, the little ones may be unimportant to the selfish who cannot use them, since they have no influence, power nor wealth. They are only an embarrassment to the pious, because they are unable to keep up. They represent only 1% of the flock anyway, so why bother? Jesus answers eloquently: Because they are precious to God, that's all!

Doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and go unto the mountains and seek.

The Greek of both Matthew and Luke (on Matthew 15:4) states that the 99 were left upon the mountains or in the wilderness (Luke 15:4). These prepositional phrases modify the preceding verbals, not the following verb preceded by kaì. Obviously, the ASV translators of our text felt that the shepherd would not have abandoned the large flock in the hills to the greater danger of scattering during his absence in search of the one lost sheep, so they render the verse so as to have the shepherd go into the mountains. (But even ASV in Luke 15:4 has: doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost.) The translators failed to see the other shepherds with whom our shepherd left the 99 while he went searching. And, if we are not at liberty to invent fellow shepherds, must we add equally unmentioned dangers like wolves, thieves and robbers, or scattering? Let us give Jesus credit for not creating a ridiculous parable, which, if pushed to its logical extreme would picture the Good Shepherd as abandoning His people to their fate while He goes traipsing around in search of strays! In fact, since the setting of the story is the hilly country of Palestine, unless the shepherd took the 99 clear back to town before beginning his search, he would have had to leave them right there where they were grazing on the mountains, since the major portion of Palestine devoted to pasture land is hilly.

Does he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go in search of the one? (RSV) Of course, he does, is the answer Jesus expects. (ouchì afései. ;) Although there are sheepfolds out on the hills in Palestine, Jesus does not seem to refer to them here. Rather, the picture is that of the anxious shepherd who no sooner than the sheep is missed, leaves the remainder of the flock in good hands right where they are and begins the search at once.

Maclaren (PHC, XXII, 435) avoids the problem of the shepherd's leaving the 99 out on the mountain, by imagining the flock of 100 sheep as the totality of God's creations of which man is only one, however, the one that went astray: Not because man was so great; not because man was so valuable in comparison with the rest of creationhe was but one among ninety and nine unfallen and unsinfulbut because he was so wretched. so small,. so far from God, therefore the seeking love came after him, and would draw him to itself. But Jesus is picturing only the crisis of this one sheep now, but tomorrow the lost sheep might be another one. He is not discussing lost man as against unfallen nature, but one lost man as opposed to others who, at the moment of the story, did not need seeking.

The 99-1 emphasis is obviously on the one that went astray. This means that the Lord would have us understand how much He cares about each one personally. For the shepherd the one lost stray was not lost in the crowd: he missed it because it mattered to him. (Cf. 1 Peter 5:7) Nobody is unimportant to Jesus. (See on Matthew 18:5.) Everyone is significant to Him. He thinks in terms of persons, not humanity en masse, and by making individual concern for individuals the center of this story, He furnishes us motive and power to evangelize.

There is in this parable a tacit comparison between the attitude of the Good Shepherd and that of everyone else toward the straying. To the extent that this comparison sours into a contrast, to that degree the single disciple does not share the mind and heart of his Lord. The disciple is often tempted to harbor resentment and revenge at the misbehavior of his brother. In fact, he may calculate how much trouble and anxiety it costs him to be bothered by the other's conduct that forces him to have to seek him. The Lord, on the other hand, reacts quite differently to the same situation, being moved to compassion to help the fumbling, stumbling, faltering man. (Cf. Matthew 9:36)

Doth he not leave. go. and seek? Jesus Himself is the Good Shepherd (John 10:11 ff) who does everything divinely and humanly possible to rescue those left to the prey of wolves and hirelings, thieves and robbers. His mission was to seek and save the lost. (Luke 19:10) This is why He stopped at Zacchaeus-' house. This is why He chose Matthew! (Matthew 9:12 f) He longed to save the wayward Jerusalem. (Matthew 23:37) And He found profound, genuine joy every time He succeeded. Bruce (Training, 200) sees that His love shows that

... there was not only no pride of greatness in the Son of God, but also no pride of holiness. He could not only condescend to men of humble estate, but could even become the brother of the vile. the charity of the Son of Man, in the eyes of all true disciples, surrounds with a halo of sacredness the meanest and vilest in the human race.

A Pharisee can never understand this. (Cf. Luke 7:36-50)

And if so be that he find it. There is always the realistic possibility that even the Good Shepherd could fail to bring the lost sheep back, since the will of the human sheep is left free. (Hebrews 6:4-6; Matthew 23:37) If the wandering one refuses to be found, he will not be compelled against his will, because the Kingdom of God is entered freely, not by constraint. (See on Matthew 13:9-10; also Apologetic Value after Matthew 13:43, esp. point 2.) Judas wandered away from the flock never to return, and he was not alone. (John 6:66-71) Some are recovered. The formerly incestuous man was reclaimed for the Kingdom and the whole Corinthian congregation was held together around Jesus. (1 Corinthians, 5; 2 Corinthians 2:1-11; 2 Corinthians 7:1-16)

He rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. The ninety-nine just had not gone astray yet! This did not mean that one, two or ten of them could not do so the very next day. But the Shepherd's gladness is unmarred because they have given Him no particular difficulty. In fact, this paradox is Jesus-' point: the one sheep that gave him the most trouble brought him the most happiness! The Shepherd lavishes special attention upon the lost one, not because he is worthy, or because he loves him more, or due to a supposedly greater intrinsic worth of the lost one. His greater rejoicing and special care is lavished on the one, just because he so desperately needs it.

In chapter 20 Matthew will illustrate what He means by picturing this Shepherd who hears the lost sheep's cry, as hearing the appeal for help by two stumbling blind men over on the edge of a pushy, arrogant crowd that was trying to hush them up. (Matthew 20:29-34) But Jesus stopped everything and mercifully healed them, enabling them to join the flock on its way to Jerusalem.

He rejoices: without recriminations, grudge-holding, lecturing or superior contempt, He rejoices to have His child back safe again. (Cf. the Father's attitude in Luke 15:20; Luke 15:22-24) Lenski says it beautifully (Matthew, 695): Jesus is simply stating what we constantly experience: a sheep, a jewel, a child, any treasure takes on greater dearness when they are lost and then found or when they are endangered and then brought to safety.

This parable hits hard at the problem of grabbing for greatness in the Kingdom. Since the Son of man came to save what was lost, this which had been His clearest self-humiliation is also His most glorious exaltation. He who had laid aside His celestial splendor to don the slave's garb and undertake the world's greatest man-hunt must be the greatest of the race! And if He care that much for the morally degraded and wicked, how much must He care for little weak ones? It is far harder to love the self-righteous, the calloused and cold-hearted ungodly than it is to interest oneself in relatively good people. (Romans 5:6-8) But can He who did the more difficult fail to do the simpler?

Can the power-hungry disciples see themselves yet as like sheep gone astray and turned every one to his own way? (Isaiah 53:6; 1 Peter 2:25) The major question is one of identification with Jesus-' story: what if I had been the lost sheep and those who held my attitude toward the little ones had despised me and left me out there to die?

As in the case of the angels-' care for the little ones, God's watch-care looked over all, so also here God's great Shepherd-heart goes seeking the lost. (Ezekiel 34:12-15) We must admit that Jesus did not identify the Good Shepherd. He is probably Ezekiel's David, the Servant of Javéh, the prince and shepherd for Israel. (Ezekiel 34:23 f) We are right to think of Jesus in this capacity, because He proved it over and over again. (John 10) Nevertheless God had already written an angry chapter on self-interested, self-serving shepherds whom He accused in words that sting the complacent of every age: The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the crippled you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. (Ezekiel 34, esp. Ezekiel 34:4) With compassion Javéh lovingly sought them wherever they strayed and brought them to safe pasture. (Ezekiel 34:11-31; cfr, Isaiah 40:10 f) Jesus must be God come in the flesh therefore.

See Matthew 18:22-35 for Fact Questions.