Luke 15:8-10

The Lost Drachma.

The anxiety of the woman to find her lost piece of money certainly does not proceed from a feeling of pity; it is self-interest which leads her to act. She had painfully earned it, and had kept it in reserve for some important purpose; it is a real loss to her. Here is divine love portrayed from an entirely different side. The sinner is not only, in the eyes of God, a suffering being, like the sheep on whom He takes pity; he is a precious being, created in His image, to whom He has assigned a part in the accomplishment of His plans. A lost man is a blank in His treasury. Is not this side of divine love, rightly understood, still more striking than the preceding?

The general features, as well as the minutest details, of the description are fitted to bring into prominence this idea of the value which God attaches to a lost soul. General features: 1. The idea of loss (Luke 15:8 a); 2. The persevering care which the woman expends in seeking the drachma (Luke 15:8 b); 3. Her overflowing joy when she has found it (Luke 15:9).

Details: The woman has laboriously earned this small sum, and saved it only at the cost of many privations, and for some urgent necessity. Jesus leaves out the ἐξ ὑμῶν, of you, of Luke 15:4. Perhaps there were none but men in the throng, or if otherwise, He was addressing them only. For the number 100, Luke 15:4, He substitutes the number 10; the loss of one in 10 is more serious than of one in 100.

The drachma was worth about eightpence. It was the price of a full day's work. Comp. Matthew 20:2, where the master agrees with the labourers for a penny (a sum nearly equivalent to eightpence) a day, and Revelation 6:6.

With what minute pains are the efforts of this woman described, and what a charming interior is the picture of her persevering search! She lights her lamp; for in the East the apartment has no other light than that which is admitted by the door; she removes every article of furniture, and sweeps the most dusty corners. Such is the image of God coming down in the person of Jesus into the company of the lowest among sinners, following them to the very dens of the theocracy, with the light of divine truth. The figure of the sheep referred rather to the publicans; that of the drachma applies rather to the second class mentioned in Luke 15:1, the ἁμαρτωλοί, beings plunged in vice.

In depicting the joy of the woman (Luke 15:9), Luke substitutes the Middle συγκαλεῖται, she calleth to herself, for the Active συγκαλεῖ, she calleth, Luke 15:6; the Alex. have ill-advisedly obliterated this shade. It is not, as in the preceding parable, the object lost which profits by the finding; it is the woman herself, who had lost something of her own; and so she claims to be congratulated for herself; hence the Middle. This shade of expression reflects the entire difference of meaning between the two parables. It is the same with another slight modification. Instead of the expression of Luke 15:6: “For I have found my sheep which was lost (τὸ ἀπολωλός),” the woman says here: “the piece which I had lost (ἣν ἀπώλεσα)”; the first phrase turned attention to the sheep and its distress; the second attracts our interest to the woman, disconsolate about her loss.

What grandeur belongs to the picture of this humble rejoicing which the poor woman celebrates with her neighbours, when it becomes the transparency through which we get a glimpse of God Himself, rejoicing with His elect and His angels over the salvation of a single sinner, even the chief! The ἐνώπιον τῶν ἀγγ., in the presence of the angels, may be explained in two ways: either by giving to the word joy the meaning subject of joy, in that case, this saying refers directly to the joy of the angels themselves, or by referring the word χαρά to the joy of God which breaks forth in presence of the angels, and in which they participate. The first sense is the more natural.

But those two images, borrowed from the animal and inanimate world, remain too far beneath their object. They did not furnish Jesus with the means of displaying the full riches of feeling which filled the heart of God toward the sinner, nor of unveiling the sinner's inner history in the drama of conversion. For that, He needed an image borrowed from the domain of moral and sensitive nature, the sphere of human life. The word which sums up the first two parables is grace; that which sums up the third is faith.