This fall Katie, Christine, and I are preaching this sermon series called WDJA (What did Jesus Ask?) based on these two books [Elizabeth Dias’ book called What Did Jesus Ask? and Martin Copenhaver wrote another book subtitled The 307 Questions Jesus Asked and the 3 He Answered.] and from the four gospels including this one from the Gospel of Matthew:
“Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven. What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?  And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray.  So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.
Jesus lived his life in the interrogative mood.  He asked 307 questions in four short gospels, including this one: “If a shepherd has 100 sheep and one of them wanders off, will he not leave the 99 on the mountain and search for the one?”

To Jesus it’s a rhetorical question. To him the answer is so blatantly obvious he doesn’t even need you to answer it. But it’s not obvious to me. I doubt it was obvious to the original audience of Galileans he queried. In fact it might be a little irresponsible to leave 99 lambs in peril while you’re scurrying off to find the feckless sheep who couldn’t resist a pleasant patch of pasture over yonder and couldn’t find his way back to the flock.

It was his own darn fault. The Greek word Jesus uses to describe the wandering sheep is planomenon, from which we get our English word “planet,” because a planet is a wandering body. He wasn’t rustled. He wasn’t snatched by a mountain lion; he was reckless. Let him face the consequences.

I don’t know much about shepherding, but 99 out of 100 seems to me like a pretty successful shepherding expedition; he manages to secure all but one. A Loss Prevention Manager at a Walmart warehouse, or a Shoplifting Detective on a Costco retail floor would get a huge bonus if his store finished the fiscal year with a mere 1% of merchandise lost to shoplifting or forklift-spearing damages.

But as someone put it, “the one statistically unimportant wanderer means everything to this shepherd. Human thinking says ‘Let it go; we have 99.’ God’s thinking is, ‘there were 100; where is my one.’ Jesus is trying to convert us to the mentality of the one, to the importance of the statistically unimportant.”[1]

Sometimes we get this right, this mentality of the one. Sometimes we pour all our energy into the straggler. You might have one child you can ignore from mewling infancy to sensible adulthood. You don’t have to say a word to her, you practically don’t have to think about her, and she’ll still win the state championship in lacrosse and get a scholarship to Northwestern and become a brain surgeon. Meanwhile her younger brother has trouble reading and making friends and has you scurrying around from teacher to therapist to private tutor.

Do you know how many resources the New Trier School District pours into the stragglers—kids on the spectrum, kids with learning disabilities, kids who try to read Harry Potter but all they see is page after page of alphabet soup, kids who speak English as a second language? It really is remarkable; we can be proud of that. It’s kind of like Jesus.

Jillian Turner was kayaking along these sheer cliffs in Cromarty Firth, Scotland and she saw a sheep all by herself at the base of the cliff. Two years later, when she was paddling in the same place, there was the sheep again. Clearly she had been lost and alone for two years. Sheep are pack animals; they called her the loneliest sheep in Britain.

Jillian told some local farmers about the lonely sheep. They scared up a huge crane and with herculean effort hauled her up this towering, sheer rockface and brought her back to her friends. They named her Fiona.[2] Maybe these Scottish farmers had learned “the mentality of the one” from Jesus.

Have you wandered off? Are you lost? Are you alone? Can’t find your pack? Would it help to remember that somebody is looking for you? A few of us have been reading or rereading Charles’ Dickens masterpiece David Copperfield. One of the main characters is a sweet young thing named Emily, but Emily disgraces herself when she runs off with a handsome and charismatic but vile miscreant, who eventually gets bored with her and abandons her far from home. Lost and alone and without resources, Emily descends to the verge of prostitution.

Another character slanders Emily like this: “This piece of pollution, picked up from the water side, to be made much of for an hour, and then tossed back to the surf! There are doorways and dust heaps for such deaths, and such despair—find one, and die!”[3]

But somebody is looking for her. Her uncle Mr. Peggotty will just not quit till he finds her. He scours England and the continent until he finally finds her and hefts her depleted self onto his shoulder and heaves her home. While Mr. Peggotty is off on his peripatetic meanderings, he tells his family back home to keep a candle burning in the window, so Emily will know she’s welcome if she ever decides to come back. That candle in the window indicates that no matter how lost and alone Emily might be, somebody is looking for her.

This is Princess Fiona. No relation to Fiona the sheep. Just a coincidence. Princess Fiona is a seven-year-old, 48-pound pit bull mix with Cushing’s disease, which gives her patchy fur, terrible hair loss, and a bloated beer-belly physique.  So she is a balding, potbellied pit bull. She was named of course for the hero in Shrek. There is some resemblance.

She was far from the most adorable resident of the animal shelter in Washington, D.C., where she ended up. Unwanted and unadoptable, she lived in the shelter for 119 days; the average stay for a dog is three weeks. Her caretakers called her “Potato” and “Land Hippo.” Someone asked, “Is she pregnant?”

But then five-year-old Myanni wandered into a pet adoption event at a Petsmart in DC. Myanni walks up to Princess Fiona and pets her beer belly. Then she touches the furless wrinkles on her forehead, and then she turns to the shelter attendant and says, “Do you take Venmo or credit cards?”[4] Who knows what Myanni saw in Princess Fiona, but obviously someone was looking for an unwanted pit bull with a beer belly.

It’s the mentality of the one. Human beings say, “Let it go; we have 99.” Jesus says, “There were 100; where is my one?” Jesus is always asking questions like that.
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[1]Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, vol. 2: The Churchbook (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, first published 1990, revised 2004), p. 219.

[2]Emma Ogao, “Britain’s ‘Loneliest’ Sheep Rescued from Remote Scottish Cliff,” ABC News, November 7, 2023. https://abcnews.go.com/International/britains-loneliest-sheep-rescued-remote-scottish-cliff/story?id=104684584

[3]Slightly adapted from Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ch. L.

[4]Jessica Contrera, “No One Wanted Princess Fiona. Then the Balding, Potbellied Pitbull Met a Little Girl,” The Washington Post, December 19, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/12/19/rescue-dog-cushings-disease-adoption/