Filtering the Message
“for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Luke 19:10
Lost – Jesus is an Old Testament man. He doesn’t look like the paintings of Rembrandt. He isn’t the fair-skinned Hollywood mystic. Jesus is a man of the land of oppression, saturated in the Law and the Prophets. He repeats what God already said. We just weren’t listening. If you think you can understand the message of Jesus by reading the gospels, you are terribly mistaken. What Jesus says comes packaged in Old Testament images and allusions. Most of the time, Jesus’ teaching is filled with reminders, not new information. God’s message has been the same since the beginning. The Son came to make it as plain as it could be. But we won’t understand the story by starting two-thirds of the way through the book. We need to start “in the beginning”.
When Jesus tells Zaccheus that he has come to seek and save the lost, he reminds all Old Testament readers that someone else said exactly the same thing centuries earlier. The reminder is intentional. It tells us that Jesus had something in mind far deeper than our contemporary application of this verse to the grand vision of missions. The “lost” that Jesus had in mind are not the “lost” we preach about. The arrow strikes much closer to home.
Luke uses the Greek apololos, a word that means “to be lost to the owner, to wander away.” It is associated with a much stronger form that means “to be destroyed or to perish.” The word is used to describe the prodigal son who was “lost” to the father. But Jesus’ reference is to Ezekiel 34 where the Hebrew word is abayda, a word with the same dual character: to perish, destroy and to wander and be lost. When Jesus spoke this word in his native tongue, no one in the crowd missed the reference. It called up the entire image of Ezekiel 34. And what is Ezekiel 34 all about? It is about the utter failure of the religious leaders to protect, nourish and care for God’s people! The reason that the Son of Man comes to seek and save the “lost” is not because they have not heard God’s voice but rather because the ones charged with watching over them, the priests and the Levites, have taken advantage of them. They have bruised them, scorned them, refused to feed them, plundered them and delivered them to the enemy. In Ezekiel, God says that He Himself will come to their rescue and He will destroy those who have placed ego ahead of compassionate care.
Christians beware! The “lost” are not overseas, in some remote village, waiting for our pearls of spiritual wisdom. They are the ones who wandered away from our midst. They are in the last pew, in the car outside the church school door, on the mailing list. We are charged with their care! And God does not forget when we didn’t have time to talk, when we couldn’t offer assistance because it wasn’t in the budget, when our program was more important than providing help. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
If things don’t change, it doesn’t seem likely that He will.
