The Parable of the Lost Coin

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"Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them."¹ Three parables answer that complaint in immediate succession: a shepherd who leaves ninety and nine sheep to find one, a woman who searches her house for one coin, and a father who watches the road for one returning son. The parable of the lost coin is the second of the three, and the shortest. Nothing in it is spent on decoration.

"Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it?"²

A Coin Among Ten

The ten pieces of silver were drachmas, Greek coins roughly equal in value to a Roman denarius, a common laborer's wage for a single day. Ten drachmas represented a considerable holding for a woman of modest means, and the one piece she lost was a tenth of what she had. The parable does not explain how the coin came to be lost, whether it slipped from her hand, rolled through a crack in a packed dirt floor, or lay buried under the straw that covered such floors in that country. What the story establishes is only that the coin was hers, that it was lost, and that its worth to her did not diminish for having gone missing. A coin under a floor is worth exactly what it was worth in her hand. A household of that class kept its savings where it lived rather than in any distant vault, so what was lost was lost inside the four walls she could search, and what was found would be found there as well.

The Search Before the Finding

Peasant houses of that kind were small, often windowless, and dim even at midday. A coin lost on such a floor would not be found by whatever light reached it through the door. Her lamp was a small clay vessel burning a wick in oil, giving barely enough light to search by, and it had to be lifted and carried from corner to corner rather than simply set down to flood the room. She lights it because the lamp is the only way to see well enough to search, and she sweeps the house because sweeping is the only way to move what covers the floor without missing what lies beneath it. The word rendered diligently carries the sense of careful and sustained effort, the opposite of a glance followed by a shrug. She searches till she finds it, not until she tires of looking. The scene is not sentiment about how much a coin might matter in the abstract. It is a woman on her knees with a lamp, refusing to stop before the search is finished.

The Joy That Calls for Neighbours

"And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost."³

The finding itself takes five words, and the celebration takes the rest of the sentence. She does not simply feel relief and return the coin to the other nine. She calls people to her house. The joy will not stay private, and it is a joy over one piece of silver briefly out of her hand and now back in it. Whatever the search cost her in lamp oil, in swept dust, and in the trouble of gathering friends and neighbours at whatever hour she found it, that cost never enters the reckoning. The coin recovered is worth more to her than the search cost, or she would have kept the finding to herself.

The Joy Set Before the Angels

"Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth."⁴

Jesus draws the line from the parable to its subject himself, and leaves nothing to inference. The joy belongs to heaven, and one thing alone sets it in motion: one sinner who repents. Heaven does not wait for an accumulation of converts before it counts a number worth celebrating. The coin was one piece out of ten, a tenth of a poor woman's holding, and its recovery was enough to call in friends and neighbours. The comparison Jesus draws runs proportion for proportion. What a tenth of one woman's silver meant to her, one soul means to God, and the celebration matches the value rather than the number.

The God Who Does the Seeking

The parable immediately before this one sets a shepherd in the same position toward a flock of a hundred: "What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?"⁵ The proportion differs, one lost among a hundred against one lost among ten, but the pattern holds in both. The one who has the right to search does not wait where the lost might return on its own. He goes. She searches. Ezekiel had already put that same searching in God's own mouth long before either parable was spoken: "For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out. As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day."⁶ The word used of God there is the same word used of an ordinary shepherd counting a flock at evening, and its force is that the search is not delegated. God says I, even I, will search. A few verses later the same chapter completes the picture: "I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick."⁷ Jesus states the same mission for himself in the plainest terms available: "For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."⁸ The woman with her lamp is not only a picture of patience rewarded. She pictures God at work, undeterred by the size of the house or the smallness of the thing lost, until what is his and had gone missing is found and numbered again among what he keeps.

One Complaint, Answered Three Times

The third parable in the sequence completes what the first two set out. A father whose younger son has taken his inheritance and wasted it in a far country runs to meet him while he is still a long way off, and says to the household once the son is safely home, "For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry."⁹ The words are almost the words already used of the coin: he was lost, and is found. Three pictures, a coin, a sheep, and a son, differ in what was lost and in how much of the whole it represented, one part in ten, one part in a hundred, one part in two. They do not differ in the outcome. Each ends the same way, with what was missing accounted for and someone calling others to rejoice over it. The shepherd's own parable had already stated the ratio Jesus intends by all three: "I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance."¹⁰ The joy is not proportioned to how much trouble the finding required. It is proportioned to the plain fact that the one who was lost is no longer lost.

The parable ends where it began, with a complaint answered rather than argued. The Pharisees and scribes objected that Jesus received sinners and ate with them. By the end of the three stories told in reply, the objection stands answered, not by a rule laid down but by a picture held up: what is lost has not thereby become worthless, what is worth searching for is worth celebrating when it is found, and the joy belongs first to heaven, before it ever reaches the house where the search took place.

Luke 15:1-2, KJV. ↩
Luke 15:8, KJV. ↩
Luke 15:9, KJV. ↩
Luke 15:10, KJV. ↩
Luke 15:4, KJV. ↩
Ezekiel 34:11-12, KJV. ↩
Ezekiel 34:16, KJV. ↩
Luke 19:10, KJV. ↩
Luke 15:24, KJV. ↩
Luke 15:7, KJV. ↩