TRANSLATION MATTHEW 18:12

What’s your opinion? If some man has a hundred sheep and one of them strays, won’t he leave the ninety nine on the hillside and go in search of the one that has strayed? And if he happens to find it, Amen, I tell you, he will be happier over it than over the ninety nine that did not stray. Just so, your father in heaven is utterly unwilling that one of these little ones should be lost.

The image of the ruler as shepherd goes far back into the era of the patriarchs of Israel, and the pastoral life which the traditional stories of them depict. It continues in the narratives of David, the shepherd -king, and is picked up by the prophets, especially the second Isaiah and Ezekiel. The last has extended mediations on to the bad (exploitative) shepherd- kings, which contain the promise that Yahweh God will himself come to be the people’s good shepherd. All these traditions would be well-;known to Jesus and the gospellers.

Jesus depicts the father in heaven as farmer who shepherds his own sheep, whose love is daft enough to risk losing many sheep in order to save one that strays. The sang-froid of this searching-and- rescuing figure is magical and majestic. Little ones may be made to stray but none will be lost unless they want to be.

The delight of the father in the rescue of the lost is an important theme in Matthew, depicting a God who is certainly not an unmoved mover but is affected by his own persuasive work and the responses of human beings.

The construction of a God who sends “and tae heaven and ten tae hell, a’ for thy glory” (Burns) ought to have been impossible in view of this passage.