In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis talked about God sending the human race “good dreams,” before the coming of Christ, stories about a god who dies and comes to life again. He saw the pagan myths as foreshadows of what became reality in the death and resurrection of Jesus. I like to think that the same thing happened in regard to the primary image in our text this week, Luke 15:1-10.
I feel like I grew up familiar with the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd carrying home the lost lamb draped over His shoulders. It is a picture I probably first saw in early childhood in some poorly drawn Bible illustration or in one of those old Sunday School posters. I would recognize it anywhere as a symbol of our faith in a gentle, loving, saving Lord.
So imagine my surprise the first time I stood thirty years ago in the Acropolis Museum in Athens and gazed up at the sculpture pictured here. This is the moschophoros, the “calf-bearer,” and it is from nearly 600 years before Christ. Almost as ancient is the next picture of a kriophoros, a “ram bearer” which depicts the god Hermes carrying a ram on his shoulders, coming from the story that Hermes saved a city from a plague by carrying the ram around the walls.
God sent the ancient Greeks good dreams of the Savior who described Himself in our parables for this week, the One who seeks out and carries home the lost, rejoicing in their redemption.
Jewish people had their own background images of the shepherd-king in David and in the Old Testament’s depiction of God as the Shepherd of Israel. Yet because of preparation by the calf-bearer and ram-bearer images, the Greek-speaking ancient Christians picked up and fell in love with the image of the Good Shepherd carrying home a lost lamb. It became the most used image in the Christian art which decorated the catacombs.
These parables are small, but the picture especially of the first is a powerful
description of God’s love for us in Christ. We are lost, helpless and alone and the love of Jesus seeks us out and brings us home. It’s something we do well to remember whoever we are. We don’t come to Jesus or merit His grace by our own efforts. We don’t find Jesus. He finds us. May we be humble and ready (that’s the essence of “repentance”) to be found and brought home, as many times as we drift away.