<p>15:5<i> And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing</i>-At the time of Jesus, it was taught (<i>Mishnah Qidd</i> 4.14) that &ldquo;A man should not teach his son to be a herdsman&hellip;for their craft is the craft of robbers&rdquo;. Shepherds weren&rsquo;t seen as kindly old men. They were seen as crafty and thieves. But the Lord chose that figure to represent Himself and the Father- even though the Old Testament likens God to the shepherd of Israel. The startling, unsettling figure for the first century Jewish mind was to demonstrate how it is the Lord&rsquo;s humanity that makes Him our saviour. Likewise, the likening of the Gospel to yeast would have been shocking; or to a mustard bush, which is a member of the cabbage family rather, e.g., than to a fruitful vine or upright palm tree. It is signalled to us that there is to be a strangeness to this new Kingdom about which Jesus spoke, a humanity and yet unusualness about it. It was hard for the Lord to explain to us the level of love for us which He would reach in the cross. So He told a story of a shepherd who so madly loves his sheep, whose life is so taken up by his job, that he would die to save one of them, and comes back triumphantly rejoicing when he has found the lost sheep. The average shepherd would have surely accepted that some sheep are lost, it's the luck of the game. But this shepherd who dropped all and ran off after one lost sheep was no usual shepherd. And the element of unreality in the story brings out the Lord's grace towards us. Note in passing how the man : sheep relationship portrays that between us and the Lord. As the sheep understood pathetically little about the shepherd's sacrifice to save it, so we too fail to appreciate the height of the fact that Christ died for us, as the shepherd for the sheep. We can be sure that the frightened sheep didn&rsquo;t bob along on the shepherd&rsquo;s shoulders, grinning all the way home. With his underside covered in faeces and mud, it would have struggled with the Saviour shepherd, fanatic almost in his passion to save the sheep. As he stumbled along the rocky paths, shoulders bowed down, hands against his chest clutching the animal&rsquo;s paws, the shepherd would be the living imitation of the posture of the Lord as He carried the cross of our sins to Calvary. All this is a pattern of the almost fanatic effort we should expend to win back the lost.</p><p>The man who owned 100 sheep was rich. Shepherds were the lowest of the low. If you owned 100 sheep, you employed a shepherd to look after them and take responsibility for chasing the lost. But there&rsquo;s something unreal- the owner of the sheep is the one who is the shepherd. This actually is the point of the Ezekiel 34 passage upon which the Lord built the parable- having fired the unworthy shepherds of Israel, &ldquo;Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, <i>I myself, even I</i>, will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered abroad, so will I seek out my sheep; and I will deliver them &hellip; I will bring them &hellip; I will feed them &hellip; I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep&rdquo; (Ez. 34:11-15). The remarkable thing is that the owner of the sheep decides to become the personal shepherd, feeding, seeking, delivering, bringing the sheep <i>himself personally</i>. A Palestinian wealthy enough to own a whole flock of sheep simply wouldn&rsquo;t do this. He <i>always</i> hired someone else to do this- because being a shepherd was so despised. Behold the humility of God. But see too His personal passion for us. Hence the Lord&rsquo;s question: Which one of <i>you</i> would act like this? The Father and His Son take such passionate personal responsibility for us, that God was willing in Christ to shame and humiliate Himself in order to get us back into the fold. &nbsp;<br /><b>Personal Responsibility</b> <br />There&rsquo;s also something odd about the way the Lord speaks of the shepherd: &ldquo;<i>He</i> has lost one of them&rdquo;. Translations of the Bible into Semitic languages, especially Arabic, tend to read: &ldquo;If one of them is lost&rdquo; (passive). In the language and concepts of the Middle East, a speaker never blames himself. As in Spanish, they would not say &ldquo;I lost my book&rdquo;- rather, &ldquo;the book went from me&rdquo;. Likewise &ldquo;I missed the train&rdquo; is expressed as &ldquo;the train left me&rdquo;. And I would even speculate that preaching Christ in Arabic and even Hispanic cultures comes up against the problem of people strongly disliking taking ultimate responsibility, or to own up to the personal guilt of sin; the shifting of blame away from oneself is reflected even in their languages. And so when the Lord puts words in the shepherd&rsquo;s mouth whereby he takes direct responsibility for the loss of the sheep, this would&rsquo;ve sounded strange even grammatically. Apparently to this day, it&rsquo;s hard to translate that actual phrase into Arabic. Likewise with the idea of the woman saying that she had found the coin which she had lost. The Lord is labouring how God, and God in Christ, feel an extraordinary personal responsibility for the lost. &nbsp;</p>