Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ (Matthew 15:8-9)
Beethoven once wrote a piece of music about his rage over a
lost penny: Beethoven
- Rage Over a Lost Penny [60k special] - Bing video. In today’s passage, Jesus
talks about a woman’s joy at finding a lost coin. According to the study notes,
the coin in question was worth about one-tenth of a day’s wages, so at $15/hour
and an eight-hour day, we’re talking about a coin worth $12, not $0.10 or $0.25.
But Jesus still makes it clear that the value we’re talking about isn’t much. It's
not the value of the coin nearly so much as the fact that it’s lost that is the story's focus.
But what impresses me today is that
Jesus didn’t make light of the value of the missing item. He didn’t laugh at
how foolish the woman was about being upset over the loss of a coin. “I mean,
it’s a coin, for crying out loud! It’s not like she lost her arm or her life!”
Today, as I suffer through yet another
day of illness, I continue to think in terms of “I mean, it’s just a cold for crying
out loud! It’s not like I’ve lost my arm or my life!” How trivial I am. How
embarrassing to God. I should be out there doing… something or everything. And
I suspect that a third to a half of the population suffers from this same guilt
syndrome and the attached corollaries – either everything will fall apart
without us, or they’ll discover how little they need us.
But Jesus doesn’t seem to chide people for having only a little of anything except faith. Illness doesn’t bother Him. Poverty isn’t a problem. Even death is a minor detail. So tonight, having “wasted” the whole day, I’m trying to figure out how to bask in the compassion and love of the Father despite my failure, disability, illness, or lost coin.
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