Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 279 · October 6
That Which Was Lost
“For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
What has to be true before a thing counts as lost?
Two things, in ordinary speech. It belongs to somebody, and somebody wants it back. A stone in a field is not lost. A coat nobody misses is discarded, and the difference is the owner. The Greek behind that which was lost is neuter, a thing rather than a person, and the King James keeps it, which sounds cold until you hear it as the language of property: an item with an owner, not where it should be. Luke has already run that word three times in a single chapter. A man with a hundred sheep goes after that which is lost, until he find it. A woman lights a candle and sweeps the house for one coin. A father watches a road. In each the object does no searching of its own. Behind all three stands a sentence God says in Ezekiel, in anger against shepherds who let the flock scatter and could not be bothered to go after it: I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away.
Then look where Jesus says it. This is the last sentence of the Zacchaeus story, spoken in a street where the crowd has just been muttering, That he was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner. The man is rich, he collects taxes for the occupying power, and half an hour earlier he was up a tree. Jesus files him under lost, which is to say under owned and wanted back, in front of people who had filed him elsewhere.
Choose one name your family or your church has quietly moved out of the lost column into the written-off one. Announce nothing. Move the name back, and behave like somebody looking for that person the next time they are in the room.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 279 is Every Promise Is Yes (2 Corinthians 1:20).