Just as the skilled traveler finds a way to enter the depths of the sea and to cross the pathless tracks of the flowing waters: so the divine Law has granted and taught us to hear something of God's words, and to penetrate to the secret of the divine meaning. Hence it is that, loosing the raft of our mind from the shore of the flesh, we enter the open sea of the gospel discourse, believing that, with the Holy Spirit breathing, we shall reach the harbor of heavenly understanding. Our Lord today has advanced the hope of sinners toward pardon, and with a most tender example has checked the murmur of the proud. 'There were,' he says, 'publicans and sinners drawing near to the Lord, to hear Him: and the Pharisees and Scribes murmured, saying that this man receives sinners and eats with them' (Luke XV).
No less envious than proud, they took occasion for malice from the Lord's goodness: from God's tenderness they were rendered impious, from Christ's mercy they became cruel, from the heavenly cure they took sickness, and they turned the pardon of the penitent into an indictment of the Judge. 'He receives sinners, and eats with them.' Thus the envious sees, thus the proud feels: thus the avaricious tastes, thus the malignant understands. 'He receives sinners.' They do not say 'He takes up.' What had he lost, who receives? He gives to himself who turns wrath into joy, changes sorrow into grace—whoever finds what he had lost. 'He receives sinners.' God receives sinners, but God does not allow those whom He receives to be sinners;
the sinner does not violate God by drawing near, God sanctifies the sinner when he approaches. Pharisee, Christ does not receive sins when He receives the sinner, because God is the receiver not of the crime but of the man. Whence the Pharisee ought to have seen the sinners not as they had come, but as they were returning. Surely Paul, whom they had sent as a persecutor, they saw returning soon as a preacher. But now let us hear by what comparison, by what likeness, God insinuates His joy over the return of the sinner. 'And He spoke to them a parable: What man of you that has a hundred sheep, and if he lose one of them, does he not leave the ninety-nine in the desert, and go after that which was lost, until he find it?'
'And when he has found it, he lays it upon his own shoulders, rejoicing; and coming home he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them: Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost. So, I say to you, there shall be joy in heaven over one sinner doing penance, more than over ninety-nine just who need no penance.' Whenever indeed we recover things lost, we take a new heap of joys, and it is more pleasant to us to have found things lost than not to have lost things kept safe. But this parable speaks of divine tenderness rather than of human custom, and it expresses truth. To leave great things and love lesser things belongs to the power of God, not to human cupidity:
for God both makes to be the things that are not, and so follows what is lost that He holds what He has left; and so finds what was lost that He does not lose the things that were kept. Therefore this is not an earthly shepherd, but a heavenly one, and this whole parable is not figured by human labors, but is overshadowed by divine mysteries; as at once grows clear from the very number when He says: 'What man of you that has a hundred sheep, and if he lose one of them?' Why not fifty, why not two hundred, but a hundred? Why not four, why not five, but one? To show that the grief was not from the loss, but from the number. For the loss of a single one had scattered the whole hundredfold number;
and had brought the whole from the right hand to the left, so that by the loss of one the left hand should enclose all, and the right have nothing. The ninety-ninth number lies shut up in the left, clings constricted, is held oppressed: which yet, when it has received and felt the increase of one, at once passes to the palm of the right hand, at once comes to the crown of the hundredfold number; and if to have lacked the hundredfold number is a matter of grief, of what grief is it to have lost it? You see that through the loss of one sheep this shepherd had grieved that the whole flock had fallen from the right hand, and that the whole had slipped back into the left; and therefore, leaving the ninety-nine, he follows the one, seeks the one, that he might find all in one, and restore all in one.
But now let us unfold the secret of the heavenly parable. The man having a hundred sheep is Christ. The good shepherd, the loving shepherd, who in one sheep—that is, in Adam—had placed the whole flock of the human race, that he might set it among the delights of paradise, in the region of the living pasture; but that sheep forgot the voice of the shepherd, while it believed the wolfish howlings, and lost the saving folds, and was wholly wounded with deadly wounds. This sheep, then, Christ, coming into the world to seek it, found in the womb of the virginal region. He came in the flesh of His nativity, and laid it upon the shoulders of His Passion, lifting it onto the cross, and rejoicing with all the joy of the resurrection, He bore and carried it by the ascension to the heavenly dwelling. And He called His friends and neighbors—that is, the angels.
Saying to them: Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost. The angels congratulate and rejoice together with Christ over the return of the Lord's sheep, nor do they resent His presiding over them upon the whole throne of majesty, because envy had by now been put to flight from the heavenly places together with the devil: nor could sin any longer penetrate through envy into the heights by means of the Lamb who had taken away the sin of the world. Brethren, He sought us on earth, let us seek Him in the heavens; He bore us to the glory of His divinity, let us bear Him in our body with all sanctity: 'Glorify,' says the Apostle, 'and bear God in your body' (1 Cor. VI). He bears God in his body who bears no sin in the working of his flesh.