The Shepherd Who Goes After the One (Luke 15:3–7)

Luke 15

Pompeo Batoni, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1773, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. GG 148). Public domain.

A Link to Luke 15 (ESV)

The Shepherd Who Goes After the One (15:3–7)

Long before Jesus told a parable about a lost sheep, the prophet Ezekiel stood over a scattered flock and named the ones responsible. The shepherds of Israel had fed themselves and not the sheep. The weak were not strengthened, the sick were not healed, the strayed were not brought back, and “the lost” were not sought (Ezek 34:4). So Yahweh announced that he would do the shepherds’ work himself:

“I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed” (34:16).

In the LXX, Ezekiel calls that wandering animal τὸ ἀπολωλός (to apolōlos), “the lost one,” and it puts a verb of searching, ζητέω (zēteō), in Yahweh’s own mouth. Israel’s leaders had abandoned the flock. The God of Israel would come looking.

That is the tradition standing behind the grumbling in Luke 15. Tax collectors and sinners are drawing near to Jesus, and the Pharisees and scribes complain, “This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). The complaint is a shepherding judgment. These are the strayed, the unclean, the ones the religious leaders had written off, and Jesus is gathering them in. So he answers with a question that puts his accusers in the field:

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it (15:4)?”

The phrase Luke uses is the same one Ezekiel used. The sheep is τὸ ἀπολωλός, “the lost one,” and the shepherd goes after it ἕως εὕρῃ, “until he finds it.” There is no calculation about acceptable losses, no waiting at home for the animal to find its own way back. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine and walks into the wilderness after a single sheep, and when he finds it, he lifts it onto his shoulders and carries it home, rejoicing (15:5). Then he calls together his friends and neighbors, because the work of finding is not finished until it is shared.

The Pharisees had read Ezekiel 34. They knew Yahweh had promised to come as the shepherd who seeks the lost. What they did not expect was to watch that promise being kept at a dinner table, by a man eating with the very sheep they had given up on.

The shepherd of Ezekiel 34 has come, and he is still going after the lost ones, still carrying them home on his shoulders, still calling the neighbors in to rejoice. The only question the parable leaves us is whether we will grumble at the table or pull up a chair.

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Coming Home from the Far Country (15:11-32)

The parable commonly called the Prodigal Son is the third in a series. Jesus tells it alongside the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3–7) and the Parable of the Lost Coin (15:8–10), and all three are in response to a single complaint:

“This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2).

Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, Lost Son. The name “Prodigal” is a distraction. The word refers to reckless spending, but money is not the primary point. The main idea is that what was lost has been found and that the right response is celebration.

The parable would have resonated deeply with its original audience in ways that can easily be overlooked today. A son who rejects his father, takes his inheritance prematurely—an act equivalent to wishing his father dead—and travels to a “far country” (εἰς χώραν μακράν, Luke 15:13), where he squanders everything and ends up feeding pigs for Gentiles: this is not just a story about a reckless young man. It is a story about Israel.

For over five centuries, the children of Abraham have lived in distant lands, exiled from their ancestral home and separated from God’s presence. The son’s fall among pigs—animals that no faithful Jew would handle—symbolizes his descent into the kind of Gentile defilement that exile represented.

The turning point occurs in v. 17: εἰς ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἐλθών, “he came to himself.” The phrase carries the weight of repentance and echoes Moses’s promise in Deut 30:1–3 that when the exiles “call to mind” what has happened among the nations, they will return to the Lord and he will restore their fortunes.

This allusion isn’t the first time exile-and-return imagery has appeared in the chapter. The Parable of the Lost Sheep already calls to mind Ezek 34:11–16, where God himself promises to seek out his scattered flock and bring them back from the countries where they have been driven, and Jer 23:3 follows the same theme. Each parable makes it clearer than the last that Jesus believed Israel’s long exile was coming to an end in his ministry. As sinners turned to him, the lost son was coming home at last.

But the parable’s most remarkable moment is not the son’s repentance. It is the father’s response:

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him (Luke 15:20).

In a culture where men of dignity did not run, the father absorbed the social cost without hesitation. He does not wait for an explanation. He runs, embraces, and restores his lost son.

Here is Jesus’s answer to the Pharisees who grumble that he eats with sinners. The exile is coming to an end. The lost son has been found. The only fitting response is to celebrate.

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Joy in Heaven (Ash Wednesday)

There is a line from an old hymn that has always felt uncomfortably personal to me: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it / Prone to leave the God I love.” Ash Wednesday invites us to begin Lent with exactly that kind of honesty — to acknowledge that we are creatures of dust, and that wandering from God comes naturally to us. Luke 15 answers that honesty with something unexpected: not a demand to do better, but a portrait of a God who throws a party when we come home.

The chapter opens with the scene that gives all three parables their meaning. Tax collectors and sinners are drawing near to Jesus, and the Pharisees and scribes are grumbling:

“This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2).

Jesus responds not with an argument but with three stories, each one a window into the same reality.

A shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one that is lost. A woman lights a lamp and sweeps the whole house for a single coin. A father watches the road for a son who “came to himself” in a far country and decided to turn for home (15:17). The progression is deliberate. With each parable, the lost thing is more precious and the joy at its recovery more personal.

What the three stories share is more striking than what distinguishes them. Each ends not with a sober acknowledgment that things are back in order, but with a celebration. “Rejoice with me,” both the shepherd and the woman say (15:6, 9). And Jesus names the deeper reality behind both: “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (15:7).

The Prodigal Son extends this logic to its furthest reach. The son rehearses his confession on the long walk home, but the father never lets him finish it.

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him (15:20)

The father runs — an undignified act for a patriarch in the ancient world — because his joy will not wait for propriety. The robe, the ring, and the fatted calf are not rewards for a successful repentance. They are the expression of a love that was already running toward the returning son.

Ash Wednesday asks us to return. Luke 15 tells us what we are returning to.

I pray that Ash Wednesday brings joy to your Father in heaven. He is running to meet you and welcome you home.