The Lost Van is based on Luke 15:3-6
Sheep and Shepherds
There are two main questions with this parable. Firstly, if we have to tell it to people who aren’t familiar with sheep at all, should we keep ‘sheep’? Secondly, what do we do where there’s a prevalent metaphor of ‘sheep stands for people?’ If we drop ‘sheep’ we lose the many biblical images of God (or Jesus) as the shepherd and his people as sheep. However, in the UK, ‘sheep’ has an extremely negative connotation when the word is applied to people. Calling people sheep, or sheeple, is not a compliment.
Part of this is the difference between our style of shepherding and the style of shepherding practiced in the Middle East. Shepherds in the hills of the UK will gather their sheep with the aid of a highly trained dog. The sheep will be driven before the shepherd, possibly with some sharp nips from the dog to make sure they’re going in the right direction.
In the Middle East, Jesus would have been familiar with a system where sheep learn from birth to trust their shepherd to lead the flock. The shepherd is walking in front of the flock, leading them to drinking water, to grass, to the safety of their enclosure at night. So for Jesus and his listeners, the image of the lost sheep is that of a creature who should have trusted and followed their shepherd – but instead has wandered off on their own path. Knowing sheep, it’s probably stuck in a ditch somewhere. Or it’s found its way to a high ledge with some tasty grass and is now wondering why it can’t get down as easily as it got up.
But for people in the UK, the image of sheep is primarily of a stupid animal being driven forward to places it doesn’t want to go. ‘Sheep’, or ‘sheeple’, is a byword for people going forward blindly because someone (usually a malicious someone) is pushing them to go that way. With those negative connotations, maybe it might be worth trying the parable with another image than ‘sheep’.
Children or van?
One possible image would be ‘children’ and ‘teacher’. A group of children trustingly following their teacher – that’s pretty close to the image of the sheep trustingly following their shepherd. And Jesus himself was a teacher, so that image does keep some biblical echoes. But while we’d certainly make every effort to find the lost child, leaving the other ninety-nine alone ‘in the wilderness’ wouldn’t exactly be good practice…
However, in Luke’s Gospel, Luke has Jesus tell this parable with another story – one about a woman losing one of her silver coins, her ‘rainy day money’. So in this case, Jesus seems to be thinking about valuable things. To God, sinners are valuable, not worthless. They are just as valuable as the shepherd’s sheep (their means of making a living) or a woman’s silver coin (her emergency money).
Which is why I ended up using ‘van’. They’re a means of making a living. They’re valuable. They get lost. And while they don’t have any biblical connections (vans being in short supply in first century Galilee), they do have drivers. We can hear a story about a lost van and make the connection with a lost person. We’d also realise that the other ninety nine vans-and-drivers will likely be okay while the boss is out searching.
And it keeps one of the original meanings of this parable; that even though the shepherd has a hundred sheep, he cares about each and every one. The owner of our van fleet isn’t leaving this to subordinates. He’s out there searching, towing the van back if he has to, leading his lost van home.
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