The Lost Garnet is based on Luke 15: 8-10.
The Coin
I often find lost coins without searching for them. Coins nowadays are of so little value that I frequently find them on the streets, where someone’s dropped them. Far from searching frantically for them, people didn’t bother to stoop and pick them up.
In the UK, the highest value coin we have is £2. If a modern Jesus asked us if we’d search every nook and cranny of our homes for a £2 coin, the answer would be ‘errr… no?’ We’d have to be completely broke to be that desperate.
That may be why, even in my translation of the Bible, the translators have already done some retelling. They’ve called the everyday drachma of the original a ‘silver coin’ – because we know silver coins are still valuable.
Value
So if we decide to expand, rather than retell, we might want to emphasise the value of the original drachma. A drachma was about a day’s wages, so the woman has lost the equivalent of £100. While she still has £900 left, she’s still searching (of course!) for that lost £100. So, in places that have very high denomination notes, a simple retelling (or would it be a ‘translation’?) could easily substitute a high-value note for the lost coin.
The Woman
The danger of sticking to coins (even silver coins) in a world where coins are now low-denomination is that we begin to see the searching woman as poor. She’s conducting a major search for a coin, so she must be poor. A poor widow, perhaps, or maybe that’s all the money she has.
It’s a short parable, but the evidence shows that the woman isn’t poor. The coin is one of ten, she has a house, she can afford to invite her women-friends over for a celebration. We don’t know if the missing coin is part of her personal savings, her dowry or her ’emergency money’ – but we do know she’s not on the edge, precisely because she has those savings. Losing one-tenth of her savings is annoying enough to make her search carefully. But what it isn’t is a potential disaster; she still has nine coins left.
Except she wants all ten. Enough to make a long and painstaking search to get the lost coin back.
A Garnet Necklace
So, the lost coin is more ‘valuable’ than the lost sheep because it’s one of ten, not one of a hundred. It’s also lost in a smaller place. The woman wants all her coins and isn’t satisfied with ‘it’ll turn up someday’. A necklace becomes a good modern equivalent. It’s incomplete without its lost part; it could well be reasonably valuable. Furthermore, if it has sentimental value, everyone would immediately understand why the woman would conduct a detailed search. Rather than the slight puzzlement of why this woman is turning the house upside down for a coin, changing it to a necklace returns the listeners to ‘of course she’ll search like mad.’
But what sort of necklace? The woman in the parable loses a drachma – a day’s wages. In a farming village, she probably wouldn’t use much in the way of cash, so her ten coins probably represent a useful, but not huge amount of money. That’s why I went for semi-precious garnets rather than rubies or diamonds. Repairing her necklace with a new garnet would be quite affordable, just as the original woman would be fine with nine coins. But she wants the original part back. Ordinary, and not hugely valuable it may seem to other people’s eyes – but she wants it back.
The Parable as Part of a Set
Luke has placed this parable as the middle of a set of three (earlier, I retold The Lost Sheep as The Lost Van). Luke has also placed those three parables as an extended response to the complaint that Jesus was eating with ‘sinners’ (Luke 15:2). It’s entirely possible that Luke did this because he knew Jesus used the parables that way; Jesus seems to have seen his earthly ministry as particularly orientated to finding the ‘lost’. Likewise, the parables work well as a set of three on the theme of finding the lost; moving the audience from the least valuable (a sheep that will ultimately be eaten) to the most valuable (an irreplaceable son).
But it’s also possible that Jesus told these parables more than once, and told them separately. Certainly, the parable of the lost coin is short enough to be a quick reply, or a quick example of what he was doing in his ministry. John had people come to him; Jesus was actively searching for them.
Repentance
Levine (in Short Stories by Jesus), points out that coins don’t really repent. Yet centuries of Christian interpretation has often concentrated on the now-found repentant sinner (Verse 10) and downplayed the search.
The woman in this parable isn’t making a token search. Not only does she look everywhere, she’s behaving as if it’s her own fault that the coin is lost. I don’t think the original parable is really asking us to place ourselves in the role of the lost coin (or repentant sinner). I think it’s asking us to place ourselves (and God, and Jesus) in the role of the woman looking frantically for something she’s lost.
Jesus was searching out the lost. He was willing to eat with them before they repented and whether or not they repented. If they did repent, then the angels would rejoice; but before they could do that, someone had to go out and find them.
Someone had to search for what was lost.
Previous Parable: The Sourdough Starter: Matthew 13: 33
Next Parable: The Lost Sons: Luke 15: 11-32
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