THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

Remember the short parable about the woman loses one of her ten silver coins? She is frantic. She searches the house, sweeps it down, in search of the coin. The when she finds it, she calls her friends together and then, would you believe it, throws a party to celebrate the recovery of the lost coin and probably spends half the value of the coin in the cost of throwing the party!

One has to shake one’s head, scratch it even, trying to understand what is going on here. I do not ever remember being invited to a party by a friend who lost something valuable and then found it again and now wants to celebrate his good fortune but in doing so has to spend a great part of the cost of that once-lost item in order to do so.

It happens, I am sure, and I understand – once the details are understood. It was the custom for Palestinian women to receive ten silver coins as a wedding present. The coins may not have had much monetary value, but they were invaluable to those who received them. If a wife lost one of those coins, it was like losing part of herself. It was more symbolic than anything.

But we all understand do we not? We all have personal treasures that we cherish that mean everything to us but would have little or no meaning to anyone else, perhaps even to our spouse. Even more, we cannot explain why these treasures are so important. They just are and that is all that matters.

Thus, as with all Jesus’ parables, we should not get bogged down in the details when we try to understand his point. But we must understand those details if we want to understand that point. In this parable that point is quite obvious. In God’s eyes each and every one of us is like that lost coin. We are of infinite value. God does not take our being lost from God lightly. God will look for us until God finds us. And when we return to God, God rejoices.

That is Jesus’ point. But that is not his only point. Yes, we are infinitely valuable in God’s eyes. But at the same time we must never lose sight of the fact, no pun intended, that we should be of infinite value in our own eyes. Sometimes, sadly, we do. Sometimes we do things, sin in such a way, that we are embarrassed to even look at ourselves in the mirror. We can’t believe we did what we did. We can hardly forgive ourselves for it. And if we can’t forgive ourselves, we wonder how God could. Then in our self-loathing we begin to pull away from God.

That’s the devil, if you will, at work trying to convince us that God abandons us when we abandon God. Of course that is a lie. The saving grace, as this parable points out, is that God never pulls away from us and never allows the devil to win us over. While we may try to move away from God, God never moves away from us, thanks be to God. In the end and throughout it all, it is God’s grace and never-ending love that is the reason we can finally come to our senses, return to God by asking for forgiveness, accepting that forgiveness and then forgiving ourselves.