A week last Friday evening I was on police chaplaincy duty. The officer I was assigned to told me that at 8pm she needed to get back to the police station for a briefing for part of a special operation she was assigned to. So we went to the briefing and there were perhaps 20 officers present in total including 4 armed officers. And I learned that the operation was part of an initiative by Wiltshire Police to try and prevent people trafficking.
So just after 9pm I accompanied the police to a property in the centre of Swindon where the police believed a brothel was being run. On entering the property the police found two women from Poland who appeared to be working as prostitutes. Though I am not sure whether the police decided that the women had in fact been trafficked.
What was made quite clear however was that the police were not interested in arresting the women. The police were solely concerned for the women’s safety. And I was told by one of the officers who deals with people trafficking all the time, that if the women had been trafficked, and wanted to be set free, then the police would assist them with this. In fact the police pass them on to a Salvation Army team who help with rehousing.
So I am hoping the Methodist Recorder won’t now get hold of the story of “Methodist Minister in brothel!”
Seriously though, I found the approach of the police to the women very interesting. Very theological if you like. They were treated just like Jesus treated the woman caught in adultery. They were forgiven and then told to sin no more as it were.
In Luke 15 Jesus teaches on the nature of God, particularly God’s forgiving nature and his desire to restore his people to him. And the parables both have the same idea – what forgiveness is like in terms of things lost and found.
Jesus does this by talking in terms of things the people can understand by getting people to think in terms about what is most important to them.
Remember this was largely an agricultural society so people would have understood why a shepherd would value the health and safety of his sheep for that is the source of his income. And people would have understood how a woman valued the hard - earned money she has scraped together maybe to save or may just to feed her family. And later in the chapter is the Parable of the Lost Son (or the Parable of the Prodigal Son as we usually refer to it.) This tells the story of how a parent values the happiness and well-being of his her children.
In telling his parables Jesus was saying to the crowds, to the sinners and tax collectors, to the Pharisees and Sadducees and to the Disciples
“Think of that thing that is most precious in your life and what it would be like if you lost it, whether through carelessness, or intent, or theft. Think of something on which you place extreme value that has gone missing. How would you feel? You’d be devastated. And whilst you’d be able to carry on with your life, after all people adapt, your life would be incomplete. Part of the whole is missing.”
And 2,000 years later we can still relate to these stories. We might not be shepherds, we might not have to count every penny, but all of us have a sense of what it might mean to lose something precious. Imagine losing a wedding ring or maybe a necklace given by your mother. Maybe not hugely valuable in pounds and pence but priceless.
And that is the message given to us by Jesus. In God’s eyes we his children are priceless. He hunts high and low for us when we go missing. God is like the shepherd who values each sheep in his flock. God is the like the woman who loses the silver coin. When one of God’s children is missing, when one of God’s children has turned her back on him, he searches her out and pleads with her to come home.
God is love. And that love looks like one who goes out tirelessly searching, because the one who is lost is so lost that he or she can’t find their way home.
It occurs to me that Jesus doesn’t tell us anything about the value of the sheep or the value of the coin. And I think we need to read something in to that.
Jesus doesn’t say
‘Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses the prize ram worth thousands of pounds. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?
Jesus doesn’t say:
‘Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins[a] and loses one worth a thousand pounds. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?
I think it is significant that Jesus doesn’t mention the value of the sheep or the coin because Jesus is making the point that even if the sheep was some old barren ewe, the shepherd still cares so much that he searches for her. And similarly it doesn’t matter that the silver coin is only worth a few pennies. To the woman it is very valuable. And that is my point. God searches out all people who are lost to him no matter who they are.
As a police chaplain I am with the police for the police and police staff. I am not there for members of the public. So when I am out with the police and we encounter the public I tend not to engage them in conversation unless the officer asks me to do so. There are legal reasons for this mainly – because if a suspect spills the beans to me as it were I am a witness. So when I was with the police a week last Friday I didn’t speak to the two Polish women.
And I found that hard. I would have liked to be alongside them and show that they were loved by God. But God was in that flat searching those women out. He was there acting through the way the officers were acting. As I said the officers acted compassionately. And if the women wanted it they were being offered a way out, a place of safety.
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