The Story Of The Lost Coin Revisited

Those of us raised in religious families can easily be so familiar with our faith’s sacred stories that we can hear one of those stories without really listening to it.    

This overfamiliarity is shattered when someone offers a new translation or updates a too-well-known faith story.  A story that has grown stale over time is fresh again, and with that freshness, we catch, almost like for the first time, the story’s wisdom.

In the 1960s, Clarence Jordan updated the New Testament gospels to portray Jesus speaking to rural folks in America’s South.  His “Cotton Patch” paraphrase of books in the New Testament was more than an entertaining read.  His retelling of the ancient stories cleverly applied Jesus’ teachings to address the joys and sorrows of the Civil Rights Movement.  In Jordan’s retelling, “Rome” became Washington, D.C.; “crucifixion” became lynching.   

When I taught Jesus’ parables in my New Testament class at Franklin College, I’d sometimes assign students to choose one of Jesus’ parables and, like Clarence Jordan, to update the story for our times. 

Several weeks ago, I faced a problem that reminded me of one of Jesus’ better-known parables.  The parable as Jesus spoke it over two thousand years ago is as follows:

“What woman with ten drachmas would not, if she lost one, light a lamp to sweep out the house and search thoroughly until she found it?  And then, when she had found it, call together her friends and neighbors?  ‘Rejoice with me,’ she would say, ‘I have found the drachma that I lost.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing among the angels of God over one repentant sinner.”

Entering the ancient world in which Jesus and his audience lived poses some challenges.  The first might be the question, What is a drachma?   A quick search on the internet reveals that a drachma was a coin worth nineteen cents.  But, if we dig a bit deeper, we discover that a drachma was the equivalent of a day’s wage in Jesus’ day.  So, no small change. 

More insight into this parable comes when we use our imaginations.  We might picture a one- or two-room house without electricity.  Inside the house, we can imagine a woman lighting an oil lamp and carrying it from one part of the house to another as she sweeps every inch of the dirt floors.  Looking more closely, we might imagine her eyes straining to see the glint of a silver coin by the meager light of that oil lamp. 

Available resources and our imaginations allow us, almost like time travelers, to return to life in ancient times.  What I asked my students to do, and what I also attempted to do two weeks ago, was the opposite—bring the ancient story forward to our own day as Clarence Jordan did in his day. 

The circumstance that brought this parable to mind and prompted me to update it will become obvious from my version of Jesus’ parable. 

“What absent-minded retired professor would not, if he couldn’t find his cellphone with all its data and stored information, spend nearly two days searching every room in his house and then his car, all the time worried that he’d dropped it while at a meeting in Indianapolis, before he found the cell phone beneath a box in the back seat of his car?  And then, when he has found it, would he not tell his wife, who more than once has helped him find his phone, keys, or wallet, that he found his phone?”  The joy and relief of finding that irreplaceable phone, Jesus teaches, is like the joy in God’s world when one broken person is healed. 

The parable changes; the lesson remains the same.  In God’s world, rescuing the broken calls for  a celebration.  How different our world would be if we believed that.