The Kingdom of God is Like . . .

Chapter 11

by Fr. Thomas Keating

The Parable of the Lost Coin

 "What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light  a lamp, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' "  (Luke 15:8-9)

   This parable is not unlike the parable of the mustard seed. In that parable the Lord seems to be burlesquing the popular expectations of the kingdom as a giant cedar of Lebanon. As if Jesus were to say, "You are looking for a cedar of Lebanon, the great apocalyptic tree, and all I am asking of you is to become an insignificant little shrub."

    If we can imagine the astonished faces of the hearers, it is not hard to picture Jesus' amusement at the collapsing of their house of cards. This parable continues in a similar vein.

    A certain woman has lost a coin. A drachma was about the same as a denarius, one day's wage for a common laborer. It was not a lot of money.  But she is looking everywhere for this coin, sweeping the house up and down. Some of the hearers are not getting excited and want to help her. When she finally finds it, there is great joy! She calls friends and neighbors, and they rejoice over her recovery of the tiny sum.

    Jesus once again juxtaposes the grandiose expectations in the popular mind regarding how the kingdom is expected to appear in our lives, and how it actually appears. The woman finally finds the coin of modest value. That is the extent of God's intervention. Thus the kingdom is identified with the ordinary. She did not win the state lottery. Jesus undermines grandiose expectations of all kinds. For one reason: they are not likely to happen. 

    In the three parables that appear in chapter fifteen of Luke--the prodigal son, the lost sheep, and the lost coin--Luke seems to be intent on justifying Jesus' conduct in eating and drinking with public sinners. In his view, Jesus' purpose is to call them to repentance. In fact, the original meaning of the texts according to contemporary exegetes has little to do with repentance but focuses rather on the nature of the kingdom.

    In the Gospel of Thomas a number of the parables are found in a different form from that reported in the synoptic Gospels. There is one parable that appears only in Thomas. Many exegetes think it is genuine because it follows the patterns that are familiar in Jesus' parables: shock value, an undermining of grandiose ideas about the kingdom, and identification of the kingdom with the unclean, the marginalized, and the outcasts of society.

    The parable reminds us of the story of the widow of Zarephath in I Kings 17:8-15. There was a great famine in her country. The prophet Elijah, in desperate hunger, asked the widow for a morsel of bread and she replied that she had nothing to give him. The prophet then miraculously filled her empty jar saying, "The jar of meal shall not be spend, nor the cruze of oil, until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth."

    The parable in the Gospel of Thomas has a different ending:

The kingdom of God is like a certain woman who was carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking on a road still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke and the meal emptied out behind her on the road. She did not realize it. She had noticed no accident. When she reached her house she set the jar down and found it was empty. (Thomas 97)

This story tells us that the kingdom of God is present in failure, accident, and emptiness. In her case, there was no prophet to come to her rescue, no visible divine intervention. There was just accident, failure, everydayness, the ordinary. The teaching of Jesus is that those are precisely the situations where the miraculous activity of the kingdom takes place. This means that the kingdom must be active at a deeper level than we are normally looking for or expecting. Nowhere does Jesus say there is no divine intervention. It is just not on the level that we would like it to be. In this remarkable parable, the divine intervention is represented by the empty jar.

    This raises the question, "Is God just as present in absence as in presence?" Or to put it another way, "Is the divine intervention always there supporting us whether we think it is present or not?"

    The answer of the parables is emphatically yes. The kingdom of God is active in failure, ordinariness, everydayness. If we wait for a miraculous rescue, a vindictive triumph, or for some idealized lifestyle to appear, we are looking for the wrong kingdom, certainly not the one that Jesus is revealing.

    There is no place to go to find the kingdom because it is always close at hand. We do not need to look for success because the kingdom is equally present in failure. What is disconcerting for the hearers in both of these parables is that the kingdom is not only present and active in failure and in ordinariness, but is at work in the unclean, in the prostitutes and tax collectors to whom Jesus extends table fellowship. 

    According to Jesus, God is in total solidarity with ordinary daily life with its poignant failures in the spiritual journey as well as in everything else. Thus God's mercy invites us to show compassion and solidarity with all the other sinners in the world, including public sinners and street people, who in the parable of the great dinner, are the only ones who finally got in (Luke 14:16-24).

    The kingdom is present not in grandiose accomplishments, but in showing practical love in humble ways, day after day, and in refusing to allow our failures and disappointments to hide God's love from us. God invites us to share the divine emptiness. The divine emptiness might also be described as total vulnerability: the willingness to be hurt over and over again without loving less but more. That means never giving up on anyone, not even on ourselves. Of such is the kingdom of God.