He will go after the lost one until he finds her. On this feast of Jesus’ Sacred Heart, there is no explicit language about the heart in any text, but it is about an extraordinary form of love that we associate with the thought of the heart. The Gospel shows this in all its paradox. After all, the shepherd takes care of his whole flock evenly, so how are we to understand that he leaves ninety-nine in the wasteland (actually in the desert) and only cares about the one who wandered away? As can be seen, here the risk is not considered, counted, or thought of if the majority remains unprotected; it only looks at the danger that threatens one, as if it only matters to him. There is no thinking about what the hopes for success are.
God is not indifferent to whether a few people are lost, although most of humanity is saved. The human heart, which here becomes a vessel of divine love, does not think like this; a loved and irreplaceable person is vital to him. As a rule, believers who celebrate the feast of Jesus’ Sacred Heart have no idea how much God loves each individual; so many saints expressed the idea that Christ would die on the cross even then, if only one single person needed redemption. This idea seems a little heated to us, but it draws its legitimacy from this parable of Jesus. And not only worrying about one sheep, the joy of finding it again is described. One can say with certainty that each of the ninety-nine is loved equally by the Good Shepherd: after all, they are all sinners for whom Jesus dies on the cross, not an anonymous mass, but unique persons.
Christ died for us while we were still sinners.
The second reading underlines what has just been said. What is given as lost in the parable is actually what has fled from God, is far from him, and is hostile to him. The love of the Good Shepherd does not rest on any mutuality; it is love that, through its perfect surrender, strives to arouse this mutuality. The sheep, which is saved and carried on the shoulders of the shepherd, begins to judge how dear it is to the shepherd and what it owes him. However, this parable was not intended to evoke this reciprocity; the love of Jesus is present in all circumstances. The reading also does not speak of love that is already committed and corresponds to God, but only of the certainty that we are already hidden in God’s love and have achieved “reconciliation”. Whether this certainty obliges us to respond to this love or instead that this response of love is spontaneously created in us will be able to be judged by everyone who realizes what has been said.
I will look for the lost.
The Old Testament text of the first reading repositions the love of Jesus’ heart at the heart of God. God wants to “seek out his flock himself”, bring them back “from all the places where they scattered in foggy and cloudy time”. Here we are shown that the human heart of Jesus, to whom we attribute this unique personal love, it is not a prototype – as if God’s love acquired this quality only during the incarnation – it is rather a more comprehensible expression of the incomprehensible love that the eternal God has had for his creatures forever.
