The Parable of the Lost Coin #11

The Parable of the Lost Coin is one of the shortest stories Jesus told, only three verses long, about a woman who loses one of her ten silver coins and searches until she finds it. It appears only in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 15:8-10), where it is the second of three parables about lost things, and it teaches that God takes great joy in every person who is found and brought home.

The Parable

Jesus asks his listeners to imagine a woman with ten silver coins who loses one. She lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and searches carefully until she finds it (Luke 15:8). When she does, she calls her friends and neighbors together and asks them to rejoice with her because she has found the coin she lost (Luke 15:9). Jesus concludes that in the same way there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:10).

Context

Luke introduces the whole chapter by explaining that tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to hear Jesus while the Pharisees and scribes muttered that he welcomed sinners and ate with them (Luke 15:1-2). Jesus answers with three parables that build on one another: a sheep, a coin, and a son (Luke 15:3-32). The Parable of the Lost Sheep features a man, and the Lost Coin features a woman, which gives the pair a note of balance. Together they show that the seeking love Jesus displays is neither a peculiarly male nor a peculiarly female concern.

The coin is a drachma, roughly a day’s wage for a laborer. Ten of them may have been a small household’s savings, and some commentators suggest they could also have been part of a woman’s headdress or dowry ornaments, although the text does not say so. A first-century village house typically had a dirt floor, small windows, and little light, so a lamp and a broom were exactly what someone would need to find a small coin. The sweeping and the lamp, then, portray careful and thorough searching. The sheep wandered off on its own and the coin cannot even do that, so this second story emphasizes that the seeking is done by the owner alone.

Meaning

The lesson runs in two directions. About the lost, the parable says that they have value to God far beyond their apparent size, and that God does the seeking. About the joy, it says that heaven celebrates repentance, which contrasts with the grumbling of those who object to Jesus’s welcome of sinners.

Christian traditions read the woman in different ways. Some early writers saw the woman as divine Wisdom or the church seeking the lost, and the lamp as the word of God or Christ’s humanity. Many modern readers prefer to take the woman simply as an image of God’s own seeking. Most agree that Jesus is answering his critics and that the parable stresses God’s initiative and the joy of restoration, not a program for how a sinner earns his way back.