The Lost Sheep
By Fr. Peter Fennessy, SJ
N. C. Wyeth, The Lost Sheep (c. 1926), oil on canvas, 45 × 40 inches, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.
The Pharisees complained so much that Jesus associated and ate with sinners, that He told them the parable of the lost sheep. The terrain is rugged and barren. There are no green pastures or still waters here. The steeply descending treetops hint at the precipitousness of the land.
God, the kings of Israel and the Pharaohs all adopted the title Shepherd since like shepherds they protected, guided, loved and cared for those entrusted to them. Shepherds knew their sheep well enough to notice if even one was missing out of a hundred. But Pharisees despised shepherds as unclean. They must have resented Jesus for beginning this parable, “What man of you…,” as if any of them would ever debase and defile himself by shepherding sheep. But Jesus said that He and heaven rejoiced over a recovered sinner as a shepherd would over a recovered lost sheep. Notice the love and relief of this shepherd tenderly embracing his wayward sheep.
If the three stars in the sky are the Summer Triangle, then morning is breaking, and the light and shadows are from the rising sun; the artist may have believed that the search for the sheep took place mostly at night.