05 November 2009

Not worth a farthing

A 100 drachma note ... worth about 17 cent if you try to cash it in before 2012. Imagine how much one lost dracma was worth

Patrick Comerford

Luke 15: 1-10


I have chosen the Gospel reading for Holy Communion in the Lectionary for today.

I was working in Greece at the time the Drachma was being phased out as the national currency, and the Euro was being introduced.

As far as I remember there were about 330 or 350 drachma to the Euro. If you have any old drachma notes left stuck in holiday guidebooks, you can still exchange them until 2012, but you’ll get €1 for 587.5000 drachma at this stage.

So a drachma in my days was worth about as much as a farthing. And when Greeks hear this passage in Saint Luke’s Gospel today, they hear about the women sweeping her house, searching not for a valuable silver coin but for a tiny worthless coin, searching for a farthing.

When she finds it, she’s rejoicing over very little. And when she throws a party to rejoice with her friends, it’s going to cost her more than the rest of her savings if she only has ten drachma.

Last year, Philip Matyszak published an introduction to Classics, Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day – but you probably wouldn’t have been able to even buy a bottle of retsina or bottle of ouzo in ancient Athens for half of what this woman had saved.

And how the tax collectors who heard this parable (verse 1) must have laughed with ridicule! Finding a drachma certainly wasn’t going to help the party spirit, never mind being worth considering for taxes and tax collecting.

Leona Helmsley, the ‘Queen of Mean,’ was reported to have said: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes …” But this little old woman was probably had too little and too poor to be preyed on by tax collectors.

Sometimes, when we get caught up in the grand plans and the grand schemes, we forget about the little people.

As Bishop Trevor Williams pointed out in last night’s lecture, we can be so committed to building programmes and working for the greater good the wider church, that we can forget those people who are on the margins, the little people, the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised, for whom the Gospel ought to be good news.

But is it?

I remember once in Achill, how a shepherd died on a cliff side as he went in search for a lost sheep, and slipped on the edge. A local man reacted by pointing out what a small price sheep fetch in the mart.

When you do find a lost sheep, it’s probably been caught in brambles, is full of dirt and matted with droppings. It’s not a pleasant fluffy creature, as seen in so many stained glass windows. It may not even be worth bringing home, in the eyes of a shepherd or a sheep farmer. In its panic and distress, it will have lost weight, and may not be possible to sell.

So often we think of people in monetary terms …. What they’re worth to us.

I still remember sustentation fund lists being pinned to the church door. They were always headed by the richest parishioners, who were also the most powerful … they were on the vestry, they were on diocesan synod, they were parochial nominators and Episcopal electors.

But the little people must have looked at those lists and felt that in the eyes of the Church they weren’t worth a farthing, they were the lost drachma, the lost sheep.

As we are caught up here in the great plans of the church, the university and society, let us not forget the little people, and never let us be too proud to become little people again, especially in the eyes of our heavenly Father, worth only a drachma or a farthing in the eyes of others, but worth the life of his Son.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. This reflection was shared at an academic staff meeting on 5 November 2009.

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