The Good Shepherd and the Sheep

Texts: 1 John 3:16-24; Psalm 23; John 10:11-18

Everybody loves Jesus the Good Shepherd. We love seeing him in stained glass windows, or depicted in beautiful mosaics, in our churches. We love to recite the 23rd Psalm with its message of comfort, and many of us have our favorite renditions of that Psalm in music, from the evocative chant written by Bobby McFerrin to the lush choral version by Howard Goodall that everyone now knows as the Theme to the Vicar of Dibley tv series. Then there’s Bach’s lovely aria Sheep May Safely Graze which we often hear at weddings to encourage us to live without fear, although it was written to be a birthday song. 

So on this Good Shepherd Sunday, it’s lovely to reflect on Jesus the Good Shepherd who cares for the sheep and watches over them. I know how important it can be, especially in the hard times, to feel that a loving someone is watching over us.

But everybody doesn’t love sheep, or at least not everyone loves the idea of being a sheep. The rap sheet on sheep is that they are dumb, they get lost a lot, they don’t think for themselves, and they are very very smelly. When I was growing up there was a local farm with a herd of sheep and I remember going out there to play with the farm children and when I got home my mom made me take off all my clothes in the garage and put them directly into the washing machine. They are definitely smelly. And they have a bad reputation as simple minded, passive, and prone to wander off and get in trouble. 

Which, actually, kind of sounds a lot like us. One of our confessions in the prayer book starts out with us admitting to God that all we have erred and strayed from God’s ways like lost sheep. 

So sheep are pretty from afar in the green fields of the British Isles and cute up close in the Christmas pageant at church and lovely to sing about at any time, but nobody actually wants to be compared to a sheep.

But if Jesus is the Good Shepherd, then there have to be sheep. He’s not the Good Shepherd in a vacuum. He didn’t lay down his life for nothing. He laid it down for the sheep. Remember that Christ died for you, we say at the Eucharist.

And so, like it or not, we are the sheep. 

As it turns out, though, sheep are actually quite emotionally complex and intelligent animals. They form deep, lasting bonds with each other and can remember a number of people’s faces and even more different sheep faces for years. They stick up for each other in fights and they grieve when they lose a friend. They are playful and curious and perhaps most importantly, they stick together against predators. They are calmer and less stressed when accompanied by fellow sheep even in worrisome situations and form strongly bonded social groups. They learn from each other and know themselves to be interdependent. And they do depend on their shepherd, not for everything, but for when trouble is near.

So, actually, we ought to be more like sheep. We humans are interdependent, too, but lots of us don’t want to know that, much less be it. Society does not heap praise among people who know themselves to be interdependent - our founding myth is of the strong silent lone ranger self-made person who doesn’t need anybody and would consider interdependence too close to dependence, and thus a weakness.

We don’t really want to depend on God. We don’t want to depend on anyone. Maybe because we’ve been let down, been hurt, been worse than hurt, by people who were supposed to care for us. Maybe we prayed for something that didn’t turn out like we wanted it to. We would rather engineer our own lives and plot out every waypoint to reach our goals. We would rather be self-reliant than interdependent. We would rather be self-centered than other-centered. We would rather not have to give anything up for anyone else.

But Christians are called to be different in a world that is full of hired hands who do not actually care for those they are charged with shepherding. And Christians as much as anyone else are indeed prone to wander and get off course. We do need a shepherd. We do need to learn that we are interdependent. We do need to learn how to be there for others and to consider ourselves part of the flock instead of striving to become masters of the universe. Giving ourselves away for others is what it means to be like Jesus, the one we try to follow.

That said, I think it’s important to note that giving ourselves away, seeing ourselves as interdependent, does not mean that we allow ourselves to be abused or misused or taken advantage of out of some misplaced sense that we have to do that in order to be loved or in order to be Christians. It is not okay to insist that the Christian thing to do is to stay in an abusive relationship or to submit to manipulation. We are still supposed to be wise even as we are peaceful. Jesus said that he came so that we would have life and have it abundantly, that he came to set people free from being captive to those who wish to wield power over us for their own gratification. There are limits.

All we like sheep have indeed gone astray. I certainly have. And my soul has needed reviving plenty of times. But I have been saved by knowing that I belong to the Good Shepherd and the Good Shepherd’s flock of smart and silly sheep who ultimately do come to know that we all need each other. We are one flock, and there is one shepherd, and whatever kind of sheep we may be, we are loved.