Good Shepherd and Sheep

Sermon preached at Whitkirk Parish Church

Easter 4 (Year B) - 3rd May 2009

I was in the dales last week at a place called Marrick Priory, leading a quiet afternoon for the Diocesan Healing Group.  It wasn’t particularly well attended but it did give me an opportunity to see part of the wider diocese I don’t often see.  This is an activity centre and it turned out that Year 6 from Austhorpe Primary had been there earlier in the week and left that morning.  It is an old priory, surrounded by farm land and lots of sheep.  Some of the sheep ran away as I approached them, some were lambs and just bleated not really knowing which way to go, and some stood defiant staring at me as I walked past.

Sheep are not always the brightest of creatures and if you mistake one of their trails for the path when walking in open country you will get very lost.  They stray, they chew grass and they bleat.  They are also a cash crop for a farmer who doesn’t view them as pets.  They are bred, reared and sold at market for their meat.  They might be shorn for their wool and their hide makes nice rugs, slippers and coats.  So a shepherd is there to protect the investment, see that they are rounded up when need be, scare off predators, but should it come to choice between them or him, the sheep are clearly expendable and will be left to their fate.

Shepherds were not regarded as particularly important people.  In the Old Testament, when Samuel was looking for someone to anoint as king David was dismissed as being too young – so unimportant that he was looking after the sheep somewhere.  For Samuel to say that he will not sit down until they have found him was astounding; he would have to stand for quite a while and why bother looking for someone so low as to be looking after sheep.  For Jesus to talk about being the Good Shepherd (John 10:11-18) was like saying I am the good dustman, who lays down his life for the rubbish.  You can almost see the puzzled look on their faces: ‘You’re the what?’  ‘You will lay down your life for what?’  Of course ‘shepherd’ carried other resonances for them too, with Psalm 23, The Lord is my shepherd.  The Good Shepherd would trigger their minds in that direction too.  Still the sheep remain the sheep!

We have become familiar with the idea that Jesus is a shepherd and bishops carry a shepherd’s crook as their staff of office.  We give it all sorts of meanings.  The one we don’t see very often is just how upside down this image is.  It is an image that says the unimportant are important; no one is just a cash crop to be exploited for the ends of the rich and powerful, or even for the comfortable and complacent.  It is an image of sacrificial generosity for the ungrateful and unaware, not just the highly tuned and wide awake.  Those who stand and bleat, not knowing which way to turn, or who run away and even those who stand defiant and bolshie are loved.  This kingdom ruled by a shepherd, who will lay down his life for those of no value or who can easily be replaced, is radical in the extreme.

Two thousand years on I think we are only just beginning to understand what this really means and when we grasp it we have to be reminded.  It is one thing to be generous when the money flows like an ever flowing stream, but when it dries up and things are tight the danger that we turn inwards is very great.  True generosity shares of its wealth and poverty.  True generosity looks at wealth and poverty through different eyes.  Balloon debates about who we will keep in and who we will throw overboard are often argued on the basis of who is most valuable to keep.  Yet the good shepherd’s upside down world will regard no one as being worthy of being thrown down; so I guess we either all stay up in the balloon or we all crash.  We stand or fall together.

This is a good shepherd who dares us to look beyond mere survival, beyond mere self preservation.  This is bonkers which is why Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians (1:23) that the cross is a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks.  It requires a new way of looking at the world; one that is generous and self-giving.  The foolishness and stumbling-block was not that Jews and Greeks didn’t understand generosity and sacrifice, they did.  But that God would be like this with his creation did not have a place in their heads, which is why we need the resurrection.

This passage about the good shepherd laying his life down for his sheep is being read in these days of Easter, when we are focusing on the resurrection.  It only makes sense in the light of the resurrection.  There is only any hope in this when we view it through the resurrection, because without that it is just a noble, laying down but ultimately hopeless story and that is how those who are labelled Jews and Greeks came at it, without the resurrection faith.

The good shepherd imagery tells us something very important about how much we are regarded by God.  We may be a speck on the surface of a vast universe, a mere blip in the time span of eternity, worth as much as a cash crop, but God nonetheless values each one of us very highly.  What should be of no account is raised with Christ to the very height of heaven.  Bleating, frightened and bolshie – and we can all be all of those – the world is turned upside down by Christ rising from the dead to show just how much we are regarded by the maker of all things.  If God can make that mental shift, how much more should we change the way we view our fellow members of his flock?

© Ian Black 2009