Abstract
The Good Shepherd
Very few passages in the Bible mean as much to people as the 23rd Psalm. I remember in my early twenties and going through a difficult period in which life just seemed to have fallen in. Did anything make sense? Then one day I was sitting listening in my flat to a record of the Gelineau version of the psalm and hearing the antiphon ‘The lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want. He leads me, my Saviour nothing shall I fear.’ And I knew that was what was happening to me. The time of darkness passed, my hope and idealism were untouched and love still seemed the only thing that really matters in life. I could get on with life. Later when as a minister I was visiting the dying in hospital, the 23rd Psalm was the passage I most read to them, and quite often they joined in. There is a calming, comforting power in the words. ‘He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters.’ In John’s Gospel Jesus takes up this picture of the shepherd and the sheep. ‘I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’
I have to confess not to be an expert on sheep. East Anglia used to be a sheep area but today it’s mainly crops. Growing up in that part of England I saw plenty of fields of swaying corn, and quite a few turkeys and chickens, but very few sheep. But my wife’s uncle used to be a farmer in the Cotswolds, and he always said he preferred cows, that sheep really were rather stupid. I understand there is some debate about this! What seems to be true is that they can easily be sidetracked: they will wander off into remote parts of the pasture following an interesting smell; they come to the stream, feel the water on their feet, lean down to drink and, if they’re not careful, tumble into the stream and get stuck. If one sheep starts a stampede, all the others will follow along, not bothering to look where they’re going. In my experience if you meet a flock of them on the road, they are not very fast to get out of the way! Left to themselves in a wild place, sheep do not tend to last very long. So, the voice of a shepherd they can trust is important to them.
Which is perhaps the point—in some ways they seem to resemble human beings. As Handel reminds us in the Messiah, ‘All we like sheep have gone astray.’ We too have a habit of making a mess of our lives, getting into foolish situations. We too sometimes follow the herd rather than thinking for ourselves. Human beings are in no position to criticize sheep. But the Good Shepherd loves his sheep; he’s prepared to leave those who are safe and risk his life for the odd one of their number which gets lost. This is a promise of God’s love for the unlovable. And since in reality a responsible shepherd does not often leave ninety-nine sheep alone in the wilderness to go looking for one who is lost, it’s clear that God’s love goes beyond our expectations. God loves people: every man and woman—extravagantly, indiscriminately, generously. The good news of our faith is about an amazing grace from which no-one is excluded. This is the strong heart of the gospel tested and found in so many lives. We are the sheep for whom the Shepherd died.
There is a stark note of reality in this we sometimes miss. When Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd, he did so in contra-distinction to false shepherds, who didn’t pay enough attention or care very much at all for the sheep, who saw danger coming and ran away instead of staying to guard his flock. The implication is that this is part of human life too. The Good Shepherd does his shepherding not in some dream like idyll, some arcadian utopia, but in the real world, with its greed and heartlessness, ruthlessness, and cruelty. He is there to be with people in the midst of the often-grimy reality of life. When he’s gathered the sheep safely into the circular fold where they spend the night, he sleeps across the entry. He is the sheep’s protection against predators.
And if people are valued like that by him then those who follow him must have the same vocation. In the First letter of John—written in the tradition of John’s Gospel, we hear this clearly: ‘We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.’ If loved we must love, if served we must serve. We are not just called to be the sheep; we’re called to follow the way of the shepherd. Pope Francis once said to his priests that they were to bring the healing power of God’s grace to everyone in need, to stay close to the marginalized and to be ‘shepherds living with the smell of the sheep.’
The Church is a place where people find themselves valued by God and one another, learn the story of Jesus, and then, like him, find life by giving themselves away in service to others. This is what Christian mission is, not a concern to preserve church structures, not endless re-branding, strategizing, PR exercises and reputational-management. The people of God are brought together, only to be sent out; they have an end greater than themselves. Dietrich Bonhoeffer gets this right, ‘The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity.’ After a transformational ministry at 4th Presbyterian in Chicago John Buchanan wrote:
Studies of growing congregations, at a time when mainline denominations are declining numerically, consistently discover that the one characteristic that growing congregations share is not theology, ideology, or worship styles, but a sense of mission. Growing congregations are focused on the world outside the walls of their buildings and are intentional about translating the theological affirmations they make inside into acts of compassion, love, and justice outside. When institutional survival absorbs a church’s energy and imagination and resources, it simply ceases to be very interesting or compelling. When a congregation lives out its faith in and for the sake of its Lord, it is difficult to ignore.
Grounded in God’s unconditional love in Jesus Christ, we point to a Christ who stretches out the arms of his love to the lowest, the least, the last, the lost. We are to follow him into the real world and seek to show what love we can in his name.