(sometime in 1988)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

"Jesus had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd".

It would be easy for me to preach a whole sermon on the specific ways in which this particular Galilean crowd were lost and leaderless. The situation may be summed up as follows. Economically they were distressed: they laboured under a double system of taxation, the Temple system and the Roman, so that in a once prosperous region much of Our Lord's teaching had to be directed to the simple anxiety about how to make ends meet -- lest you think that the taxman has any of us in the same bind, let me remind you that the Roman method was to let out a contract on taxes: as long as the quota came in, the sky was the limit, with no legal recourse, for what the individual might have to cough up. Politically they were torn in two between the Zealots, the freedom fighters of the day, who told them that with one more little push they could have the Romans out, and the Herodians, the Quisling party, whose view was "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." An anointed king of David's line, or Messiah, was nowhere in sight. From the religious point of view there was no word from God: the easy worldly go-through-the-motions religiosity of the Sadducees, and the harsh self-righteous legalism of the Pharisees, were alike unsatisfying to those who really wanted to please God.

If I wanted to keep stuck in the first century I could preach similarly on the great privilege which is given to Gentiles -- that is probably almost everyone here but Anna and me -- to come in out of the cold into the Covenant through the blood of Jesus, as our Ephesians passage described. But the fact is that nowadays in practical terms all of us correspond to those sad words in Ephesians 2:12, and are "without hope and without God in the world". So I have decided to preach on the Lord's compassion, shepherds and sheep.

Sometimes the Christian message comes over a little bit like this: God was so angry with us miserable sinners that he had to send His Son in order to take it out on Him. This is not altogether wanting as a formulation, but we should always remember that behind the anger and the sending was His compassionate heart, bleeding for the terrible misery that sinners both suffer and inflict. Sheep without a shepherd are indeed lost and pitiable. The young of most species -- though I'll admit that I've never been able to get off on slugs or spiders at any stage -- are cute and cuddly: lambs certainly are; but adult sheep, I believe, can be malodorous, verminous and are subject to nasty diseases and accidents. The idea of God as shepherd, and of human leaders as under-shepherds, is very common in Scripture. It goes back at least as far as David, who was a shepherd, poet and musician before he was a king. A couple of centuries later it turns up in our Jeremiah passage, where "shepherd" has become shorthand for politico-religious leader. We think of Psalm 23, of "All we like sheep have gone astray", of the Parable of the Lost Sheep, of Our Lord's summing up of his own mission as being "to seek and to save that which is lost" and of many other passages. As a metaphor it gets its most extended treatment in the 10th chapter of St. John's Gospel, a passage which could have been set for us instead of a snippet of St. Mark, and which I urge you to sit down and read this afternoon, whether the weather is nice or nasty. The metaphor has given rise to a whole complex of ideas and expressions, including an ideal of government for the good of the governed, "pastor", "pastoral", "pastorate", "congregate", "congregation", "gregarious" , etc. etc.

The comparison is not very flattering to us. Sheep are none too smart. It is a question whether their IQ is lower singly or collectively. Such tried and true maxims as "Look before you leap", "Safety in numbers" and "It's possible to have too much excitement" never appear to enter their woolly heads. Palpable falsehoods like "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence", "Follow-my-leader" or "Hedges were made to be broken" find easy lodging there. The rod to redirect and the crook to yank out of a mess are constantly needed. They are best led not driven, and in small numbers, so that like English cows they can be called by name. Left to themselves they fall over ledges, break their legs, and get stuck in places where is no turning round. That they are without exception born followers doesn't stop any from getting delusions of grandeur and discerning in itself extraordinary qualities of leadership. Sheep without a shepherd are lost by definition. I therefore suggest that anyone who has never seen himself in "I once was lost, but now I'm found" or "Perverse and foolish oft I strayed But yet in love He sought me" has never got to square one in the Christian life, certainly taken very few steps in it, for dependence on the Lord is of the essence. We never grow out of it. I have small patience with those who dismiss faith as a crutch and the realism of the Gospel as a tale invented to meet infantile dependency-needs. It is unbelief which represents a form of arrested development.

How is it that we never grow out of our dependence on the Lord? When our elder child was very small we refused her something on the grounds that "Mummy and Daddy don't have money for that". To which, ever-resourceful, she replied, "Then why don't you go to the Bank and get some?" At 21 she has matured into a clearer idea of the difference between a Bank and the medicine-shop or food-shop. Our domestic dogs and cats never mature into the faintest conception of what we do when we are out, where the food comes from or of the tiniest portion of adult human life. For us, maturing can only open ever more of the unimaginable gulf fixed between our life and the life and thinking of One infinitely beyond us. It is my policy never to disagree publicly with a clergyman, and if I had not already taken issue with our Rector privately, I should not say this in the pulpit. Not one of us is transparent to any other human being, yea verily not to the most skilled counsellor, not to our resident psychiatrist in top analytical gear, not even to ourselves. Only to our mighty Creator, according to Scripture, are we transparent: this One, who has made the Universe, perhaps more than one, infinitely large, so that just thinking of the distance to the edge of our Galaxy boggles the mind, Who paints the sky all the time, Who the other day seems to have made two identical snowflakes just for the fun of the thing, Who, it is now surmised in particle physics, makes matter infinitely small, so that there are boxes within boxes in an infinite regression, He sees right to the back of our muddled little minds, right to the bottom of our murky little souls, and, wonder of wonders, we remain precious to Him. Thus it is that the Good Shepherd will always be all-sufficient. Though he may deny many of our wants, He will always supply all of our needs.

Yes, the shepherd-sheep analogy is wholly apt. Nevertheless it must not be pressed. The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. It is not immediately obvious how a dead Shepherd protects his sheep better than a live one. To understand that, we must let the metaphor undergo a shift. A very old writer said of the Atonement, "The Son of God became what we are, in order that the sons of men might become what He is ". But to do that He had to become what we never have been, a spotless Lamb. In real life the best of shepherds is interested in wool as well as in happy sheep. Real sheep, unlike us, do not set out to fleece one another, nor are they ever willfully unshepherded, vicious or cruel. Sheep never develop, or metamorphose into, shepherds. But the New Testament presents us with a dynamic picture of ministry, not a static one. The purpose of shepherding is to turn sheep into those who know how to shepherd. Each of us ought to be turning into leaders; tragically we often do not. Perhaps those 50,000 lost Anglicans are trying to tell us something. For every hundred times that we hear as an excuse for unfaithfulness in attendance at public worship "Oh, I left St. Stick-In-The-Mud's because I didn't like the Rector, didn't like the lay people when it wasn't the Rector, wasn't getting anything out of it," how often do we hear "I moved to Itsy-Bitsy's Free Evangelical Memorial because my gifts were used there and my ministry recognized"? How about doing what we are supposed to, changing and growing, maturing into shepherds in our own right under Christ? He will receive us the moment we turn ever so little towards Him. As George MacDonald said, He is "easy to please". He added, however "but hard to satisfy". The Lord Jesus did not hang on the Cross, nor was it His design for us, that we should sit and warm the pew in -- I say this with the authority of over 50 years' experience -- that typical passive Anglican way, for 10, 20, 40, 60 years. We are intended to get our eyes with all deliberate speed off ourselves and our own problems, to outgrow our liking or dislike of this human pastor or that, and to learn in some small way to shepherd others. So I challenge both you and myself: to whom are you a pastor? To whom do you extend the rod of redirection, the crook of rescue? To whom do you speak the sweet name of your Shepherd?

My father, a life-long pastor, saw many people dying, and as they died. None, he said, went through a marked personality-change. Rather, all inhibitions removed, the real person emerged. Some were self-centered and self-pitying to the end. Others prayed, cared and hoped. Which shall we be, you and I?

Now may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight; and may the blessing of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, rest on you from this day forth and for evermore.