Trinity 7

Sermon preached by the Revd Canon Richard Ames-Lewis

 What is this thing about shepherds and sheep?

 It seems the scriptures are permeated with references to shepherds and sheep. We have them mentioned three times in today’s readings. Why?

In today’s OT reading we hear from the prophet Jeremiah. Now he knew a bit about broken promises and shattered dreams. He had seen the occupation of Jerusalem and the transportation of the people into exile in Babylon. He complains “woe to the Shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture….it is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them…. But, says the Lord, I shall gather the remnant of my flock out of the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold and they shall be fruitful and multiply; and I shall raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing”.

This extraordinary prophecy of future restoration, of a return home from exile, a gathering together of a broken people is one that resonates very much with us in our Covid exile and the promise of a return to some kind of normality.

Jeremiah is developing this analogy of the leader as a shepherd and the people as his flock. It is an analogy which goes deep into the experience of the Jewish people. King David was called from among the sheepfolds. He was an actual shepherd; he knew about sheep. When he selected his five round pebbles to slay Goliath he put them into his shepherd’s bag.

Then for our psalm today we joined in Psalm 23, the most beautiful psalm in the book. Here the Lord is compared to a shepherd, who makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters; who revives my soul, guides me along right pathways and comforts me with rod and staff when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. What does it mean, as we read this psalm, to picture our Lord as a shepherd?

 In our gospel reading we come face to face with Jesus having compassion on the great crowd who had followed him “because they were like sheep without a shepherd”. Jesus, of course, was fond of the analogy. His mission was to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and “What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the hillside and go in search of the one that went astray?” And he famously applied the analogy to himself when he said “I am the Good Shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. I am the Good Shepherd and I know my own and my own know me”. 

Then there are other sheep references: the famous judgement parable at the end of St Matthew’s gospel where the King separates the sheep from the goats; the goats go down to hell and the sheep enter paradise. And perhaps the most famous sheep reference of all comes after the resurrection when Jesus commissions the apostle Peter to “feed my sheep”.

Now we know that ancient Israel and New Testament Palestine was an agrarian society living close to the land, where the herding of animals was an integral part of life. We know that the liturgical cycle at the temple in Jerusalem required large quantities of sheep for sacrifice. So shepherds and sheep were commonplace. So commonplace indeed that shepherding came to be regarded as a low and poverty-stricken occupation. It was to poor shepherds tending their flock by night that the good news of the incarnation was first delivered, as we hear every Christmas.

So the analogy of a leader as a shepherd, and the people as flock has an appropriateness to the world of the Bible. If you are fortunate to visit the Holy Land today and see a shepherd on the Judaean hills with his flock of sheep, you feel you have arrived.

But why is this so pervasive an analogy? What it is about shepherding that connects so particularly with spiritual leadership? Or what is it about a flock which is comparable with a religious community?

A modern-day prophet is the Cumbrian shepherd James Rebanks, whose tale of Lake District shepherding “The Shepherd’s Life” has become a best seller, and whose elegy “English Pastoral” is a story of hope in a world ravaged by exploitation and climate change. Rebanks, whose family have farmed in the same area for 600 years, points to the connection between the shepherd and the land, and the craft of shepherding as an inherited and unchanging tradition. He speaks of the shepherd not just knowing sheep of his flock, but individually breeding them and knowing of each their pedigree; of sheep becoming “hefted” to the land, that is safe and wedded to their pasture. He speaks of the intelligence of the flock, moving and pasturing as one under the guidance of the shepherd.

It goes without saying that a developed, capitalist, society like ours lost this intimate connection with the land and with animals years ago. I have on the wall of my study one of my favourite paintings from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Samuel Palmer’s the Magic Apple Tree. This painting describes a fruitful autumnal scene with the golden apple orchard and the church spire in the background, while in the foreground a shepherdess pipes to her flock of sheep. This painting was made in 1830, a time of rapid industrialisation and agricultural change. It speaks of a nostalgia for a tradition that was already passing away.

So in our own time and in our own way of life we have few connections with the land or the seasons, and little understanding of animals, or their rearing, their welfare or their slaughter. It is interesting to note that during lockdown, people whose mental health has been most severely affected have been those without gardens and those without pets.   If you have a garden to tend and if you have a pet to look after you have a precious connection, however tenuous, with the created world beyond yourself and can start to appreciate God as creator of all things living.

So, let’s be honest, it is difficult for us really to comprehend the meaning of shepherd as leader, just as it is difficult of us to appreciate the concept of being part of a flock. But we can work at it. The words shepherd and flock describe only an analogy: a spiritual leader is something like a shepherd; a Christian congregation is something like a flock. What is behind the analogy is raw human relationships, the capacity to communicate, to forgive, and to love.

In the Christian congregation, guided by a leader, relationships are deepened, failures can be forgiven and faltering steps of human love are exchanged, because of the presence of Jesus Christ our Good Shepherd, always with us. He knows us and invites us to know him; he leads us into new pasture; he lays down his life for us; and he feeds us with the heavenly food of the Eucharist.