I don’t know much about sheep. I have some faint memories of sheep grazing in fields around the small town where we lived till I was five, and there was an airstrip at a military base nearby where they kept a herd during the summer to cut the grass. I read about sheep in commercials for merino wool and pecorino cheese, but that’s about it. Besides that, sheep show up in some movies — Babe comes to mind, and Brokeback Mountain — and, of course, in the Bible. When the Lord talks about sheep, hearing his words in Elizabethan English seems quite appropriate, given the inherent quaintness of the imagery:
Jesus said unto them, What man shall there be of you, that shall have one sheep, and if this fall into a ditch on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?[1]
Many of you will have watched recently the 30-second video of the boy who, with great care and effort, manages to pull a sheep out of a narrow ditch by its hind leg. The sheep takes off, with high leaps that suggest pure, ovine happiness—and plunges right back into the ditch, headfirst.[2] There aren’t many stories in the tradition about the wisdom of sheep. Andre Dubus remembers the first year he and his family lived in a very hold house in southern New Hampshire.
The landlord wanted someone to live in it while he was working out of state, the rent was a hundred dollars a month, the house was furnished, had seven fireplaces (two of them worked), and in the backyard was a swimming pool. There were seventy acres of land, most of it wooded except for a long meadow, hilly enough for sledding. There were also three dogs, eight sheep, and a bed of roses. … The landlady wanted the roses there when she came home after the year, and the landlord wanted the sheep. They were eight large ewes, and he bred them. They were enclosed by a wire fence in a large section of the meadow.
“All we had to do about them,” writes Dubus, “was make sure they didn’t get through the fence, which finally meant that when they got through, we had to catch them and put them back in the pasture.” Catch them and put them back, he makes it sound quite doable, doesn’t he?
The sheep did not want to leave their pasture, at least not for long and not to go very far. One would find a hole in the fence, slip out, then circle the pasture, trying to get back in. The others watched her. Someone in our family would shout the alarm, and we’d all go outside to chase her. At first we tried herding the ewe back toward the hole in the fence, standing in the path of this bolting creature, trying to angle her back, as we closed the circle the six of us made, closed it tighter and tighter until she was backed against the fence, and the hole she was trying to find. But she never went back through the hole, never saw it, and all our talking and pointing did no good. Finally we gave up, simply chased her over the lawn, around the swimming pool, under trees and through underbrush until one of us got close enough, dived, and tackled. Then three of us would lift her and drop her over the fence, and we’d get some wire and repair the hole.
Dubus hadn’t had much experience with sheep until then, outside of movies and church, that is. “When I was a boy,” he writes,
sheep had certain meanings: in the Western movies, sheep herders interfered with the hero’s cattle; or the villain’s ideas about his grazing rights interfered with the hero’s struggle to raise his sheep. And Christ had called us his flock, his sheep; there were pictures of him holding a lamb in his arms. His face was tender and loving, and I grew up with a sense of those feelings, of being a source of them: we were sweet and lovable sheep. But after a few weeks in that New Hampshire house, I saw Christ’s analogy meant something entirely different. We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves.[3]
Plunge right back into the ditch, headfirst.
In the Bible, shepherding is a metaphor for good governance, for attentive leadership that seeks to serve the flourishing of life in community. Psalm 78 proclaims the hopeful dimension of this vision,
The Lord chose his servant David,
and took him from the sheepfolds;
from tending the nursing ewes God brought him
to be the shepherd of God’s people …
With upright heart he tended them,
and guided them with skillful hand.[4]
Prophets like Ezekiel provide a much different, much more sober perspective of Israel’s shepherds: they feed themselves, not the sheep; they don’t strengthen the weak; they don’t heal the sick; they don’t bind up the injured; they don’t bring back the strayed; they don’t seek the lost; they rule with force and harshness; and so they scatter the sheep.[5]
When Jesus declares, “I am the good shepherd,” he announces that he has come to seek the lost and bring back the strayed, to bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, so that all would live in safety, and no one would make them afraid.[6] This shepherd doesn’t run when the wolf comes, far from it — he lays down his life for the sheep and takes it up again, so they may have life, and have it abundantly. He subverts royal visions of absolute power. The good shepherd lays down his life. Five times this phrase is repeated in the short passage from John, emphasizing a sovereignty that is entirely defined by love, love for God and love for us. This shepherd has but one goal: to gather us into a community of deep friendship with God and with each other.
‘One flock, one shepherd’ is the name of that vision in John. We don’t see much of that unity; we see multiple flocks of all shapes and sizes, mostly made up of sheep that look alike, bleat alike, and smell alike. But the good shepherd keeps reminding us, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold”—and while we may all think that the envisioned unity will come when finally all of them will have become more like us, Jesus’ mission is all manner of ‘we’ and ‘they’ becoming a new kind of ‘we’ by growing in likeness with him.
Some of us think that being scattered isn’t so bad. We’re quite comfortable in our respective little flocks, and when the comfort level isn’t to our liking anymore, we move on—there’s something for everyone! Some of us have convinced ourselves that the ideal herd size is actually the flock of one: I come to the garden alone, and that’s how I like it. Just me and the Lord; and he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own—forget about the others. Others just make community so complicated.
The wolf, as you can imagine, is very pleased. The wolf loves to tell the lambs not to give in to “herd mentality” and to “forge their own path.” The wolf, of course, is mostly interested in a steady and convenient supply of lamb chops.
And the good shepherd? At the end of the Gospel according to John, Jesus says to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”
He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.”
A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.”
He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”[7]
This suggests that at the end of the story we sheep-folk are to become shepherd apprentices, loving Jesus, listening to the voice of Jesus, and caring for each other. James Rebanks comes from a long line of shepherds and he wrote about the trials and the beauty of the shepherd’s life.[8]
You need to be tough as old boots. ... The romance wears off after a few weeks, believe me, and you will be left standing cold and lonely on a mountain. It is all about endurance. Digging in. Holding on. … You’ll need the patience of a saint, too, because sheep test you to the limit, with a million innovative ways to escape, ail or die.
Who knows how many sheep he’s pulled out of the ditch, only to watch them leap off and plunge right back in, headfirst. He writes,
The apprenticeship period for a shepherd is … about 40 years. You are just a “boy” or a “lass” until you are about 60: it takes that long to really know a mountain, the vagaries of its weather and grazing, to know the different sheep, marks, shepherds, bloodlines, and to earn the respect of other shepherds. This isn’t just fell walking behind sheep with a dog friend – it requires a body of knowledge and skills that shepherds devote decades to learning.[9]
In other words, this apprenticeship is a lifelong project; which sound about right. Walking with Jesus, listening to his voice, growing in mutual love and knowledge, we sheep-folk become for each other what he is to us — we become shepherd-folk, committed to life’s flourishing.
[1] Mt 12:11
[2] https://youtu.be/f97zwQS6I4o
[3] Andre Dubus, “Out like a lamb,” in: Broken Vessels: Essays by Andre Dubus (1991)
[4] Ps 78:70-72
[5] See Ezekiel 34:2-6
[6] Ez 34:16, 28
[7] John 21:15-17
[8] James Rebanks, The Shepherds Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape (New York: Flatiron Books, 2015)
[9] James Rebanks https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/agriculture/farming/11569612/Are-you-hard-enough-to-survive-as-a-shepherd.html