Thomas Kleinert
I don’t know much about sheep. I know a little about wool and pecorino cheese, but I don’t know much about sheep. I have some faint memories of sheep grazing in fields around the small town where my family lived till I was five, and there was an airstrip nearby where they hired a herd of sheep, a dog, and a shepherd to keep the grass from getting too tall during the summer. Besides that, in my world, sheep show up in some almost forgotten movies like Babe and, of course, in the Bible. When the Lord talks about sheep, hearing his words in Elizabethan English seems most 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]
Chances are, not many of you have recently pulled a sheep from the ditch, whether on the sabbath or any day, but you may remember watching the clip of a boy who, with great care and effort, manages to pull a sheep out of a narrow ditch by its hind leg.[2] The sheep takes off, with high leaps that suggest pure, ovine joy—O freedom!—and plunges right back into the ditch, headfirst.
They don’t tell many stories about smart sheep. Andre Dubus remembers a summer in southern New Hampshire when his family rented a house that came with eight sheep. They were enclosed by a wire fence in a large section of a meadow by the house. “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.
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, … 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.
Like myself, Dubus hadn’t had much experience with sheep until then, outside of Western movies and church, that is.
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 shepherd-kings: they feed themselves, not the sheep; they don’t strengthen the weak; 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. This shepherd subverts royal visions of power and serves 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 flocks of all shapes and sizes, mostly made up of sheep that look alike, bleat alike, and smell alike. And some of us think that being scattered isn’t so bad. There’s something for everyone—isn’t it wonderful?! And a growing number of us have convinced ourselves that the ideal herd size is actually the flock of one: The Lord is my shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters, and other sheep just make life in community so much more complicated. But the good shepherd keeps reminding us,
“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”
We may think that it’s all about them growing in likeness with us, but Jesus’ shepherding project is about all of us growing in likeness with him, becoming a community of deep friendship with God and with each other.
In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott introduces us to Ken, a man in her church who had lost his partner to AIDS and was dying from the same disease, “disintegrating before our very eyes,” she writes. A few weeks after the funeral, Ken told them that “right after Brandon died, Jesus had slid into the hole in his heart that Brandon’s loss left, and had been there ever since [and] … that he would gladly pay any price for what he has now, which is Jesus, and us.”[7]
“I am the good shepherd,” says Jesus. “I know my own, and my own know me, just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father.”[8] This knowledge is not the kind you need to do well on a test. Thisknowledge is something like a deep familiarity, something very much like love, a trust-filled openness and intimacy.
Lamott describes Ken’s face as “totally lopsided…, ravaged and emaciated, but when he smiles, he is radiant. He looks like God’s crazy nephew Phil.” This is what being known and found by Jesus looks like. This is what knowing the good shepherd looks like.
Lamott tells us about a woman in the choir named Ranola, who, she says, “is large and beautiful and jovial and black and devout as can be.” And Ranola had “been a little standoffish toward Ken.” She had “always looked at him with confusion,” when she looked at him at all. Or she looked at him sideways, “as if she wouldn’t have to quite see him if she didn’t look at him head on.” Ranola had been taught “that his way of life—that he—was an abomination.” And that’s not something you just let go of like you drop a t-shirt in the box for Goodwill. But Ken had been coming to church nearly every week for the last year and it was getting to Ranola.
So on this one particular Sunday, for the first hymn, the so-called Morning Hymn, we sang “Jacob’s Ladder,” which goes “Every rung goes higher, higher,” while ironically Kenny couldn’t even stand up. But he sang away sitting down, with the hymnal in his lap. And then when it came time for the second hymn, the Fellowship Hymn, we were to sing “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen—only Ken remained seated... and we began to sing, “Why should I feel discouraged? Why do the shadows fall?” And Ranola watched Ken rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face began to melt and contort like his, and she went to his side and bent down to lift him up—lifted up this white rag doll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her, draped over and against her like a child while they sang. And it pierced me.[9]
This is what being known and found by Jesus looks like. This is what knowing the good shepherd looks like. This is the life to which we are called: to let ourselves be loved by God and learn to love each other.
At the end of the Gospel according to John, Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?” Three times he asks him, and three times Peter replies, “You know that I love you.” And three times Jesus responds, “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.”[10] This curious exchange underlines how loving Jesus and caring for others go hand in hand. And it suggests that loving Jesus, listening to the voice of Jesus and caring for each other, the sheep of God’s pasture become indistinguishable from apprentice shepherds.
James Rebanks comes from a long line of shepherds and he wrote about the trials and the beauty of the shepherd’s life.[11]
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 pulled out of the ditch, only to watch them leap off and plunge right back in, headfirst.
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.[12]
In other words, this apprenticeship is a lifelong project; which sounds about right. Walking with Jesus, listening to his voice, growing in mutual knowledge and love, we become for each other what he is to all of us—we become shepherd-folk, committed to each other’s flourishing.
[1] Mt 12:11 ASV
[2] https://youtu.be/T-Wc8vluyp0?si=Zn-efKtgMJZm-oZ2
[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] Ezekiel 34:16, 28
[7] Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 64.
[8] John 10:14-15
[9] Lamott, 64-65.
[10] John 21:15-17
[11] James Rebanks, The Shepherds Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape (New York: Flatiron Books, 2015)
[12] James Rebanks https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/agriculture/farming/11569612/Are-you-hard-enough-to-survive-as-a-shepherd.html